LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Sept. 26, 2013 — Within its first three months on Mars, NASA's Curiosity Rover saw a surprising diversity of soils and sediments along a half-kilometer route that tell a complex story about the gradual desiccation of the Red Planet. Perhaps most notable among findings from the ChemCam team is that all of the dust and fine soil contains small amounts of water. "We made this discovery literally with the very first laser shot on the Red Planet," said Roger Wiens, leader of the ChemCam instrument team. "Every single time we shot at dust we saw a significant ...

Female promiscuity—something that occurs in a majority of species, including humans—results in the ejaculates from two or more males overlapping within her reproductive tract. When this happens, sperm compete for fertilization of the female's eggs. In addition, the female has the opportunity to bias fertilization of her eggs in favor of one male's sperm over others. These processes, collectively known as postcopulatory sexual selection, drive a myriad of rapid, coordinated evolutionary changes in ejaculate and female reproductive tract traits. These changes have been ...

SANTA MONICA, CA -- A new urine test for prostate cancer that measures minute fragments of RNA is now commercially available to men nationwide through the University of Michigan MLabs. The new test—Mi-Prostate Score (MiPS)—improves the utility of the PSA blood test, increases physicians' ability to pick out high-risk prostate tumors from low-risk tumors in patients, and may help tens of thousands of men avoid unnecessary biopsies. The MiPS test incorporates blood PSA levels and two molecular RNA markers specific for prostate cancer in one final score that provides men ...

Certain diseases such as cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy are linked to genetic mutations that damage the important biological process of rearranging gene sequences in pre-messenger RNA, a procedure called RNA splicing. These conditions are difficult to prevent because scientists are still grasping to understand how the splicing process works. Now, researchers from Brandeis University and the University of Massachusetts Medical School have teamed up to unravel a major component in understanding the process of RNA splicing. In a recent paper published in Cell ...

Like the plastic caps at the end of shoelaces, telomeres protect — in their case — the interior-gene containing parts of chromosomes that carry a cell's instructional material. Cancer cells are known to have short telomeres, but just how short they are from cancer cell to cancer cell may be a determining factor in a prostate cancer patient's prognosis, according to a study led by Johns Hopkins scientists. "Doctors are looking for new ways to accurately predict prostate cancer patients' prognoses, because the current methods that use disease stage, Gleason score, and PSA ...

The effects of childhood abuse and lack of parental affection can last a lifetime, taking a toll both emotionally and physically. There are many reports assessing the psychological damage resulting from childhood abuse, and the effects on physical health have also been well documented. For instance, this "toxic" stress has been linked to elevated cholesterol, cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome and other physical conditions posing a significant health risk. The research into the physical effects of abuse, however, has focused on separate, individual systems. A ...

A University of Virginia engineering professor has proposed a novel approach for keeping waste carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Andres Clarens, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at U.Va.'s School of Engineering and Applied Science, and graduate student Zhiyuan Tao have published a paper in which they estimate the amount of carbon dioxide that could be stored in hydraulically fractured shale deposits after the methane gas has been extracted. Their peer-reviewed finding was published in Environmental Science and Technology, a publication ...

The first scoop of soil analyzed by the analytical suite in the belly of NASA's Curiosity rover reveals that fine materials on the surface of the planet contain several percent water by weight. The results were published today in Science as one article in a five-paper special section on the Curiosity mission. "One of the most exciting results from this very first solid sample ingested by Curiosity is the high percentage of water in the soil," said Laurie Leshin, lead author of one paper and dean of the School Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "About 2 percent ...

Scientists have provided the most comprehensive details yet of the journey energy from the sun takes as it hurtles around Earth's magnetosphere. Understanding the changes energy from the sun undergoes as it travels away and out into space is crucial for scientists to achieve their goal of some day predicting the onset of space weather that creates effects such as the shimmering lights of the aurora or interruptions in radio communications at Earth. Taking advantage of an unprecedented alignment of eight satellites through the vast magnetic environment that surrounds Earth ...

One of the instruments that flew aboard one of two unmanned Global Hawk aircraft during NASA's HS3 mission was the Hurricane Imaging Radiometer known as HIRAD. HIRAD identified an area of heavy rains and and likely strong winds in Hurricane Ingrid by measuring surface wind speeds and rain rates using its rectangular antenna to track activity on the ocean's surface. NASA's Global Hawk 871 is the over-storm Global Hawk that carried HIRAD on a flight over Hurricane Ingrid on Sept. 15 as the storm moved through the extreme southwestern Gulf of Mexico and traveled west-northwestward ...

Scientists have discovered differences in the brain structure of ballet dancers that may help them avoid feeling dizzy when they perform pirouettes. The research suggests that years of training can enable dancers to suppress signals from the balance organs in the inner ear. The findings, published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, could help to improve treatment for patients with chronic dizziness. Around one in four people experience this condition at some time in their lives. Normally, the feeling of dizziness stems from the vestibular organs in the inner ear. These ...

PHILADELPHIA — A bioinformatics approach to repurposing drugs resulted in identification of a class of antidepressants as a potential new treatment for small-cell lung cancer (SCLC), according to a study published in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. Based on data generated using bioinformatics, two drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat symptoms of depression were tested on SCLC cells and animal models. Both antidepressants were found to induce SCLC cell death. They were also effective in mice ...

STANFORD, Calif. — A little-used class of antidepressants appears potentially effective in combating a particularly deadly form of lung cancer, according to a new study from researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. And because the drugs have already been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use in humans, the researchers have been able to quickly launch a clinical trial to test their theory in patients. The phase-2 trial is now recruiting participants with small-cell lung cancer and other, similar conditions like aggressive gastrointestinal ...

The report by scientists of a new hepatitis virus earlier this year was a false alarm, according to UC San Francisco researchers who correctly identified the virus as a contaminant present in a type of glassware used in many research labs. Their finding, they said, highlights both the promise and peril of today’s powerful “next-generation” lab techniques that are used to track down new agents of disease. In research published online September 11, 2013, in the Journal of Virology, researchers led by Charles Chiu, MD, PhD, director of the UCSF Viral Diagnostics ...

A star is "blooming" in the southern sky — and astronomers using a CSIRO telescope are a step closer to knowing why. An old star, IRAS 15445-5449, has begun to push out a jet of charged particles that glow with radio waves. A few old stars are known to have jets, "but this is the first one where the radio waves tell us the jet is held together by a strong magnetic field", said Dr Jessica Chapman of CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science, a member of the research team. "That's a clue to what makes these jets switch on." The finding has been published online in the journal ...

VIDEO: The aging pulsar rotates slower and slower, then matter from its companion spins it up again. As the pulsar is spun up, it alternates between emitting X-rays (white) and radio... Click here for more information. An international team of astronomers has used X-ray telescopes in space and ground-based telescopes, including two of CSIRO's, to identify a pulsar that switches between emitting X-rays and emitting radio waves. This is the first direct evidence of one kind ...

Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) taken from a patient hold great therapeutic potential for many diseases. However, studies in rodents have suggested that the body may mount an immune response and destroy cells derived from iPSCs. New research in monkeys refutes these findings, suggesting that in primates like us, such cells will not be rejected by the immune system. In the paper, publishing September 26 in the ISSCR's journal Stem Cell Reports, published by Cell Press, iPSCs from nonhuman primates successfully developed into the neurons depleted by Parkinson's disease ...

VIDEO: This is a Eurydice crustacean swimming. Click here for more information. Animals living in marine environments keep to their schedules with the aid of multiple independent—and, in at least some cases, interacting—internal clocks. The findings, presented by two research groups in papers appearing in the Cell Press journals Current Biology and Cell Reports on September 26, suggest that multiple clocks—not just the familiar, 24-hour circadian clock—might even be standard ...

Alzheimer's disease is characterized by the accumulation of particular toxic proteins in the brain that are believed to underlie the cognitive decline in patients. A new study conducted in mice suggests that newly identified antibody treatments can prevent the accumulation of one of these of these toxic components, called tau proteins. The findings, online September 26 in the Cell Press journal Neuron, suggest that these antibodies may provide a basis for a promising therapy for patients with Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders. In the brains of ...

A research team led by Professor Jun Takahashi and Assistant Professor Asuka Morizane at the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA) at Kyoto University, Japan, has carried out a study to compare the impact of immune response in autologous transplantation (transplantation of cells from the subject's own body) and allogeneic transplantation (transplantation of cells from a different individual of the same species). The researchers used cynomolgus monkeys to carry out transplantation into the brain of neural cells derived from iPS cells. Autologous transplantation ...

Washington, DC (September 23, 2013) – Smoking is a major public health problem, killing approximately 443,000 people every year in the United States. Quitting smoking can have a profound effect on a person's health, but it is also one of the hardest addictions to kick. A recent paper published in the Journal of Communication found that people who engage in health specific social networking sites found it easier to quit smoking. Joe Phua, University of Georgia, examined health-based social networking sites that focus on helping members to quit smoking. He found that as ...

Although heavily studied, the specific genetic causes of "complex diseases," a category of disorders which includes autism, diabetes and heart disease, are largely unknown due to byzantine genetic and environmental interactions. Now, scientists from the University of Chicago have created one of the most expansive analyses to date of the genetic factors at play in complex diseases—by using diseases with known genetic causes to guide them. Analyzing more than 120 million patient records and identifying trends of co-occurrence among hundreds of diseases, they created a unique ...

NEW YORK, NY (September 26, 2013) — Researchers from Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) have found that the skeleton, acting through the bone-derived hormone osteocalcin, exerts a powerful influence on prenatal brain development and cognitive functions such as learning, memory, anxiety, and depression in adult mice. Findings from the mouse study could lead to new approaches to the prevention and treatment of neurologic disorders. The study was published today in the online edition of Cell. "The brain is commonly viewed as an organ that influences other organs ...

Scientists have used a brand new technique for examining individual stem cells to uncover dramatic differences in the gene expression levels – which genes are turned 'up' or 'down'– between apparently identical 'sister' pairs. The research, published today (Thursday) in Stem Cell Reports, was conducted and funded by The Institute of Cancer Research, London. It provides the latest evidence that despite having identical DNA, sister stem cells can display considerable differences in their molecular characteristics. The study showed that DNA methylation, a process that controls ...

Becoming obese or remaining lean can depend on the dynamics of the mitochondria, the body's energy-producing "battery," according to two new studies by Yale School of Medicine researchers featured as the cover story in the Sept. 26 issue of the journal Cell. Mitochondria are vital cellular organelles that generate and maintain proper energy levels in complex organisms. Using animal models, the Yale research team studied mitochondria in different populations of brain cells known to be involved in the regulation of appetite. The team found that during the transition from ...