Scientists have found that carvacrol – the substance in oregano oil that gives the pizza herb its distinctive warm, aromatic smell and flavour – is effective against norovirus, causing the breakdown of the virus' tough outer coat. The research is published today (12 February) in the Society for Applied Microbiology's Journal of Applied Microbiology. Norovirus, also known as the winter vomiting disease, is the leading cause of vomiting and diarrhoea around the world. It is particularly problematic in nursing homes, hospitals, cruise ships, and schools, and is a very common ...

Researchers used data from satellite transmitters attached to the turtles to track their movements across the Atlantic Ocean. These movements were then overlapped with information on high pressure fishing areas to identify where the turtles are most susceptible to becoming entangled and where they may drown. The international study, jointly led by Dr Matthew Witt of the University of Exeter and Dr Sabrina Fossette of Swansea University, found that urgent international efforts are needed to protect the iconic species. Between 1995 and 2010, a total of 106 leatherback ...

Two doses of vaccine against human papillomavirus (HPV) provide good protection against genital warts, but three doses is better according to an extensive register study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. The results are published in the scientific periodical JAMA. Since 2012, girls in Sweden between the ages of 10 and 18 are offered free vaccination against HPV. The vaccine provides protection against various types of HPV, including some that cause cervical cancer and those that cause genital warts. Current recommendation is three doses of the vaccine ...

Moderate aerobic exercise helps to preserve the structure and function of nerve cells in the retina after damage, researchers at the Emory Eye Center and the Atlanta VA Medical Center have found. The findings, from a study of an animal model of age-related macular degeneration, are the first to suggest that aerobic exercise can have a direct effect on retinal health and vision. The results are scheduled for publication Feb. 12 in the Journal of Neuroscience. Senior authors are Machelle Pardue, PhD and colleague Jeffrey H. Boatright, PhD at the Atlanta VA Center for ...

Health professionals who treat people with psychiatric problems often overlook their patients' smoking habits, assuming it's best to tackle depression, anxiety or substance abuse problems first. However, new research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis shows that people who struggle with mood problems or addiction can safely quit smoking and that kicking the habit is associated with improved mental health. The study is published online in the journal Psychological Medicine. "Clinicians tend to treat the depression, alcohol dependence or drug problem ...

As humans have expanded into new environments and civilizations, man's best friend, dogs, have been faithful companions at their sides. Now, with DNA sequencing technology readily available to examine the dog genome, scientists are gaining new insights into canine evolution. In a new study published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, author Dong-Dong Wu, et. al., explored the genetic basis of high-altitude adaptation of Tibetan Mastiffs, which were originally domesticated from the Chinese native dogs of the plains. The authors examined genome-wide mutations ...

VIDEO: This TRMM flyover is a simulated 3-D view of Fobane that shows a few powerful thunderstorms near the center were reaching heights of over 14km (~8.7 miles) on Feb. 11.... Click here for more information. Tropical Cyclone Fobane was located southeast of Reunion Island in the southwest Indian Ocean when the TRMM satellite passed over and captured rainfall and cloud data on the storm. TRMM saw that despite Fobane weakening, there was still some punch left in a few of the thunderstorms ...

In the tech world, coolness takes more than just good looks. Technology users must consider a product attractive, original and edgy before they label those products as cool, according to researchers. That coolness can turn tepid if the product appears to be losing its edginess, they also found. "Everyone says they know what 'cool' is, but we wanted to get at the core of what 'cool' actually is, because there's a different connotation to what cool actually means in the tech world," said S. Shyam Sundar, Distinguished Professor of Communications, Penn State, and co-director ...

NIH-funded scientists have shown that boosting the production of certain broadly neutralizing antibodies can protect humanized mice from both intravenous and vaginal infection with HIV. Humanized mice have immune systems genetically modified to resemble those of humans, making it possible for them to become HIV-infected. Led by David Baltimore, Ph.D., of the California Institute of Technology, the investigators inserted the genes encoding the NIH-discovered broadly HIV neutralizing antibody VRC01 into a vector, a virus that infects mice but does not cause disease. In ...

University of California, Berkeley, researchers have shown that chronic stress generates long-term changes in the brain that may explain why people suffering chronic stress are prone to mental problems such as anxiety and mood disorders later in life. Their findings could lead to new therapies to reduce the risk of developing mental illness after stressful events. Doctors know that people with stress-related illnesses, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), have abnormalities in the brain, including differences in the amount of gray matter versus white matter. ...

LEBANON, NH (Feb. 10, 2014) – Options are limited in America's battle of the bulge. While diet and exercise can help in the short term, they are frustratingly ineffective in the long run. And, even the search for a magic weight-loss pill is falling short, said Drs. Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice in the Feb. 10 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine. Many medications for weight loss have been proposed or are under development. The Federal Drug Administration has approved few drugs for long-term weight loss, ...

Nearly 12 percent of Medicare patients who receive inpatient rehabilitation following discharge from acute-care hospitalization are readmitted to the hospital within 30 days after discharge from the rehabilitation facility according to new research published in the Feb. 12 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Before now, there was a lack of research on the frequency and causes of patients returning to hospital after rehabilitation. The new research reports 30-day hospital readmission rates across rehabilitation impairment categories and examines ...

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Feb. 10, 2014) — A new study led by University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center researcher Peter Zhou shows that targeting Twist, a nuclear protein that is an accelerant of the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) program in human cells, may provide an effective approach for treating triple-negative breast cancer. Triple-negative breast cancer has an activated EMT program, which is a process that provides cells with the increased plasticity (or flexibility) to adapt to stressed environments during embryonic development, wound healing, tissue fibrosis ...

PHILADELPHIA -- Penn Medicine researchers have developed a better way to assess and diagnose psychosis in young children. By "growth charting" cognitive development alongside the presentation of psychotic symptoms, they have demonstrated that the most significant lags in cognitive development correlate with the most severe cases of psychosis. Their findings are published online this month in JAMA Psychiatry. "We know that disorders such as schizophrenia come with a functional decline as well as a concurrent cognitive decline," says Ruben Gur, PhD, director of the Brain ...

CHAPEL HILL, NC – Researchers at the UNC School of Medicine conducted a comprehensive genetic analysis of invasive bladder cancer tumors to discover that the disease shares genetic similarities with two forms of breast cancer. The finding is significant because a greater understanding of the genetic basis of cancers, such as breast cancers, has in the recent past led to the development of new therapies and diagnostic aids. Bladder cancer, which is the fourth most common malignancy in men and ninth in women in the United States, claimed more than 15,000 lives last year. The ...

Ann Arbor, Mich. – New American Diabetes Association (ADA) screening guidelines may lead to the missed diagnoses of type 2 diabetes in children, according to a new study by University of Michigan. The research, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, finds that both pediatric and family medicine providers who care for children are using screening tests for type 2 diabetes that may result in missed diagnoses for children, says lead author Joyce Lee, M.D., M.P.H., associate professor in U-M's Departments of Pediatrics and Communicable Diseases and Environmental ...

CHICAGO --- A new imaging technique for measuring blood flow in the heart and vessels can diagnose a common congenital heart abnormality, bicuspid aortic valve, and may lead to better prediction of complications. A Northwestern Medicine team reported the finding in the journal Circulation. In the study, the authors demonstrated for the first time a previously unknown relationship between heart valve abnormalities, blood flow changes in the heart and aortic disease. They showed that blood flow changes were driven by specific types of abnormal aortic valves, and they were ...

Four unknown galaxy clusters each potentially containing thousands of individual galaxies have been discovered some 10 billion light years from Earth. An international team of astronomers, led by Imperial College London, used a new way of combining data from the two European Space Agency satellites, Planck and Herschel, to identify more distant galaxy clusters than has previously been possible. The researchers believe up to 2000 further clusters could be identified using this technique, helping to build a more detailed timeline of how clusters are formed. Galaxy clusters ...

Dr Alex Scott-Samuel and colleagues from the Universities of Durham, West of Scotland, Glasgow and Edinburgh, sourced data from over 70 existing research papers, which concludes that as a result of unnecessary unemployment, welfare cuts and damaging housing policies, the former prime minister's legacy "includes the unnecessary and unjust premature death of many British citizens, together with a substantial and continuing burden of suffering and loss of well-being." Speaking about the figures, Dr Scott-Samuel said: "Towards the end of the 1980s we were seeing around 500 ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Inspired by tiny particles that carry cholesterol through the body, MIT chemical engineers have designed nanoparticles that can deliver snippets of genetic material that turn off disease-causing genes. This approach, known as RNA interference (RNAi), holds great promise for treating cancer and other diseases. However, delivering enough RNA to treat the diseased tissue, while avoiding side effects in the rest of the body, has proven difficult. The new MIT particles, which encase short strands of RNA within a sphere of fatty molecules and proteins, silence ...

When most people envision crocodiles, they think of them waddling on the ground or wading in water—not climbing trees. However, a University of Tennessee, Knoxville, study has found that the reptiles can climb trees as far as the crowns. Vladimir Dinets, a research assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, is the first to thoroughly study the tree-climbing and -basking behavior. The research is published in the journal Herpetology Notes and can be found at http://bit.ly/Myi8yr. Dinets and his colleagues observed crocodile species on three continents—Australia, ...

In 2011, biologists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) demonstrated a highly effective method for delivering HIV-fighting antibodies to mice—a treatment that protected the mice from infection by a laboratory strain of HIV delivered intravenously. Now the researchers, led by Nobel Laureate David Baltimore, have shown that the same procedure is just as effective against a strain of HIV found in the real world, even when transmitted across mucosal surfaces. The findings, which appear in the February 9 advance online publication of the journal Nature Medicine, ...

It's widely acknowledged that a common threat unites people. Individuals who were previously separated by social class, race or ethnicity come together, forming new cooperative alliances to defeat a common enemy. But does it take an external threat — an attack like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 — to make these social divisions melt away? A study by behavioral scientists at UC Santa Barbara demonstrates that peaceful cooperation has the same effect as intergroup conflict in erasing social boundaries connected to race. Their findings appear today in the journal PLOS ONE. "Evolution ...

According to an international team of researchers, the rapid pace of climate change is threatening the future presence of fish near the equator. "Our studies found that one species of fish could not even survive in water just three degrees Celsius warmer than what it lives in now," says the lead author of the study, Dr Jodie Rummer from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) at James Cook University. Dr Rummer and her colleagues studied six common species of fish living on coral reefs near the equator. She says many species in this region only ...

For the first time, neuroscientists have systematically identified the white matter "scaffold" of the human brain, the critical communications network that supports brain function. Their work, published Feb. 11 in the open-source journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, has major implications for understanding brain injury and disease. By detailing the connections that have the greatest influence over all other connections, the researchers offer not only a landmark first map of core white matter pathways, but also show which connections may be most vulnerable to damage. "We ...