LEXINGTON, Ky. (Feb. 10, 2014) — A new study led by University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center researcher Peter Zhou shows that targeting Twist, a nuclear protein that is an accelerant of the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) program in human cells, may provide an effective approach for treating triple-negative breast cancer. Triple-negative breast cancer has an activated EMT program, which is a process that provides cells with the increased plasticity (or flexibility) to adapt to stressed environments during embryonic development, wound healing, tissue fibrosis ...

PHILADELPHIA -- Penn Medicine researchers have developed a better way to assess and diagnose psychosis in young children. By "growth charting" cognitive development alongside the presentation of psychotic symptoms, they have demonstrated that the most significant lags in cognitive development correlate with the most severe cases of psychosis. Their findings are published online this month in JAMA Psychiatry. "We know that disorders such as schizophrenia come with a functional decline as well as a concurrent cognitive decline," says Ruben Gur, PhD, director of the Brain ...

CHAPEL HILL, NC – Researchers at the UNC School of Medicine conducted a comprehensive genetic analysis of invasive bladder cancer tumors to discover that the disease shares genetic similarities with two forms of breast cancer. The finding is significant because a greater understanding of the genetic basis of cancers, such as breast cancers, has in the recent past led to the development of new therapies and diagnostic aids. Bladder cancer, which is the fourth most common malignancy in men and ninth in women in the United States, claimed more than 15,000 lives last year. The ...

Ann Arbor, Mich. – New American Diabetes Association (ADA) screening guidelines may lead to the missed diagnoses of type 2 diabetes in children, according to a new study by University of Michigan. The research, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, finds that both pediatric and family medicine providers who care for children are using screening tests for type 2 diabetes that may result in missed diagnoses for children, says lead author Joyce Lee, M.D., M.P.H., associate professor in U-M's Departments of Pediatrics and Communicable Diseases and Environmental ...

CHICAGO --- A new imaging technique for measuring blood flow in the heart and vessels can diagnose a common congenital heart abnormality, bicuspid aortic valve, and may lead to better prediction of complications. A Northwestern Medicine team reported the finding in the journal Circulation. In the study, the authors demonstrated for the first time a previously unknown relationship between heart valve abnormalities, blood flow changes in the heart and aortic disease. They showed that blood flow changes were driven by specific types of abnormal aortic valves, and they were ...

Four unknown galaxy clusters each potentially containing thousands of individual galaxies have been discovered some 10 billion light years from Earth. An international team of astronomers, led by Imperial College London, used a new way of combining data from the two European Space Agency satellites, Planck and Herschel, to identify more distant galaxy clusters than has previously been possible. The researchers believe up to 2000 further clusters could be identified using this technique, helping to build a more detailed timeline of how clusters are formed. Galaxy clusters ...

Dr Alex Scott-Samuel and colleagues from the Universities of Durham, West of Scotland, Glasgow and Edinburgh, sourced data from over 70 existing research papers, which concludes that as a result of unnecessary unemployment, welfare cuts and damaging housing policies, the former prime minister's legacy "includes the unnecessary and unjust premature death of many British citizens, together with a substantial and continuing burden of suffering and loss of well-being." Speaking about the figures, Dr Scott-Samuel said: "Towards the end of the 1980s we were seeing around 500 ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Inspired by tiny particles that carry cholesterol through the body, MIT chemical engineers have designed nanoparticles that can deliver snippets of genetic material that turn off disease-causing genes. This approach, known as RNA interference (RNAi), holds great promise for treating cancer and other diseases. However, delivering enough RNA to treat the diseased tissue, while avoiding side effects in the rest of the body, has proven difficult. The new MIT particles, which encase short strands of RNA within a sphere of fatty molecules and proteins, silence ...

When most people envision crocodiles, they think of them waddling on the ground or wading in water—not climbing trees. However, a University of Tennessee, Knoxville, study has found that the reptiles can climb trees as far as the crowns. Vladimir Dinets, a research assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, is the first to thoroughly study the tree-climbing and -basking behavior. The research is published in the journal Herpetology Notes and can be found at http://bit.ly/Myi8yr. Dinets and his colleagues observed crocodile species on three continents—Australia, ...

In 2011, biologists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) demonstrated a highly effective method for delivering HIV-fighting antibodies to mice—a treatment that protected the mice from infection by a laboratory strain of HIV delivered intravenously. Now the researchers, led by Nobel Laureate David Baltimore, have shown that the same procedure is just as effective against a strain of HIV found in the real world, even when transmitted across mucosal surfaces. The findings, which appear in the February 9 advance online publication of the journal Nature Medicine, ...

It's widely acknowledged that a common threat unites people. Individuals who were previously separated by social class, race or ethnicity come together, forming new cooperative alliances to defeat a common enemy. But does it take an external threat — an attack like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 — to make these social divisions melt away? A study by behavioral scientists at UC Santa Barbara demonstrates that peaceful cooperation has the same effect as intergroup conflict in erasing social boundaries connected to race. Their findings appear today in the journal PLOS ONE. "Evolution ...

According to an international team of researchers, the rapid pace of climate change is threatening the future presence of fish near the equator. "Our studies found that one species of fish could not even survive in water just three degrees Celsius warmer than what it lives in now," says the lead author of the study, Dr Jodie Rummer from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) at James Cook University. Dr Rummer and her colleagues studied six common species of fish living on coral reefs near the equator. She says many species in this region only ...

For the first time, neuroscientists have systematically identified the white matter "scaffold" of the human brain, the critical communications network that supports brain function. Their work, published Feb. 11 in the open-source journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, has major implications for understanding brain injury and disease. By detailing the connections that have the greatest influence over all other connections, the researchers offer not only a landmark first map of core white matter pathways, but also show which connections may be most vulnerable to damage. "We ...

For the first time, scientists at King's College London have identified a gene linking the thickness of the grey matter in the brain to intelligence. The study is published today in Molecular Psychiatry and may help scientists understand biological mechanisms behind some forms of intellectual impairment. The researchers looked at the cerebral cortex, the outermost layer of the human brain. It is known as 'grey matter' and plays a key role in memory, attention, perceptual awareness, thought, language and consciousness. Previous studies have shown that the thickness of ...

New research has revealed a previously unknown mechanism in the body which regulates a hormone that is crucial for motivation, stress responses and control of blood pressure, pain and appetite. The breakthrough could be used to design drugs to help fight health problems connected with these functions in the future. Researchers at the University of Bristol and University College London found that lactate – essentially lactic acid – causes cells in the brain to release more noradrenaline (norepinephrine in US English), a hormone and neurotransmitter which is fundamental ...

February 11, 2014 Kootenay National Park, British Columbia -- Yoho National Park's 505-million-year-old Burgess Shale – home to some of the planet's earliest animals, including a very primitive human relative – is one of the world's most important fossil sites. Now, more than a century after its discovery, a compelling sequel has been unearthed: 42 kilometres away in Kootenay National Park, a new Burgess Shale fossil site has been located that appears to equal the importance of the original discovery, and may one day even surpass it. The find was made in the summer of ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — It's not necessarily voters who should be blamed for the lack of minorities in state legislatures, but instead the two major political parties for not recruiting enough candidates, indicates new research by a Michigan State University scholar. Eric Gonzalez Juenke analyzed nearly 10,000 statehouse elections in 2000 and 2010 and found Latino candidates were on the ballot just 5 percent of the time. But when Latinos did run for office, they won just as often as their white counterparts – even in districts where most voters were white. Juenke's other ...

Forest management is based on recommendations that are supposed to maximize economic revenues. However, in 40% of cases a better economic result would be achieved by neglecting some of the recommendations. This would also greatly benefit biodiversity. These results were obtained by a research group lead by Professor Mikko Mönkkönen at the University Jyväskylä. The group studied a production forest landscape encompassing 68 square kilometers of land and more than 30,000 forest stands in Central Finland. The research project aimed at revealing the potential of a forest ...

Even a moderate weight reduction can prevent the progression of obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), and even cure it, according to a 4-year Finish follow-up study published recently in Sleep Medicine. The study focused on the effects of weight loss on OSA and demonstrated, for the first time, that a sustained weight loss of just 5% was enough to prevent the disease from worsening and even cure it in a long-term follow-up. Obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) has become a major burden for our health care systems over the last years. Although it is one of the most increasingly prevalent ...

Fashion magazines come pre-loaded with scratch-and-sniff panels for perfume and aftershave, but what about advertisements for foods like chocolate chip cookies and fresh-baked bread? According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, when food advertisements combine a photo of food with an "imagined odor," consumers both salivate more for the item and then consume it in larger quantities. "We wondered whether both real and imagined food smells would enhance consumer desire for that product. Does the concept of smelling food make people salivate more and increase ...

Complex heritable traits are not only determined by changes in the DNA sequence. Scientists from the University of Groningen Bioinformatics Centre, together with their French colleagues, have shown that epigenetic marks can affect traits such as flowering time and architecture in plants. Furthermore, these marks are passed on for many generations in a stable manner. Their results were published in Science Express on Thursday, 6 February 2014. It seems that a revision of Genetics textbooks is now in order. We've all been taught that DNA is the physical foundation of heredity. ...

This news release is available in German. Whenever a new material is discovered, scientists are eager to find out whether or not it can be superconducting. This applies particularly to the wonder material graphene. Now, an international team around researchers at the University of Vienna unveiled the superconducting pairing mechanism in Calcium doped graphene using the ARPES method. Their results are published in the reputed journal Nature Communications. Superconducting materials exhibit an invaluable feature when cooled below a critical temperature – they allow ...

Low pH in tumours counteracts the desired effect of the drug chloroquine, according to a new study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. The results, which are published in the journal Autophagy, might explain possible lack of efficacy of chloroquine in clinical studies. Chloroquine, a widely used antimalaria drug, is currently under investigation in clinical trials on cancer patients. It is the ability of chloroquine to inhibit autophagy in tumour cells that has piqued researchers' interest. Autophagy is a homeostatic process by which cells eat parts of themselves, ...

Recent decades may have been the wettest in 3,500 years in North East Tibet – according to climate researchers at the University of East Anglia (UK) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Lanzhou, China). Researchers looked at 3,500-year-long tree ring records from North East Tibet to estimate annual precipitation. They found that recent decades have likely been the wettest on record in this semi-arid region. The precipitation records have been reconstructed using sub-fossil, archaeological and living juniper tree samples from the north-eastern Tibetan Plateau. They reveal ...

When natural disaster strikes, calls for help are broadcast on television and across the Internet. Despite being exposed to the needs of widespread relief organizations, only a small percentage of us actually follow through by making a financial contribution. According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, the more connected we feel with the people needing our help, the more likely we are to donate. "Our thought is that people who act more independently might not necessarily be more benevolent than people who are more connected to others within their own ...