RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Scientists have a promising new approach to combating deadly human viruses thanks to an educated hunch by University of California, Riverside microbiology professor Shou-Wei Ding, and his 20 years of research on plants, fruit flies, nematodes and mice to prove his theory true. Researchers led by Ding, who heads a lab in UC Riverside's Institute for Integrative Genome Biology, have discovered that, like plants and invertebrate animals, mammals use the RNA interference (RNAi) process to destroy viruses within their own cells. Their findings will be ...

Ancient DNA recovered from a time series of skeletons in Germany spanning 4,000 years of prehistory has been used to reconstruct the first detailed genetic history of modern-day Europeans. The study, published today in Science, reveals dramatic population changes with waves of prehistoric migration, not only from the accepted path via the Near East, but also from Western and Eastern Europe. The research was a collaboration between the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD), at the University of Adelaide, researchers from the University of Mainz, the State Heritage ...

Jülich, 10 October 2013 – The human brain keeps changing throughout a person's lifetime. New connections are continually created while synapses that are no longer in use degenerate. To date, little is known about the mechanisms behind these processes. Jülich neuroinformatician Dr. Markus Butz has now been able to ascribe the formation of new neural networks in the visual cortex to a simple homeostatic rule that is also the basis of many other self-regulating processes in nature. With this explanation, he and his colleague Dr. Arjen van Ooyen from Amsterdam also provide ...

Scientists in Norwich and China have, for the first time, uncovered exactly how an immune receptor mediating plants' natural immunity to bacteria works. The research has important implications for developing broad-spectrum disease resistance in crops. UK researchers at The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, in a close collaboration with Chinese scientists at Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing have shared their findings in a paper published this week in Science. TSL senior scientist Prof. Cyril Zipfel said: "Plants, like humans, have an ...

(Boston) -- Researchers from Boston University Schools of Medicine (BUSM) and Public Health (BUSPH) and Boston Medical Center (BMC) have found that high-risk travelers account for nearly 20 percent of patients using the five clinics of the Boston Area Travel Medicine Network (BATMN). The study, which appears online in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, also found that these travelers often visited destinations with malaria and typhoid risk. In 2010, an estimated 935 million travelers crossed international borders, including 28.5 million from the U.S. Certain travelers are at greater ...

The iron in the Earth's inner core weakens dramatically before it melts, explaining the unusual properties that exist in the moon-sized solid centre of our planet that have, up until now, been difficult to understand. Scientists use seismic waves - pulses of energy generated during earthquakes - to measure what is happening in the Earth's inner core, which at 6000 km beneath our feet is completely inaccessible. Problematically for researchers, the results of seismic measurements consistently show that these waves move through the Earth's solid inner core at much slower ...

What's in a kiss? A study by Oxford University researchers suggests kissing helps us size up potential partners and, once in a relationship, may be a way of getting a partner to stick around. 'Kissing in human sexual relationships is incredibly prevalent in various forms across just about every society and culture,' says Rafael Wlodarski, the DPhil student who carried out the research in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. 'Kissing is seen in our closest primate relatives, chimps and bonobos, but it is much less intense and less commonly used. ...

Boston, Mass., October 10, 2013 – A research team from Dana-Farber/Boston Children's Cancer and Blood Disorders Center and other institutions has discovered a new genetic target for potential therapy of sickle cell disease (SCD). The target, called an enhancer, controls a molecular switch in red blood cells called BCL11A that, in turn, regulates hemoglobin production. The researchers—led by Daniel Bauer, MD, PhD, and Stuart Orkin, MD, of Dana-Farber/Boston Children's—reported their findings today in Science. Prior work by Orkin and others has shown that when flipped ...

Hunter-gatherers and immigrant farmers lived side-by-side for more than 2,000 years in Central Europe, before the hunter-gatherer communities died out or were absorbed into the farming population. In a paper published today in Science, researchers describe their analysis of DNA and isotopes from human bones found in the 'Blätterhöhle' cave near Hagen in Germany, where both hunter-gatherers and farmers were buried. The team, led by anthropologist Professor Joachim Burger of the Johannes Gutenberg University, Germany, used stable isotopes to determine their diet, DNA ...

A study to assess whether patients prescribed smoking cessation drugs are at an increased risk of suicide, self-harm and treated depression compared with users of nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) has found no evidence of an increased risk. The findings, led by researchers from the University of Bristol, are published online in the British Medical Journal [BMJ] today [11 October]. Varenicline (brand name Champix in the UK, Chantix in the US) is widely used by patients seeking to stop smoking with recent figures showing there were one million prescriptions for the drug ...

Many viral infections are nipped in the bud by the innate immune response. This involves specific proteins within the infected cell that recognize the virus and trigger a signalling cascade – the so-called interferon response. This activates a protective mechanism in neighbouring cells and often results in the death of the primarily infected cell. In plants and invertebrates another mechanism is known to function in antiviral immune response: the so-called RNA interference (RNAi) pathway. RNAi uses an intermediate of the viral proliferation process to build a weapon against ...

Indigenous hunter-gatherers and immigrant farmers lived side-by-side for more than 2,000 years in Central Europe, before the hunter-gatherer communities died out or adopted the agricultural lifestyle. The results come from a study undertaken by the Institute of Anthropology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) that has just been published in the eminent journal Science. A team led by Mainz anthropologist Professor Joachim Burger studied bones from the 'Blätterhöhle' cave near Hagen in Germany, where both hunter-gatherers and farmers were buried. "It is commonly ...

In the land of 10,000 lakes, one lake has been the starting place for research with implications for big lakes around the world. According to a study published online this week in Science, University of Minnesota researchers, building from studies of nitrogen levels in Lake Superior, uncovered a good news/bad news scenario for lake health that has long-term, global implications for pollution control efforts. While many water-quality cleanup efforts focusing on the reduction of phosphorus have been highly effective, that success can also result in a decrease in microbial ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me," goes the playground rhyme that's supposed to help children endure taunts from classmates. But a new study suggests that there's more going on inside our brains when someone snubs us – and that the brain may have its own way of easing social pain. The findings, recently published in Molecular Psychiatry by a University of Michigan Medical School team, show that the brain's natural painkiller system responds to social rejection – not just physical injury. What's more, people who ...

Normally muscles contract in order to support the body, but in a rare condition known as cataplexy the body's muscles "fall asleep" and become involuntarily paralyzed. Cataplexy is incapacitating because it leaves the affected individual awake, but either fully or partially paralyzed. It is one of the bizarre symptoms of the sleep disorder called narcolepsy. "Cataplexy is characterized by muscle paralysis during cognitive awareness, but we didn't understand how this happened until now, said John Peever of the University of Toronto's Department of Cell & Systems Biology. ...

WASHINGTON—Research conducted by the National Geographic Genographic Project, a multiyear global initiative that uses DNA to map the history of human migration, is helping unravel the timing and source of human settlement in Central Europe. New ancient-DNA research led by the National Geographic Society's Genographic Project, the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) and researchers from the University of Mainz in Germany and the State Heritage Museum in Halle (Germany) showed a pattern of genetic replacement taking place across several millennia in a region of central ...

Cambridge, Mass. – October 10, 2013 – Thirty-eight U.S. national parks are experiencing "accidental fertilization" at or above a critical threshold for ecological damage, according to a study published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and led by Harvard University researchers. Unless significant controls on ammonia emissions are introduced at a national level, they say, little improvement is likely between now and 2050. The environmental scientists, experts in air quality, atmospheric chemistry, and ecology, have been studying the fate of nitrogen-based ...

A discovery at Rice University aims to make vehicles that run on compressed natural gas more practical. It might also prolong the shelf life of bottled beer and soda. The Rice lab of chemist James Tour has enhanced a polymer material to make it far more impermeable to pressurized gas and far lighter than the metal in tanks now used to contain the gas. The combination could be a boon for an auto industry under pressure to market consumer cars that use cheaper natural gas. It could also find a market in food and beverage packaging. Tour and his colleagues at Rice and ...

A novel device that uses only sunlight and wastewater to produce hydrogen gas could provide a sustainable energy source while improving the efficiency of wastewater treatment. A research team led by Yat Li, associate professor of chemistry at the University of California, Santa Cruz, developed the solar-microbial device and reported their results in a paper published in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano. The hybrid device combines a microbial fuel cell (MFC) and a type of solar cell called a photoelectrochemical cell (PEC). In the MFC component, bacteria ...

Ecologists conducting field research usually study areas that they hope won't be disturbed for a while. But in an article published in the November issue of BioScience, "Mapping the Design Process for Urban Ecology Researchers," Alexander Felson of Yale University and his colleagues describe how ecologists can perform hypothesis-driven research from the start of design through the construction and monitoring phases of major urban projects. The results from such "designed experiments" can provide site-specific data that improve how the projects are conceptualized, built ...

HONOLULU, October 11, 2013 — Young children whose parents used an integrated personal health record were more likely to attend six or more of the nationally recommended well-child care visits by 15 months of age, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published today in The Journal of Pediatrics. Using any Web-enabled device, PHRs allow patients to view parts of their medical record, including immunizations and after-visit instructions, manage appointments, refill prescriptions, check lab results, and securely communicate with their health care providers. In this retrospective ...

Consumers of natural health products beware. The majority of herbal products on the market contain ingredients not listed on the label, with most companies substituting cheaper alternatives and using fillers, according to new research from the University of Guelph. The study, published today in the open access journal BMC Medicine, used DNA barcoding technology to test 44 herbal products sold by 12 companies. Only two of the companies provided authentic products without substitutions, contaminants or fillers. Overall, nearly 60 per cent of the herbal products contained ...

Philadelphia, PA, October 11, 2013 – In the United States, children don't eat enough fruits, vegetables and whole grains. Instead, their diets typically include excessive amounts of sugars and solid fats, counter to the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommendations, increasing the risk of obesity and diabetes. A team of investigators implemented a two-year intervention study in low-income, rural areas where a disproportionately higher risk of overweight and obesity habits among children persists, leading to increased risk of diabetes and heart disease in adulthood. ...

New York, NY— U.S. medical schools have made significant progress to strengthen their management of clinical conflicts of interest (CCOI), but a new study demonstrates that most schools still lag behind national standards. The Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP) study, which compared changes in schools' policies in a dozen areas from 2008 to 2011, reveals that institutions are racing from the bottom to the middle, not to the top. In 2011, nearly two-thirds of medical schools still lacked policies to limit ties to industry in at least one area explored, including ...

Bethesda, MD -- New estimates released 9/18/13 from the Office of the Actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) project that aggregate health care spending in the United States will grow at an average annual rate of 5.8 percent for 2012-22, or 1.0 percentage point faster than the expected growth in the gross domestic product (GDP). The health care share of GDP by 2022 is projected to rise to 19.9 percent from its 2011 level of 17.9 percent. The findings appeared as a Health Affairs Web First article, which is published in the October issue. The article ...