MADISON, Wis. — Using human pluripotent stem cells and DNA-cutting protein from meningitis bacteria, researchers from the Morgridge Institute for Research and Northwestern University have created an efficient way to target and repair defective genes. Writing today (Monday, Aug. 12, 2013) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team reports that the novel technique is much simpler than previous methods and establishes the groundwork for major advances in regenerative medicine, drug screening and biomedical research. Zhonggang Hou of the Morgridge ...

Researchers at the University of Rochester have measured for the first time light emitted by photoluminescence from a nanodiamond levitating in free space. In a paper published this week in Optics Letters, they describe how they used a laser to trap nanodiamonds in space, and – using another laser – caused the diamonds to emit light at given frequencies. The experiment, led by Nick Vamivakas, an assistant professor of optics, demonstrates that it is possible to levitate diamonds as small as 100 nanometers (approximately one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair) in free ...

ORANGE, Calif. – Chapman University's David Frederick will present new research at the 108th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association that examines men's and women's beliefs about who should pay for dates during courtship, and how couples actually go about splitting expenses. The paper, Who Pays for Dates? Following versus Challenging Conventional Gender Norms, contains survey data from more than 17,000 participants; a quarter of whom also provided written commentaries to explain their beliefs and actions regarding paying for dates. "The motivation for ...

NEW YORK CITY — A University of Portland study challenges the popular perception that there is a "new and pervasive hookup culture" among contemporary college students. "Recent research and popular media reports have described intimate relationships among contemporary college students as characterized by a new and pervasive hookup culture in which students regularly have sex with no strings attached," said study co-author Martin Monto, a sociology professor at the University of Portland. "This implies that the college campus has become a more sexualized environment and ...

NEW YORK CITY — A woman's work is never done — or so the saying goes. Though women still do about two thirds of household chores, the division of labor may depend on what her mate does for a living. New research by University of Notre Dame Sociologist Elizabeth Aura McClintock shows that when married or cohabiting men are employed in heavily female occupations — like teaching, childcare work, or nursing — they spend more time doing housework, compared to when they are employed in traditionally male jobs. In addition, their wives or partners spend less time doing housework, ...

NEW YORK CITY — Benjamin Snyder conducted his research in the cab of a truck hauling frozen chicken from Missouri to Virginia. Snyder, a graduate sociology student in the University of Virginia's Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, will present his paper, "The Professionalized Body: Truck Driving in the Age of Flexibilization," at the 108th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. Snyder explores how truck drivers, as representatives of the American workforce, are reacting to marketplace demands for speed and flexibility. The paper relies on research ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Growing up with siblings may provide some protection against divorce as an adult, a new nationwide study reveals. And the more siblings, the better: Each additional sibling a person has (up to about seven) reduces the likelihood of divorce by 2 percent. The practical difference between having no siblings and having one or two isn't that much in terms of divorce, said Doug Downey, co-author of the study and professor of sociology at The Ohio State University. "But when you compare children from large families to those with only one child, there is ...

NEW YORK CITY — Growing up with siblings may provide some protection against divorce as an adult, a new nationwide study reveals. And the more siblings, the better: Each additional sibling a person has (up to about seven) reduces the likelihood of divorce by 2 percent. The practical difference between having no siblings and having one or two isn't that much in terms of divorce, said Doug Downey, co-author of the study and a professor of sociology at The Ohio State University. "But when you compare children from large families to those with only one child, there is ...

A new study reports that the incidence of ischemic stroke—the most common type of stroke, caused by a clot in the blood vessels of the brain—among non-Hispanic Whites and Mexican Americans over age 60 has declined over the past decade. Most concerning, however, is that the increased relative burden of stroke comparing Mexican Americans and non-Hispanic Whites has not changed at all in the last decade. Overall, Mexican Americans suffer much more, 34%, from this disease than non-Hispanic Whites. Findings are published in Annals of Neurology, a journal of the American Neurological ...

A strain of bacteria that causes skin and soft tissue infections in humans originally came from cattle, according to a study to be published in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology. The researchers who conducted the genetic analysis of strains of Staphylococcus aureus known as CC97 say these strains developed resistance to methicillin after they crossed over into humans around forty years ago. Today, methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) strain CC97 is an emerging human pathogen in Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia. ...

Rare Amur tigers in Russia are succumbing to infection with canine distemper virus (CDV), a pathogen most commonly found in domestic dogs, according to the authors of a study published in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology. Pressure from poaching, decimation of their prey base, and habitat fragmentation have diminished the population of Amur tigers (also called Siberian tigers) to fewer than 500. In the study, a team of scientists from the US and Russia show that CDV infected and caused fatal neurological disease in members ...

The decline and disappearance of stable, unionized full-time jobs with health insurance and pensions for people who lack a college degree has had profound effects on working-class Americans who now are less likely to get married, stay married and have their children within marriage than those with college degrees, a new University of Virginia and Harvard University study has found. The research, "Intimate Inequalities: Love and Work in a Post-Industrial Landscape," will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in New York City on Aug. ...

LAWRENCE - University of Kansas scientists have found that infants who were fed formula enriched with long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LCPUFA) from birth to 12 months scored significantly better than a control group on several measures of intelligence conducted between the ages of three to six years. Specifically, the children showed accelerated development on detailed tasks involving pattern discrimination, rule-learning and inhibition between the ages of three to five years of age as well as better performance on two widely-used standardized tests of intelligence: ...

People who are feeling embarrassed are more likely to choose items that hide or 'repair' the face, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The research indicates that feelings of embarrassment can be alleviated by using so-called 'restorative' products -- effectively helping people to "save face." "Previous research on embarrassment mainly documents that embarrassed individuals are motivated to avoid public exposure," explains Ping Dong, a doctoral student at the University of Toronto and lead ...

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — Science and technology have peeled back a veil of water just offshore of California, revealing the hidden seafloor in unprecedented detail. New imagery, specialized undersea maps, and a wealth of data from along the California coast are now available. Three new products in an ongoing series were released today by the U.S. Geological Survey — a map set for the area offshore of Carpinteria, a catalog of data layers for geographic information systems, and a collection of videos and photos of the seafloor in state waters along the entire California coast. "A ...

SALT LAKE CITY – A multistate study led by researchers at the University of Utah has revealed that the risk for childhood cancer is moderately increased among children and young adolescents with certain types of major birth defects. Children born with non-chromosomal birth defects have a twofold higher risk of cancer before age 15, compared to children born without birth defects, according to this study published in July in PLOS ONE. However, cancer risk varies by the specific type of birth defect, and is not significantly increased in many of the more common birth defects. An ...

Some patients with a rare type of epilepsy called epilepsy aphasia have something else in common. They have mutations in the same gene. Epilepsy aphasia disorders are characterized by seizures and speech abnormalities. University of Washington researchers headed a recent study on genetic association. Their report, "GRIN2A mutations cause epilepsy-aphasia spectrum disorders," is published in the Aug. 11 issue of Nature Genetics. The scientists sequenced genes in 519 patients with severe seizure disorders. Within the group, 44 patients had epilepsy aphasia and four ...

Results from a landmark international study using state of the art technology has revealed new genetic mutations that cause epilepsy. The findings could help to advance treatments for the most severe forms of epilepsy. The global study, led by the University of Melbourne and Austin Hospital (Aus), Duke University and the University of California, San Francisco (US), used advanced gene technology known as exome sequencing to identify new genes that cause severe childhood epilepsies. Epilepsy is a brain condition that affects an estimated 50 million people worldwide. As ...

Thioperamide, a selective histamine H3 receptor antagonist, can increase histamine content in the brain and improve brain edema in adult hypoxic rats. Brain edema is precisely considered as the important pathological change of neonatal hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy. As a study reported in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 8, No. 19, 2013), thioperamide was used to increase histamine content in the brain, and then the mechanism of action of thioperamide during brain edema in a rat model of neonatal hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy was examined. Results showed that ...

The most common limb-girdle muscular dystrophy subtype in Italy, Spain, Turkey, Russia, Brazil and Australia is calpainopathy (limb-girdle muscular dystrophy type 2A), while dystroglycanopathy (limb-girdle muscular dystrophy type 2I) is the commonest form in Norway, Denmark and northern England. In India, sarcoglycanopthies (limb-girdle muscular dystrophy type 2C-2F) are the most preva-lent, while dysferlinopathies are the most frequent type in USA and Japan. A rigorous comparison of the morphological features of biopsy specimens between limb-girdle muscular dystrophy type ...

X-linked methyl-CpG binding protein 2 plays important role in the regulation of neuronal development, proliferation and maturation, and synaptic regeneration and apoptosis. Overexpression of X-linked methyl-CpG binding protein 2 in SH-SY5Y cells can reduce cell apoptosis induced by 6-hydroxydopamine and increased tyrosine hydroxylase expression. But the specific role of X-linked methyl-CpG binding protein 2 in the pathogenesis of Parkinson's disease remains unknown. Prof. Xianhou Yuan and team from Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University used 6-hydroxydopamine-induced human ...

An algorithm capable of diagnosing heart rhythm with just 3 seconds' worth of signal, and the demonstration that it is possible to come up with the diagnosis without stopping cardiac massage, constitute the types of solutions and proposals being developed by researchers in the Signal and Communications Group of the Faculty of Engineering in Bilbao (UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country). "We don't save lives, we just do research," as Jesús Ruiz, leader of the Signal and Communications Group, makes it clear. "But what has been confirmed is that it is cardiac massage ...

SAN ANTONIO -- Adding to the picture of what prompts breast cancers to form, researchers from the Cancer Therapy & Research Center (CTRC) at The University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio today announced that "distant estrogen response elements" (DEREs) can act independently of oncogenes to spur tumor development. DEREs appear to be depots or hubs that remotely and simultaneously control multiple target genes in response to estrogen stimulation, said Pei-Yin Hsu, Ph.D., lead author of the paper in Cancer Cell. As such, they are prime targets for the study of ...

Radiography is widely used in diagnosing ankle injuries, with 85%–95% in pediatric injuries, although only 12% of these show fractures. "Radiography is unnecessary for most children's ankle injuries, and these high rates of radiography needlessly expose children to radiation and are a questionable use of resources," writes Dr. Kathy Boutis, a pediatric emergency department physician at the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and the University of Toronto, with coauthors. The Low Risk Ankle Rule is highly accurate at identifying fractures and can potentially reduce ...

Contact: Vanessa Solomon solomon@wehi.edu.au 61-393-452-971 Walter and Eliza Hall Institute Rachel Steinhardt rsteinhardt@licr.org 212-450-1582 Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research 'Dark-horse' molecule is a potential new anti-cancer target Australian researchers have identified a molecule called interleukin-11 as a potential new target for anti-cancer therapies. Until now, the importance of interleukin-11 in cancer development has been underestimated, but researchers have recently identified this molecule as a 'dark horse' for the development of cancer. ...