Cochlear implants — medical devices that electrically stimulate the auditory nerve — have granted at least limited hearing to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who otherwise would be totally deaf. Existing versions of the device, however, require that a disk-shaped transmitter about an inch in diameter be affixed to the skull, with a wire snaking down to a joint microphone and power source that looks like an oversized hearing aid around the patient's ear. Researchers at MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratory (MTL), together with physicians from Harvard Medical ...

JUPITER, FL—February 9, 2014—In research that could ultimately lead to many new medicines, scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have developed a potentially general approach to design drugs from genome sequence. As a proof of principle, they identified a highly potent compound that causes cancer cells to attack themselves and die. "This is the first time therapeutic small molecules have been rationally designed from only an RNA sequence—something many doubted could be done," said Matthew Disney, PhD, an associate professor at TSRI ...

Previous studies have shown that male fallow deer, known as bucks, can call for a mate more than 3000 times per hour during the rut (peak of the mating season), and their efforts in calling, fighting and mating can leave them sounding hoarse. In this new study, published today (10 February) in the journal Behavioral Ecology, scientists were able to gauge that fallow bucks listen to the sound quality of rival males' calls and evaluate how exhausted the caller is and whether they should fight or keep their distance. "Fallow bucks are among the most impressive vocal athletes ...

Heat stored in the western Pacific Ocean caused by an unprecedented strengthening of the equatorial trade winds appears to be largely responsible for the hiatus in surface warming observed over the past 13 years. New research published today in the journal Nature Climate Change indicates that the dramatic acceleration in winds has invigorated the circulation of the Pacific Ocean, causing more heat to be taken out of the atmosphere and transferred into the subsurface ocean, while bringing cooler waters to the surface. "Scientists have long suspected that extra ocean ...

Seven new genetic regions associated with type 2 diabetes have been identified in the largest study to date of the genetic basis of the disease. DNA data was brought together from more than 48,000 patients and 139,000 healthy controls from four different ethnic groups. The research was conducted by an international consortium of investigators from 20 countries on four continents, co-led by investigators from Oxford University's Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics. The majority of such 'genome-wide association studies' have been done in populations with European ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Optogenetics is a technique that allows scientists to control neurons' electrical activity with light by engineering them to express light-sensitive proteins. Within the past decade, it has become a very powerful tool for discovering the functions of different types of cells in the brain. Most of these light-sensitive proteins, known as opsins, respond to light in the blue-green range. Now, a team led by MIT has discovered an opsin that is sensitive to red light, which allows researchers to independently control the activity of two populations of neurons ...

Philadelphia, PA, February 10, 2014 – Primary effusion lymphoma (PEL) is a rare B-cell neoplasm distinguished by its tendency to spread along the thin serous membranes that line body cavities without infiltrating or destroying nearby tissue. By growing PEL cells in culture and analyzing the secretome (proteins secreted into cell-conditioned media), investigators have identified proteins that may explain PEL pathogenesis, its peculiar cell adhesion, and migration patterns. They also recognized related oncogenic pathways, thereby providing rationales for more individualized ...

Young women who smoke and have been smoking a pack a day for a decade or more have a significantly increased risk of developing the most common type of breast cancer. That is the finding of an analysis published early online in Cancer, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society. The study indicates that an increased risk of breast cancer may be another health risk incurred by young women who smoke. The majority of recent studies evaluating the relationship between smoking and breast cancer risk among young women have found that smoking is linked with an increased ...

Urban legislators have long lamented that they do not get their fair share of bills passed in state governments, often blaming rural and suburban interests for blocking their efforts. Now a new study confirms one of those suspicions but surprisingly refutes the other. The analysis—of 1,736 bills in 13 states over 120 years—found that big-city legislation was passed at dramatically lower rates than bills for smaller places. However, rural and suburban colleagues should not be blamed for the dismal track record, conclude co-authors Gerald Gamm of the University of Rochester ...

How you represent yourself in the virtual world of video games may affect how you behave toward others in the real world, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "Our results indicate that just five minutes of role-play in virtual environments as either a hero or villain can easily cause people to reward or punish anonymous strangers," says lead researcher Gunwoo Yoon of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As Yoon and co-author Patrick Vargas note, virtual environments afford people ...

The first clinical trial of a drug intended to delay the onset of symptoms of Huntington disease (HD) reveals that high-dose treatment with the nutritional supplement creatine was safe and well tolerated by most study participants. In addition, neuroimaging showed a treatment-associated slowing of regional brain atrophy, evidence that creatine might slow the progression of presymptomatic HD. The Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) study also utilized a novel design that allowed participants – all of whom were at genetic risk for the neurodegenerative disorder – to enroll ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Infection is a stronger trigger of stroke death in African- Americans than in whites, a University of Michigan study shows. African-Americans were 39 times more likely to die of a stroke if they were exposed to an infection in the previous month when compared to other time periods while whites were four times more likely and Hispanics were five times more likely to die of stroke after an infection, according to the findings that appear online Feb. 7 in Neurology. The most frequent infections were urinary, skin, and respiratory tract infections ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – Feb. 7, 2014 – The good news: More people survive stroke now than 10 years ago due to improved treatment and prevention. The bad news: Women who survive stroke have a worse quality of life than men, according to a study published in the Feb. 7 online issue of the journal Neurology. Researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center compared the quality of life in men and women who had a stroke or transient ischemic attack (TIA). A total of 1,370 patients ages 56 to 77 from the AVAIL registry – a national, multicenter, longitudinal registry of ischemic ...

A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory physicist and his colleagues have found a new application for the tools and mathematics typically used in physics to help solve problems in biology. Specifically, the team used statistical mechanics and mathematical modeling to shed light on something known as epigenetic memory -- how an organism can create a biological memory of some variable condition, such as quality of nutrition or temperature. "The work highlights the interdisciplinary nature of modern molecular biology, in particular, how the tools and models from mathematics ...

When people see a skunk, the reaction usually is "Eww," but when they see a group of meerkats peering around, they often think "Aww." Why some animals use noxious scents while others live in social groups to defend themselves against predators is the question that biologists Tim Caro of the University of California, Davis and Theodore Stankowich of California State University, Long Beach and sought to answer through a comprehensive analysis of predator-prey interactions among carnivorous mammals and birds of prey. Their findings appear in the online edition of the ...

Chevy Chase, MD—According to a statement issued today by the Endocrine Society, the risks and benefits of testosterone therapy for older men with declining levels of the hormone need to be fully evaluated. The statement comes in response to recent studies that have raised concerns about the safety of testosterone therapy in older men with a history of heart disease. Two retrospective analyses and one randomized trial supported by the Veterans Health Care System, and the National Institutes of Health found a higher rate of cardiovascular events in men who received testosterone ...

Imagine receiving as much as 7 inches of rain in one hour. That's about what NASA's TRMM satellite spotted falling in one area within Tropical Cyclone Edilson as it moved over the Southern Indian Ocean. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite is managed by both NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency called JAXA. TRMM can read the rate in which rain is falling on Earth while in its orbit high above. The TRMM satellite had an excellent early morning look at Edilson on February 7, 2014 at 0237 UTC/06:28 local time when it passed directly above ...

CLEVELAND – A new study published in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery finds that diaphragm pacing (DP) stimulation in spinal cord-injured patients is successful not only in weaning patients from mechanical ventilators but also in bridging patients to independent respiration, where they could breathe on their own without the aid of a ventilator or stimulation. The stimulation is provided by the Diaphragm Pacing System (DPS), a technology providing electrical stimulation to nerves running through the diaphragm, the major muscle involved in breathing. When stimulated, ...

The fourteenth tropical cyclone of the Southern Indian Ocean season was born as NASA's Terra satellite passed overhead. On February 7 at 0900 UTC/4 a.m. EST, Tropical Cyclone 14S had maximum sustained winds near 35 knots/40 mph/62 kph. It was located about 814 nautical miles/936.7 miles/1,508 km east-northeast of Port Louis, Mauritius near 14.8 south and 70.4 east. At that time, 14S was moving to the south near 8 knots/9.2 mph/14.8 kph. The Joint Typhoon Warning Center noted that multispectral satellite imagery showed that the low-level center is exposed to outside ...

CLEVELAND, Ohio (Friday, February 7, 2014)—Hot flashes, depression, and most of all, anxiety, affect the thinking skills of midlife women with HIV, so screening for and treating their anxiety may be especially important in helping them function, according to a study just published online in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS). The reproductive stage, whether it was premenopause, perimenopause or postmenopause, did not seem to be related to these women's thinking skills. The conclusions come from a new analysis of data on 708 HIV-infected ...

Scientists who study Earth, the sun and stars have long used high-altitude scientific balloons to carry their telescopes far into the stratosphere for a better view of their targets. Not so much for planetary scientists. That's because they needed a highly stable, off-the-shelf-type system that could accurately point their instruments and then track planetary targets as they moved in the solar system. That device now exists. NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va., has designed a new pointing system — the Wallops Arc Second Pointer (WASP) — that can point ...

BOSTON – While the function of eating is to nourish the body, this is not what actually compels us to seek out food. Instead, it is hunger, with its stomach-growling sensations and gnawing pangs that propels us to the refrigerator – or the deli or the vending machine. Although hunger is essential for survival, abnormal hunger can lead to obesity and eating disorders, widespread problems now reaching near-epidemic proportions around the world. Over the past 20 years, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) neuroendocrinologist Bradford Lowell, MD, PhD, has been untangling ...

Seattle, Wash. and Huntsville, Ala.—Researchers from the University of Washington and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology have developed a new method for organizing and prioritizing genetic data. The Combined Annotation–Dependent Depletion, or CADD, method will assist scientists in their search for disease-causing mutation events in human genomes. The new method is the subject of a paper titled "A general framework for estimating the relative pathogenicity of human genetic variants," published in Nature Genetics. Current methods of organizing human genetic variation ...

Vittorio Gallo, PhD, Director of the Center for Neuroscience Research at Children's National Health System, and other researchers have found a "potentially novel therapeutic target" to reduce the rate of deterioration and to promote growth of brain cells damaged by multiple sclerosis (MS). Current therapies can be effective in patients with relapsing MS, but have little impact in promoting tissue growth. The brain produces new cells to repair the damage from MS years after symptoms appear. However, in most cases the cells are unable to complete the repair, as unknown ...

PITTSBURGH, Feb. 7, 2014 – A comprehensive analysis of patient telephone records at an inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) clinic revealed that 15 percent of patients account for half of all calls to the clinic. Forty-two percent of frequent-caller patients also were seen in the emergency department or hospitalized within the following year. The results, which can help doctors identify patients with the most severe disease and those at risk of potentially avoidable high-cost medical interventions, were reported in a study published online this week in the journal Clinical ...