Treatments against hepatitis C virus have only been partially successful. A major problem is that antivirals generate drug resistance. Now Seong-Wook Lee of Dankook University, Yongin, Republic of Korea and his collaborators have developed agents that bind to the business end of a critical protein, disabling it so successfully that no resistance has arisen. The research is published in the June 2013 issue of the Journal of Virology. The target protein for the new agents is the NS5B replicase protein, which is the central catalytic enzyme in HCV replication. The researchers ...

The time-sequence images, spanning early February through May 2013, show the comet's remarkable activity despite its current great distance from the Sun and Earth. The information gleaned from the series provides vital clues as to the comet's overall behavior and potential to present a spectacular show. However, it's anyone's guess if the comet has the "right stuff" to survive its extremely close brush with the Sun at the end of November and become an early morning spectacle from Earth in early December 2013. When Gemini obtained this time sequence, the comet ranged between ...

New Rochelle, NY, May 30, 2013—Enrollment of women in clinical trials of new anti-HIV drugs is extremely low, representing only about 15% of all treatment-experienced patients. For women of color it is even lower. Why women, and especially women of color, are so poorly represented in HIV drug trials is the focus of an important article in AIDS Patient Care and STDs, a peer-reviewed publication from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the AIDS Patient Care and STDs website at http://www.liebertpub.com/apc. HIV-infected individuals that ...

The latest episode in the American Chemical Society's (ACS') award-winning Global Challenges/Chemistry Solutions podcast series describes research concluding that the number of people without access to flush toilets or other adequate sanitation is almost double the previous estimate. Based on a report by Jamie Bartram, Ph.D., and colleagues in ACS' journal Environmental Science & Technology, the new podcast is available without charge at iTunes and from http://www.acs.org/globalchallenges. It may be the 21st century, with all its technological marvels, but 6 out ...

To test the severity of a viral infection, clinicians try to gauge how many viruses are packed into a certain volume of blood or other bodily fluid. This measurement, called viral load, helps doctors diagnose or monitor chronic viral diseases such as HIV/AIDS and hepatitis. However, the standard methods used for these tests are only able to estimate the number of viruses in a given volume of fluid. Now two independent teams have developed new optics-based methods for determining the exact viral load of a sample by counting individual virus particles. These new methods are ...

A new study from the Copenhagen Centre for Team Sport and Health at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, demonstrates that soccer training improves heart function, reduces blood pressure and elevates exercise capacity in patients with type 2 diabetes. Soccer training also reduces the need for medication. The study, recently published in Medicine & Science in Sports and Exercise, investigated the effects of soccer training, consisting of small-sided games (5v5), on 21 men with type 2 diabetes, aged 37-60 years. Soccer training makes the heart ten years younger "We ...

PITTSBURGH—The mutual-friends feature on social networks such as Facebook, which displays users' shared friendships, might not be so "friendly." Often revered for bringing people together, the mutual-friends feature on Facebook actually creates myriad security risks and privacy concerns according to a University of Pittsburgh study published in Computers & Security. The study demonstrates that even though users can tailor their privacy settings, hackers can still find private information through mutual-friends features. "Oftentimes, mutual-friends features have not ...

Athens, Ga. – Children living in poverty who appear to succeed socially may be failing biologically. Students able to overcome the stress of growing up poor are labeled "resilient" because of their ability to overcome adversity, but University of Georgia researchers found this resiliency has health costs that last well into adulthood. "Exposure to stress over time gets under the skin of children and adolescents, which makes them more vulnerable to disease later in life," said Gene Brody, founder and director of the UGA Center for Family Research. Looking at a sample ...

Sexual assault has almost as much to do with age as it does with gender, according to Penn State criminologists. Young people -- both male and female -- are the most likely targets of rape and other sexual assaults, said Richard Felson, professor of criminology and sociology. The most frequent victims of those assaults are 15 years old, regardless of gender, or the age of the offender, he said. Older people and women rarely commit the crime, but when they do, their most frequent victims are still 15 years old. "People tend to look at sexual assault almost exclusively ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (May 30, 2013) – Public health officials in New York City have launched a successful program to locate HIV-positive patients who have been "lost to follow-up" and reconnect them with treatment services, reports a study published in AIDS, official journal of the International AIDS Society. AIDS is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. Efforts to restart antiretroviral therapy are especially important with the current emphasis on "treatment-as-prevention" for HIV, according to the study by Chi-Chi N. Udeagu, MPH, ...

When their schools are near fast-food restaurants, black and Hispanic adolescents are more likely to be overweight and receive less benefit from exercise than Asian or white students, according to a study published in the current issue of Journal of Public Policy & Marketing. The study underscores the importance of understanding how adolescents respond to fast-food availability near school. "Our study demonstrates that fast food near schools is an environmental influence that has magnified effects on some minority children at lower-income urban schools," said Brennan ...

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite detected hundreds of fires burning in Angola on May 24, 2013. The fires are outlined in red. Most of the fires burn in grass or cropland. The location, widespread nature, and number of fires suggest that these fires were deliberately set to manage land. Farmers often use fire to return nutrients to the soil and to clear the ground of unwanted plants. This type of field clearing is the easiest and most cost effective for the farmer. While fire helps enhance crops and grasses for pasture, ...

Though marijuana is a well-known recreational drug, extensive scientific research has been conducted on the therapeutic properties of marijuana in the last decade. Medical cannabis is often used by sufferers of chronic ailments, including cancer and post-traumatic stress disorder, to combat pain, insomnia, lack of appetite, and other symptoms. Now Prof. Yosef Sarne of Tel Aviv University's Adelson Center for the Biology of Addictive Diseases at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine says that the drug has neuroprotective qualities as well. He has found that extremely low doses ...

Indiana University researchers found that a simple program that uses pedometers to monitor how much people move throughout the day was effective at increasing physical activity, decreasing sitting time, a particular problem for office workers, and helping participants drop some pounds. "Even if somebody works out 30 minutes a day, the fact that they're sitting and not moving for long periods of time for the rest of the day is in and of itself detrimental to their health and well-being, physiologically," said Saurabh S. Thosar, an associate instructor at the IU School ...

Tropical Storm Barbara strengthened into a hurricane just before it made landfall late on May 29, and after landfall it weakened into a tropical depression. NASA satellite imagery showed that cloud tops warmed and thunderstorms became more fragmented around the storm's center after Barbara made landfall. Barbara is moving across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec today, May 30. Barbara could regenerate over the Bay of Campeche, on the Gulf of Mexico side of Mexico, and satellite imagery is watching Barbara closely. The Bay of Campeche is surrounded on three sides by the Mexican ...

Beaumont Health System research finds that symptoms of overactive bladder, or OAB, were reduced in those who received tibial nerve stimulation. The three-year results published in the June issue of The Journal of Urology show participants with urinary frequency, urgency and involuntary loss of urine maintained significant improvement in their symptoms. Tibial nerve stimulation is a painless procedure that takes place in an outpatient setting. A slim needle electrode is inserted in the ankle, near the tibial nerve. It carries electric impulses from a hand-held stimulator ...

WATERLOO, Ont. (Thursday, May 30, 2013) - Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are to blame for global warming since the 1970s and not carbon dioxide, according to new research from the University of Waterloo published in the International Journal of Modern Physics B this week. CFCs are already known to deplete ozone, but in-depth statistical analysis now shows that CFCs are also the key driver in global climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. "Conventional thinking says that the emission of human-made non-CFC gases such as carbon dioxide has mainly contributed ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (May 30, 2013) – An innovative "hybrid" surveillance strategy—highlighted by close cooperation between public health officials and clinical partners—helped Virginia mount an efficient and effective response to the ongoing outbreak of fungal meningitis and other infections, according to a report in the July/August issue of Journal of Public Health Management and Practice . The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. The Virginia Department of Health (VDH) "worked closely with clinical partners, combining ...

A new study conducted in an ethnically diverse and predominantly low income population found that only one-fifth of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients had an overall adherence rate to prescribed oral medications at 80% or greater. Findings published today in Arthritis & Rheumatism, a journal of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR), indicate that less than two thirds of medication regimens for non-biologic disease modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs) were correctly followed by RA patients. According to ACR estimates, more than one million U.S. adults experience ...

Think your antivirus product is keeping your Android safe? Think again. Northwestern University researchers, working with partners from North Carolina State University, tested 10 of the most popular antiviral products for Android and found each could be easily circumnavigated by even the most simple obfuscation techniques. "The results are quite surprising," said Yan Chen, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. "Many of these products are blind to even trivial transformation ...

A chemical reaction between iron-containing minerals and water may produce enough hydrogen "food" to sustain microbial communities living in pores and cracks within the enormous volume of rock below the ocean floor and parts of the continents, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder. The findings, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, also hint at the possibility that hydrogen-dependent life could have existed where iron-rich igneous rocks on Mars were once in contact with water. Scientists have thoroughly investigated how rock-water ...

New Rochelle, NY, May 15, 2013—The scientists who led the team that developed Glybera, the first gene therapy drug approved for use in the Western world, provide a fascinating first-person account of their pioneering work in Human Gene Therapy, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. In addition, an in-depth Review reveals the inside story of the European regulatory review and approval of Glybera, chock full of twists and turn, politics, and intrigue, reviews and critiques the groundbreaking drug's path to the marketplace appears in in Human Gene ...

The pattern of brain responses to words in 2-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder predicted the youngsters' linguistic, cognitive and adaptive skills at ages 4 and 6, according to a new study. The findings, to be published May 29 in PLOS ONE, are among the first to demonstrate that a brain marker can predict future abilities in children with autism. "We've shown that the brain's indicator of word learning in 2-year-olds already diagnosed with autism predicts their eventual skills on a broad set of cognitive and linguistic abilities and adaptive behaviors," ...

VIDEO: This video shows bonobo temporal choice. The bonobo chooses the larger, delayed reward (three pieces of food) over the smaller, immediate reward (one piece of food). He scratches after his... Click here for more information. Like some humans, chimpanzees and bonobos exhibit emotional responses to outcomes of their decisions by pouting or throwing angry tantrums when a risk-taking strategy fails to pay off, according to research published May 29 in the open access ...

Individuals suffering from anorexia nervosa perceive their bodies as being larger than they are and this disturbed body representation affects their movements, according to research published May 29 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Anouk Keizer and colleagues from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Previous studies of anorexia nervosa have largely focused on patients' disturbed perception of body image. Here, researchers examined how these disturbances may extend to unconscious, action-related representations of the body by asking anorexic and healthy participants ...