SAN FRANCISCO, CA—July 3, 2012—The ability to form blood vessels is one of evolution's crowning achievements, and something that separates vertebrates (animals with a backbone) from the rest of the animal kingdom. The two types of blood vessels, arteries and veins, are formed from the same precursor cell type—endothelial cells—that become committed to an arterial or venous cell fate during embryonic development. Yet precisely what drives this commitment, which is essential for shaping cardiovascular development, has long eluded researchers. Now, scientists at the Gladstone ...

The tropical storm that has been hugging the southwestern coast of Mexico moved toward open ocean and strengthened into a hurricane on July 2. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Dalila after moving away from the coast and strengthening into a hurricane. Dalila has become the third hurricane of the Eastern Pacific Ocean hurricane season after Barbara and Cosme. As Dalila starts to weaken, a new tropical low appears to be developing to the southeast. On July 2 at 20:55 UTC (4:55 p.m. EDT) flew over Dalila after the storm became a hurricane. The Moderate Resolution Imaging ...

At present the forest fires plaguing the area near James Bay in Quebec are causing air quality problems in the area and as far away as Maine. According to CBC News on July 02, 2013, "A smog warning is in effect for most of southwestern Quebec — from Gatineau to Montreal to Drummondville — and a smog advisory has already been effect for eastern Ontario, which was expanded all the way through Toronto and Hamilton. This current advisory is mostly due to smoke that is blowing into the warning areas from an extensive forest fire near James Bay, which has consumed around 250,000 ...

Montréal, July 3, 2013 – A team of researchers at the IRCM, led by Dr. Javier M. Di Noia in the Immunity and Viral Infections research division, discovered a novel research model for the study of auto-immune diseases. The Montréal scientists are the first to find a way to separate two important mechanisms that improve the quality of antibodies. This study was featured in a recent issue of The Journal of Immunology. Dr. Di Noia's team studies B cells, a group of white blood cells known as lymphocytes whose main function is to produce antibodies to fight against antigens. ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Humans have been affecting their environment since the ancestors of Homo sapiens first walked upright, but never has their impact been more detrimental than in the 21st century. "The loss of biodiversity has much greater and more profound ecosystem impacts than had ever been imagined," said David Tilman, professor of ecology, biodiversity and ecosystem functioning at UC Santa Barbara's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. Human-driven environmental disturbances, such as increasing levels of reactive nitrogen and carbon dioxide ...

Research published today shows why people find it hard to follow Government guidelines to cut their fat and sugars intake at the same time - a phenomenon known as the sugar-fat seesaw. The review, published in the journal Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, looked at 53 scientific papers and found a strong and consistent inverse association in the percentage of energy coming from fats and sugars. People with diets low in sugars were likely to be high in fat, and vice-versa. Nutritionists have labelled this the 'sugar-fat seesaw'. Dr Michele Sadler, who ...

Diabetes is strongly associated with socioeconomic status (SES): low income, low education, and low occupational status are all linked to a higher risk for diabetes. Trying to understand the mechanisms underlying the association, Silvia Stringhini from the Institute for Social and Preventive Medicine in Lausanne, Switzerland and colleagues report in this week's PLOS Medicine that a substantial part of it appears to be attributable to chronic inflammation. "Taking together the evidence linking socioeconomic adversity to inflammation and inflammation to type 2 diabetes" ...

A new automated diagnostic test can quickly and accurately identify most leading causes of Gram-positive bacterial blood stream infections and the presence of three antibiotic resistance genes, according to a new study published this week in PLOS Medicine. The findings from the study, conducted by a team of researchers led by Nathan Ledeboer from the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW), USA, suggest that the new technology could lead to faster diagnosis and treatment of patients suffering from sepsis. Severe sepsis is a life-threatening condition that is usually triggered ...

An intervention that consisted of home blood pressure (BP) telemonitoring with pharmacist management resulted in improvements in BP control and decreases in BP during 12 months, compared with usual care, and improvement in BP that was maintained for 6 months following the intervention, according to a study in the July 3 issue of JAMA. "High blood pressure is the most common chronic condition for which patients visit primary care physicians, affecting about 30 percent of U.S. adults, with estimated annual costs exceeding $50 billion. Decades of research have shown that ...

In a study that included more than 2.5 million children born in Sweden, compared with spontaneous conception, any in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment was not associated with autistic disorder but was associated with a small but statistically significantly increased risk of mental retardation, according to a study in the July 3 issue of JAMA. The authors note that the prevalence of these disorders was low, and the increase in absolute risk associated with IVF was small. "Between 1978 and 2012, approximately 5 million infants worldwide were born from in vitro fertilization," ...

Among patients at risk of heart failure, collaborative care based on screening for certain levels of brain-type natriuretic peptide reduced the combined rates of left ventricular systolic dysfunction, diastolic dysfunction, and heart failure as well as emergency cardiovascular hospitalizations, according to a study in the July 3 issue of JAMA. "The increasing prevalence of heart failure [HF] remains a major public health concern underlining the need for an effective prevention strategy. Present-day approaches, focusing mainly on risk factor intervention, have brought ...

In a trial that included nearly 200 participants with peripheral artery disease (PAD), a home-based exercise intervention with a group-mediated cognitive behavioral intervention component improved walking performance and physical activity in patients with PAD, according to a study in the July 3 issue of JAMA. "Few medical therapies improve the functional impairment associated with lower extremity peripheral artery disease. Supervised treadmill exercise increases maximal treadmill walking distance by 50 percent to 200 percent in individuals with PAD. However, supervised ...

"Cigarette smoking is an important cause of cardiovascular disease, and smoking cessation reduces the risk. However, weight gain after smoking cessation may increase the risk of diabetes and weaken the benefit of quitting," write Juhua Luo, Ph.D., of the Indiana University School of Public Health, Bloomington, Ind., and colleagues. As reported in a Research Letter, the authors used data from the Women's Health Initiative (WHI) to assess the association between smoking cessation, weight gain, and subsequent coronary heart disease (CHD) risk among postmenopausal women ...

Professor Andrew Bass (Cornell University), who will be presenting his work at the meeting of the Society for Experimental Biology on the 3rd July, said: "We have traced the evolutionary origins of the behavioural coupling between speech and hand movement back to a developmental compartment in the brain of fishes." "Pectoral appendages (fins and forelimbs) are mainly used for locomotion. However, pectoral appendages also function in social communication for the purposes of making sounds that we simply refer to as non-vocal sonic signals, and for gestural signalling." Studies ...

King penguin chicks survive harsh winters with almost no food by minimising the cost of energy production. A new study, to be presented at the Society for Experimental Biology meeting in Valencia on the 3rd July, shows that the efficiency of the mitochondria, the power house of the cell, is increased in fasted king penguin chicks. King penguin chicks are socially and morphologically well adapted to harsh environmental conditions, however, they experience a severe energy challenge during the cold sub-Antarctic winter, when food is not readily available. Research headed ...

The introduction of CT pulmonary angiography has been associated with an 80% rise in the detection of pulmonary emboli in the US, but with little change in death rates. Professor Renda Soylemez Wiener and colleagues argue this is evidence of overdiagnosis. They say some patients are helped, but many are harmed by the adverse effects of unnecessary treatment. This article is the first of a series looking at the risks and harms of overdiagnosis in a range of common conditions. The series, together with the Preventing Overdiagnosis conference in September, are part of ...

Wednesday 28th June 2013, Durham: A new way of detecting and visualizing fingerprints from crime scenes using colour-changing fluorescent films could lead to higher confidence identifications from latent (hidden) fingerprints on knives, guns, bullet casings and other metal surfaces. The technique is the result of a collaboration between the University of Leicester, the Institut Laue-Langevin and the STFC's ISIS pulsed neutron and muon source, and will be presented today at the Royal Society of Chemistry's Faraday Discussion in Durham. When your finger touches a surface, ...

Women living in the world's most advanced democracies and under the most progressive gender equality regimes still know less about politics than men. Indeed, an unmistakable gender gap in political knowledge seems to be a global phenomenon, according to a ten-nation study of media systems and national political knowledge funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Women know less about politics than men regardless of how advanced a country is in terms of gender equality, says researcher Professor James Curran, Director of the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media ...

A good night's sleep can increase the benefit of exercise, healthy diet, moderate alcohol consumption and non-smoking in their protection against cardiovascular disease (CVD), according to results of a large population follow-up study.(1) Results showed that the combination of the four traditional healthy lifestyle habits was associated with a 57% lower risk of cardiovascular disease (fatal and non-fatal) and a 67% lower risk of fatal events.(2) But, when "sufficient sleep" (defined as seven or more hours a night) was added to the other four lifestyle factors, the overall ...

A new study found drug-resistant bacteria associated with livestock in the noses of industrial livestock workers in North Carolina but not in the noses of antibiotic-free livestock workers. The drug-resistant bacteria examined were Staphylococcus aureus, commonly known as "Staph," which include the well-known bug MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). New Staph strains are emerging in people who have close contact with livestock animals and for this reason have been given the name livestock-associated Staph. While everyone in the study had direct or indirect ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- You might be falling in love with that new car, but you probably wouldn't pay as much for it if you could resist the feeling. Researchers at Duke University who study how the brain values things -- a field called neuroeconomics -- have found that your feelings about something and the value you put on it are calculated similarly in a specific area of the brain. The region is small area right between the eyes at the front of the brain. It's called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, or vmPFC for short. Scott Huettel, director of Duke's Center for Interdisciplinary ...

In the first study to compare all available IVF treatments and the risk of neurodevelopmental disorders in children, researchers find that IVF treatments for the most severe forms of male infertility are associated with an increased risk of intellectual disability and autism in children. Autism and intellectual disability remain a rare outcome of IVF, and whilst some of the risk is associated with the risk of multiple births, the study provides important evidence for parents and clinicians on the relative risks of modern IVF treatments. Published in JAMA today, the ...

Conservation efforts have taken an important step forward, thanks to observations of bats – creatures that make up a quarter of all of the UK's native mammal species. In a paper published today, researchers at the University of Leeds describe how they recorded the echolocation calls of more than 15,000 bats during 120 walks in the Lake District to create maps that show the suitability of areas for bat habitation. They are the most detailed large-scale habitat suitability maps ever created for bats in the UK, with a resolution of 50 metres. The impact of the maps will ...

Yale Cancer Center scientists, together with colleagues at the Denver Police Crime Lab and the University of Colorado, have found evidence that a human metastatic tumor can arise when a leukocyte (white blood cell) and a cancer cell fuse to form a genetic hybrid. Their study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, may answer the question of how cancer cells travel from the primary tumor's site of origin to distant organs and tissues of the body — the deadly process of metastasis. Such a theory was first proposed as an explanation for metastasis more than a century ago. But ...

Women who give birth vaginally are at increased risk of developing pelvic organ prolapse during the year after delivery, according to a study of Chinese women by researchers at Yale School of Medicine and Wenzhou Third People's Hospital. Published online July 1 in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, the results show that factors unique to labor and delivery made the pelvic floor relax and not recover its former support during the year after birth. These factors were not present in women who delivered via cesarean section (c-section). "The choice between ...