VIDEO: Enabled by the birefringence of liquid crystal, motion of 24nm thick bacteria flagella now is easily visible using a simple polarizing microscope. Click here for more information. WASHINGTON D.C. Feb. 17, 2014 -- Plop living, swimming bacteria into a novel water-based, nontoxic liquid crystal and a new physics takes over. The dynamic interaction of the bacteria with the liquid crystal creates a novel form of soft matter: living liquid crystal. The new type of active ...

WASHINGTON D.C. Feb. 17, 2014 -- Alzheimer's disease has long been marked by progress -- but not the kind of progress the medical community seeks. It is the most common form of dementia among older Americans, and its risk increases with increasing age; for those living with the disease, its ravages get worse over time; and as we move into the 21st century, it will place a greater and greater burden on society. The number of Americans living with Alzheimer's has doubled since 1980 and is expected to triple again by 2050. Sadly, Alzheimer's disease has been the least prone ...

1. Aortic valve replacement improves function but may not improve quality of life Transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) improves functional status but may not improve overall quality of life, according to an article being published in Annals of Internal Medicine. Aortic stenosis (AS) is the most common valvular heart disease in developing countries and it affects up to 3 percent of adults older than 75. In recent years, TAVR has emerged as an alternative treatment to surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR) for high-risk or inoperable patients with symptomatic ...

High levels of the stress hormone cortisol may contribute to the risk aversion and 'irrational pessimism' found among bankers and fund managers during financial crises, according to a new study. The study's authors say that risk takers in the financial world exhibit risk averse behaviour during periods of extreme market volatility – just when a crashing market most needs them to take risks – and that this change in their appetite for risk may be "physiologically-driven", specifically by the body's response to cortisol. They suggest that stress could be an "under-appreciated" ...

PHILADELPHIA – A new study finds that football helmets currently used on the field may do little to protect against hits to the side of the head, or rotational force, an often dangerous source of brain injury and encephalopathy. The study released today will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology's 66th Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, April 26 to May 3, 2014. "Protection against concussion and complications of brain injury is especially important for young players, including elementary and middle school, high school and college athletes, whose still-developing ...

Why does a mouse's heart beat about the same number of times in its lifetime as an elephant's, although the mouse lives about a year, while an elephant sees 70 winters come and go? Why do small plants and animals mature faster than large ones? Why has nature chosen such radically different forms as the loose-limbed beauty of a flowering tree and the fearful symmetry of a tiger? These questions have puzzled life scientists since ancient times. Now an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Maryland and the University of Padua in Italy propose a thought-provoking ...

One of science's strongest dogmas is that complex life on Earth could only evolve when oxygen levels in the atmosphere rose to close to modern levels. But now studies of a small sea sponge fished out of a Danish fjord shows that complex life does not need high levels of oxygen in order to live and grow. The origin of complex life is one of science's greatest mysteries. How could the first small primitive cells evolve into the diversity of advanced life forms that exists on Earth today? The explanation in all textbooks is: Oxygen. Complex life evolved because the atmospheric ...

As a range of climate change mitigation scenarios are discussed, University of Washington researchers have found that the injection of sulfate particles into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight and curb the effects of global warming could pose a severe threat if not maintained indefinitely and supported by strict reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The new study, published today, 18 February, in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, has highlighted the risks of large and spatially expansive temperature increases if solar radiation management ...

Teenage boys who show a combination of depressive symptoms and elevated levels of the 'stress hormone' cortisol are up to fourteen times more likely to develop major depression than those who show neither trait, according to research funded by the Wellcome Trust. In a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of Cambridge have identified the first biomarker – a biological signpost – for major, or clinical, depression. They argue that this could help identify those boys in particular at greatest risk ...

A heartier appetite is linked to more rapid infant growth and to genetic predisposition to obesity, according to two papers published in JAMA Pediatrics today (Monday). The studies investigated how weight gain is linked to two key aspects of appetite, namely lower satiety responsiveness (a reduced urge to eat in response to internal 'fullness' signals) and higher food responsiveness (an increased urge to eat in response to the sight or smell of nice food). The first paper reveals that infants with a heartier appetite grew more rapidly up to age 15 months, potentially ...

Archaeological data indicate modern herring management needs to take a longer look into the past to manage fisheries for the future says a new study involving Simon Fraser University researchers. That is one of the key findings in the study, just published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). SFU researchers Iain McKechnie, Dana Lepofsky and Ken Lertzman, and scientists in Ontario, Alberta and the United States are its co-authors. The study is one of many initiatives of the SFU-based Herring School, a group of researchers that investigates ...

A series of studies are published in a special supplement that presents results of the Maternal and Newborn Health in Ethiopia Partnership—a three-year pilot program funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with the goal of improving the health of Ethiopian mothers and their newborns. This special issue of the Journal of Midwifery & Women's Health is published by Wiley on behalf of the American College of Nurse-Midwives. High mortality rates for pregnant women and newborns continue to be a major health concern in Africa, with Ethiopia being one of the most affected ...

Researchers from Warwick Medical School have discovered the key role of a protein in shutting down endocytosis during mitosis, answering a question that has evaded scientists for half a century. The study, published today in the journal eLife, is the first to outline the role of actin, a protein, in shutting down clathrin-dependent endocytosis during mitosis. Endocytosis is the process by which cells absorb molecules that are too large to pass through the plasma membrane, such as proteins. Clathrin-dependent endocytosis is the most common route for this. Clathrin, a ...

With a little practice on a computer or iPad—25 minutes a day, 4 days a week, for 2 months—our brains can learn to see better, according to a study of University of California, Riverside baseball players reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on February 17. The new evidence also shows that a visual training program can sometimes make the difference between winning and losing. The study is the first, as far as the researchers know, to show that perceptual learning can produce improvements in vision in normally seeing individuals. "The demonstration that ...

The dramatic images of natural disasters in recent years, including hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and the Tohoku, Japan, earthquake and tsunami, show that nature, not the people preparing for hazards, often wins the high-stakes game of chance. "We're playing a high-stakes game against nature without thinking about what we're doing," geophysicist Seth Stein of Northwestern University said. "We're mostly winging it instead of carefully thinking through the costs and benefits of different strategies. Sometimes we overprepare, and sometimes we underprepare." Stein will ...

Emergence of new microbes While many endemic infectious diseases of humans have been largely contained, new microbes continue to emerge to threaten human and animal health. Such emerging infectious diseases are not confined to humans and their livestock but extend to wildlife ecosystems; the finely-tuned dynamic balance of which is destabilised by human interventions. The changes in the scale and manner of livestock production and marketing, the increase of global travel and trade including the trade in domestic livestock as well as the pet animal trade, the increasing ...

Neurotensin conjugate provides pain relief in animal models The small peptide neurotensin is a potent regulator of dopamine signaling and can provide dramatic pain relief; however, the blood brain barrier provides a substantial challenge toward clinical use of neurotensin for analgesia. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Philippe Sarret and colleagues at Université de Sherbrooke generated a conjugate of neurotensin with a peptide able to cross the blood brain barrier and evaluated the analgesic effects of this molecule in animal models of pain. The ...

WA, Seattle (February 17, 2014) – A new study describes the complexity of the new T cell repertoire following immune-depleting therapy to treat multiple sclerosis, improving our understanding of immune tolerance and clinical outcomes. In the Immune Tolerance Network's (ITN) HALT-MS study, 24 patients with relapsing, remitting multiple sclerosis received high-dose immunosuppression followed by a transplant of their own stem cells, called an autologous stem cell transplant, to potentially reprogram the immune system so that it stops attacking the brain and spinal cord. ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Grasping the concept of climate change and its impact on the environment can be difficult. Establishing common ground and using models, however, can break down barriers and present the concept in an easily understood manner. In a presentation at this year's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Michigan State University systems ecologist and modeler Laura Schmitt-Olabisi shows how system dynamics models effectively communicate the challenges and implications of climate change. "In order to face the ongoing challenges ...

Small non-coding RNAs can be used to predict if individuals have breast cancer conclude researchers who contribute to The Cancer Genome Atlas project. The results, which are published in EMBO reports, indicate that differences in the levels of specific types of non-coding RNAs can be used to distinguish between cancerous and non-cancerous tissues. These RNAs can also be used to classify cancer patients into subgroups of individuals that have different survival outcomes. Small non-coding RNAs are RNA molecules that do not give rise to proteins but which may have other ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — New research from the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center and Georgia Regents University finds that a protein that fuels an inflammatory pathway does not turn off in breast cancer, resulting in an increase in cancer stem cells. This provides a potential target for treating triple negative breast cancer, the most aggressive form of the disease. The researchers identified a protein, SOCS3, that is highly expressed in normal cells but undetectable in triple-negative breast cancer. They showed that this protein is degraded in cancers, blocking ...

One of the largest surveys of American views on religion and science suggests that the religious and scientific communities may be less combative than is commonly portrayed in the media and in politics. Only 27 percent of those surveyed said that they viewed science and religion as being in conflict with each other, with about equal percentages of those people "siding with either religion or science," said Rice University sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund at the AAAS Annual Meeting. The survey was commissioned by the AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion (DoSER) ...

WASHINGTON D.C. Feb. 16, 2014 -- Tularemia, aka "rabbit fever," is endemic in the northeastern United States, and is considered to be a significant risk to biosecurity -- much like anthrax or smallpox -- because it has already been weaponized in various regions of the world. At the 58th Annual Biophysical Society Meeting, which takes place Feb. 15-19, 2014, in San Francisco, Calif., Geoffrey K. Feld, a Postdoctoral researcher in the Physical & Life Sciences Directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), will describe his work to uncover the secrets of the ...

WASHINGTON D.C. Feb. 16, 2014 -- A research team from Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn., is the first to decipher the 3-D structure of a protein that confers antibiotic resistance from one of the most worrisome disease agents: a strain of bacteria called methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), which can cause skin and other infections. The Vanderbilt team's findings may be an important step in combatting the MRSA public health threat over the next 5 to 10 years. By deciphering the shape of a key S. aureus protein -- an enzyme called ...

WASHINGTON D.C. Feb. 16, 2014 -- New insights into one of the molecular mechanisms behind light harvesting, the process that enables photosynthetic organisms to thrive, even as weather conditions change from full sunlight to deep cloud cover, will be presented at the 58th Annual Biophysical Society Meeting, taking place in San Francisco from Feb. 15-19. At the meeting, Hsiang-Yu Yang, a graduate student, and Gabriela Schlau-Cohen, a postdoc in W.E. Moerner's research group at Stanford University, will describe how probing these natural systems at the single molecule level ...