A humble ingredient of bread – baker's yeast – has provided scientists with remarkable new insights into understanding basic processes likely involved in diseases such as Parkinson's and cancer. In a new study published today (Monday March 31) in the prestigious journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science), the team from Germany, Leicester, and Portugal detail a new advance – describing for the first time a key feature in cellular development linked to the onset of these devastating diseases. The research team is from the University Medical Center Goettingen, ...

(PHILADELPHIA) -- The code for every gene includes a message at the end of it that signals the translation machinery to stop. Some diseases, such as cystic fibrosis and Duchenne muscular dystrophy, can result from mutations that insert this stop signal into the middle of an essential gene, causing the resulting protein to be truncated. Some antibiotics cause the cell's translation machinery to ignore the stop codons and are therefore being explored as a potential therapy for these diseases. But new research reported online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ...

VIDEO: After veins grow into the implanted engineered muscle fibers, blood cells can be seen traveling through them, sustaining and nourishing the new tissue. Click here for more information. DURHAM, N.C. -- Biomedical engineers have grown living skeletal muscle that looks a lot like the real thing. It contracts powerfully and rapidly, integrates into mice quickly, and for the first time, demonstrates the ability to heal itself both inside the laboratory and inside an animal. The ...

Evidence left at the crime scene is abundant and global: Fossil remains show that sometime around 252 million years ago, about 90 percent of all species on Earth were suddenly wiped out — by far the largest of this planet's five known mass extinctions. But pinpointing the culprit has been difficult, and controversial. Now, a team of MIT researchers may have found enough evidence to convict the guilty parties — but you'll need a microscope to see the killers. The perpetrators, this new work suggests, were not asteroids, volcanoes, or raging coal fires, all of which have ...

Johns Hopkins researchers say that an experimental anticancer compound appears to have reversed behaviors associated with schizophrenia and restored some lost brain cell function in adolescent mice with a rodent version of the devastating mental illness. The drug is one of a class of compounds known as PAK inhibitors, which have been shown in animal experiments to confer some protection from brain damage due to Fragile X syndrome, an inherited disease in humans marked by mental retardation. There also is some evidence, experts say, suggesting PAK inhibitors could be used ...

Ribosomes are essential for life, generating all of the proteins required for cells to grow. Mutations in some of the proteins that make ribosomes cause disorders characterized by bone marrow failure and anemia early in life, followed by elevated cancer risk in middle age. These disorders are generally called "ribosomopathies." How can ribosomopathies first appear as diseases caused by too few cells, but later turn into diseases caused by too many cells? This paradox has puzzled the scientific community for years. A new study, which uses a genetic approach to examine ...

This news release is available in German. After several years of discussions, researchers from Aarhus University (Denmark), Lund University (Sweden) and Stockholm University (Sweden) have determined that nutrients from the land are the main cause of widespread areas of oxygen depletion. The results were published on 31 March in the prestigious American journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Nutrients are the villain The deepest areas of the Baltic Sea have always had a low oxygen content. The inflow of fresh water is actually limited by low thresholds ...

Scientists have for the first time come closer to understanding how a clone of E. coli, described as the most important of its kind to cause human infections, has spread across the world in a very short time. E. coli clone ST131 is one of the leading causes of urinary tract and blood stream infections and has crossed the globe at a rapid rate. Worryingly, members of this clone are becoming more resistant to antibiotics. As an indication of scale, more than half of all women will suffer a urinary tract infection at least once in their lives. An international team of scientists, ...

Using an acoustic metadevice that can influence the acoustic space and can control any of the ways in which waves travel, engineers have demonstrated, for the first time, that it is possible to dynamically alter the geometry of a three-dimensional colloidal crystal in real time. The colloidal crystals designed in the study, called metamaterials, are artificially structured materials that extend the properties of existing naturally occurring materials and compounds. The research by academics from the University of Bristol's Department of Mechanical Engineering is published ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Making a snap decision usually means following your initial reaction -- going with your gut. That intuitive feeling sprouts from the limbic system, the evolutionarily older and simpler part of the brain that affects emotion, behavior and motivation. But during adolescence, the limbic system connects and communicates with the rest of the brain differently than it does during adulthood, leaving many adolescents vulnerable to riskier behaviors, according to Duke University researchers. "We know adolescence is a time of profound social change. It's also ...

(Boston) – Child and adolescent hematologists at Boston Medical Center (BMC) have developed a tool to gauge how ready young adults with sickle cell disease are for a transition into adult care. In a new article for the Journal of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology, Amy Sobota, MD, MPH, and her collaborators have shown that a questionnaire geared to the needs of young adults with sickle cell disease can pinpoint areas of need before the patient goes into an adult clinic. BMC's sickle cell disease transition clinic, which is unique in Boston, was established in 2008 and serves ...

Wounds may heal more quickly if exposed to low-intensity vibration, report researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The finding, in mice, may hold promise for the 18 million Americans who have type 2 diabetes, and especially the quarter of them who will eventually suffer from foot ulcers. Their wounds tend to heal slowly and can become chronic or worsen rapidly. Timothy Koh, UIC professor of kinesiology and nutrition in the UIC College of Applied Health Sciences, was intrigued by studies at Stony Brook University in New York that used very low-intensity ...

ST. LOUIS -- Removing pressure from medical school while teaching students skills to manage stress and bounce back from adversity improves their mental health and boosts their academic achievement, Saint Louis University research finds. Stuart Slavin, M.D., M.Ed., associate dean for curriculum at SLU School of Medicine, is the lead author of the paper, which is published the April edition of Academic Medicine. The problem of depression among medical school students is significant, Slavin said, affecting between 20 and 30 percent of medical students in the U.S., and potentially ...

DARIEN, IL – A new study of older men found a link between poor sleep quality and the development of cognitive decline over three to four years. Results show that higher levels of fragmented sleep and lower sleep efficiency were associated with a 40 to 50 percent increase in the odds of clinically significant decline in executive function, which was similar in magnitude to the effect of a five-year increase in age. In contrast, sleep duration was not related to subsequent cognitive decline. "It was the quality of sleep that predicted future cognitive decline in this ...

PHILADELPHIA (March 31, 2014) – Keeping young people in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention programs is a major goal in reducing the incidence of HIV, and multi-session interventions are often more effective than single-sessions. But according to a new study from the Annenberg School for Communication, the way these programs are designed and implemented may turn off the very people they are trying to help. The study, "Motivational barriers to retention of at-risk young adults in HIV-prevention interventions: perceived pressure and efficacy," is published in ...

One state's citizens are collectively more agreeable and another's are more conscientious. Could that influence how each state is governed? A recently published study suggests it could. Jeffery Mondak and Damarys Canache, political science professors at the University of Illinois, analyzed personality data from more than 600,000 Americans, identified by state, who had responded to an online survey for another research study. They then matched that data with state-level measures of political culture, as identified by other, unrelated research. The results were striking. ...

Increasing heat is expected to extend dry conditions to far more farmland and cities by the end of the century than changes in rainfall alone, says a new study. Much of the concern about future drought under global warming has focused on rainfall projections, but higher evaporation rates may also play an important role as warmer temperatures wring more moisture from the soil, even in some places where rainfall is forecasted to increase, say the researchers. The study is one of the first to use the latest climate simulations to model the effects of both changing rainfall ...

The presence of African-American police officers has been shown to increase the perceived legitimacy of police departments; however, their depiction in film may play a role in delegitimizing African-American officers in real life, both in the eyes of the general public and the African-American community. In their recently released study, Sam Houston State University associate professor of criminal justice Howard Henderson and Indiana State University assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice Franklin T. Wilson found that African-American city police officers ...

Tropical Cyclone Hellen made landfall in west central Madagascar as NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead capturing temperature data on its towering thunderstorms. When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Madagascar on March 31 at 10:47 UTC/6:47 a.m. EDT and the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument aboard captured infrared data on Hellen. AIRS data showed powerful thunderstorms circling the center of circulation with cloud top temperatures in excess of -63F/-52C indicating they were high into the troposphere. Thunderstorms reaching those heights also have the ...

Consuming foods grown in urban gardens may offer a variety of health benefits, but a lack of knowledge about the soil used for planting, could pose a health threat for both consumers and gardeners. In a new study from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF), researchers identified a range of factors and challenges related to the perceived risk of soil contamination among urban community gardeners and found a need for clear and concise information on how best to prevent and manage soil contamination. The results are featured online in PLOS ONE . "While the ...

DNA is the molecule that encodes the genetic instructions enabling a cell to produce the thousands of proteins it typically needs. The linear sequence of the A, T, C, and G bases in what is called coding DNA determines the particular protein that a short segment of DNA, known as a gene, will encode. But in many organisms, there is much more DNA in a cell than is needed to code for all the necessary proteins. This non-coding DNA was often referred to as "junk" DNA because it seemed unnecessary. But in retrospect, we did not yet understand the function of these seemingly ...

What makes cities in India and China so frustrating to drive in—heavy traffic, aggressive driving style, few freeways—makes them ideal for saving fuel with hybrid vehicles, according to new research by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). In a pair of studies using real-world driving conditions, they found that hybrid cars are significantly more fuel-efficient in India and China than they are in the United States. These findings could have an important impact in countries that are on the brink of experiencing ...

In the summer of 2009, Stanford Professor Chris Field embarked on a task of urgent global importance. Field had been tapped to assemble hundreds of climate scientists to dig through 12,000 scientific papers concerning the current impacts of climate change and its causes. The team, Working Group II, would ultimately produce a 2,000-page report as part of a massive, three-part U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report, which details a consensus view on the current state and fate of the world's climate. The job would take nearly five ...

Researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering have improved the performance and capacity of lithium batteries by developing better-performing, cheaper materials for use in anodes and cathodes (negative and positive electrodes, respectively). Lithium-ion batteries are a popular type of rechargeable battery commonly found in portable electronics and electric or hybrid cars. Traditionally, lithium-ion batteries contain a graphite anode, but silicon has recently emerged as a promising anode substitute because it is the second most abundant element on earth and has ...

Baltimore, MD, 31 March 2014. – A new report reveals a potential breakthrough in the treatment of a common eye ailment known as pterygium (Surfer's eye) that impacts the vision, eye health, and cosmetic appearance of countless sufferers. The newly published report shows that eye drops containing the anti-anginal drug dipyridamole (Persantin®, Cardoxin®) led to almost total disappearance of an inflamed pterygium in a 35 year old otherwise healthy woman. Dipyridamole is a drug in use over the past 55 years to treat other disorders, but now found to have this remarkable ...