Located around 6000 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion), the nebula formally known as IC 4628 is a huge region filled with gas and clumps of dark dust. These gas clouds are star-forming regions, producing brilliant hot young stars. In visible light, these stars appear as a blue-white colour, but they also emit intense radiation in other parts of the spectrum — most notably in the ultraviolet [1]. It is this ultraviolet light from the stars that causes the gas clouds to glow. This radiation strips electrons from hydrogen atoms, which ...

Philadelphia, PA, September 20, 2013 – A new study reports that countries with lower gun ownership are safer than those with higher gun ownership, debunking the widely quoted hypothesis that guns make a nation safer. Researchers evaluated the possible associations between gun ownership rates, mental illness, and the risk of firearm-related death by studying the data for 27 developed countries. Their findings are published in the current issue of The American Journal of Medicine. Gun ownership in the US has been a hotly debated issue for more than 200 years. A popular ...

Claudia Bagni (VIB/KU Leuven, Belgium, and the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy), has identified the way Fragile X Mental Retardation Protein or FMRP contributes to the progression of breast cancer. For this research the group of Bagni collaborated with colleagues from the VIB/KU Leuven departments of Bart De Strooper and Peter Carmeliet (VIB/KU Leuven), with Patrick Neven (UZ Leuven) and with several research centers and Hospitals in Italy and the UK. The researchers demonstrated that FMRP acts as a master switch controlling the levels of several proteins involved ...

Market bubbles that lead to financial crashes may be self-made because of instinctive biological mechanisms in traders' brains that lead them to try and predict how others behave, according to a study part-funded by the Wellcome Trust. The research offers the first insight into the processes in the brain that underpin financial decisions and behaviour leading to the formation of market bubbles. Publication of the study coincides with the five year anniversary of the infamous collapse of the Lehman Brothers investment bank in 2008. A 'bubble' happens when active trading ...

Several psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia, autism and intellectual disabilities share the same brain cell abnormalities: the contacts (synapses) between brain cells are poorly developed and not functional. Claudia Bagni and her group associated with the VIB, KU Leuven, and Tor Vergata University in Italy, in collaboration with leading laboratories in the Netherlands, France, USA and UK have unraveled how a single protein (CYFIP1) orchestrates two biological processes to form proper contacts between brain cells. Importantly, the researchers identified various ...

A study into the aerodynamic performance of feathered dinosaurs, by scientists from the University of Southampton, has provided new insight into the evolution of bird flight. In recent years, new fossil discoveries have changed our view of the early evolution of birds and, more critically, their powers of flight. We now know about a number of small-bodied dinosaurs that had feathers on their wings as well as on their legs and tails: completely unique in the fossil record. However, even in light of new fossil discoveries, there has been a huge debate about how these ...

PHOENIX, Ariz. — Sept. 18, 2013 — Researchers have discovered why multiple myeloma, a difficult to cure cancer of the bone marrow, frequently recurs after an initially effective treatment that can keep the disease at bay for up to several years. Working in collaboration with colleagues at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, researchers from Mayo Clinic in Arizona and the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) in Phoenix were part of the team that conducted the study published in the Sept. 9 issue of Cancer Cell. The research team initially analyzed 7,500 ...

The obesity epidemic has massive socio-economic consequences, and decades of health campaigns have not made significant headway. Researchers at the University of Copenhagen are therefore pursuing the development of new, interdisciplinary methods for preventing and treating this widespread problem. The subjects in the test group that exercised the least talk about increased energy levels and a higher motivation for exercising and pursuing a healthy everyday life. "Obesity is a complex social problem requiring a multidisciplinary approach. In a new scientific article ...

Scientists know that physical and biochemical signals can guide cells to make, for example, muscle, blood vessels or bone. But the exact recipes to produce the desired tissues have proved elusive. Now, researchers at Case Western Reserve University have taken a step toward identifying that mix by developing an easy and versatile way of forming physical and biochemical gradients in three dimensions. Ultimately, one of their goals is to engineer systems to manipulate stem cells to repair or replace damaged tissues and organs. "If we can control the spatial presentation ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Physical, sexual and emotional abuse among young gay black men is a pervasive problem, yet there remains a lack of social services and resources available to help them, a Michigan State University scholar argues in a new study. The trauma they experience -- often at a young age -- is related to depression, substance abuse and high-risk sexual behavior, said Robin Lin Miller, professor of psychology. "Young black men who are gay and bisexual have few resources available to them that are tailored to their specific needs and concerns, despite how ...

LOS ANGELES (Embargoed Until 9 a.m. EDT/6 a.m. PDT on Sept. 18, 2013) – Post-menopausal women whose doctors prescribe hormone replacement therapy for severe hot flashes and other menopause symptoms may want to consider taking low doses of Food and Drug Administration-approved bioidentical forms of estrogen or getting their hormones via a transdermal patch. A new observational study shows bioidentical hormones in transdermal patches may be associated with a lower risk of heart attack and FDA-approved products -- not compounded hormones -- may be associated with a slightly ...

California biologists have discovered four new species of reclusive legless lizards living in some of the most marginal habitat in the state: a vacant lot in downtown Bakersfield, among oil derricks in the lower San Joaquin Valley, on the margins of the Mojave desert, and at the end of one of the runways at LAX. "This shows that there is a lot of undocumented biodiversity within California," said Theodore Papenfuss, a reptile and amphibian expert, or herpetologist, with UC Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, who discovered and identified the new species with James ...

SYDNEY: By collecting water samples up to six kilometres below the surface of the Southern Ocean, UNSW researchers have shown for the first time the impact of ocean currents on the distribution and abundance of marine micro-organisms. The sampling was the deepest ever undertaken from the Australian icebreaker, RSV Aurora Australis. Microbes are so tiny they are invisible to the naked eye, but they are vital to sustaining life on earth, producing most of the oxygen we breathe, soaking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and recycling nutrients. "Microbes form the bulk ...

University of Adelaide researchers have identified a likely molecular pathway that causes a group of untreatable neurodegenerative diseases, including Huntington's disease and Lou Gehrig's disease. The group of about 20 diseases, which show overlapping symptoms that typically include nerve cell death, share a similar genetic mutation mechanism ‒ but how this form of mutation causes these diseases has remained a mystery. "Despite the genes for some of these diseases having been identified 20 years ago, we still haven't understood the underlying mechanisms that ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A new gonorrhea treatment, based on an anti-cancer therapy developed by a Buffalo startup company, has successfully eliminated gonococcal infection from female mice and prevented reinfection, according to research published today by University at Buffalo scientists in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. Through TherapyX Inc., an early stage biotech company in Buffalo, the UB researchers have a $300,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant to develop the technology to treat and prevent gonorrhea infection. UB's Office for Science, Technology Transfer ...

Schizophrenia is a potentially debilitating mental illness affecting a person's thought processes, perception, language and sense of oneself. Globally, 7 out of every 1000 are affected, accounting for 24 million patients. Significant risk factors for the illness in males is serious problems during birth or fetal hypoxia while increased cerebral ventricular size in both infancy and adulthood due to embryological defects can underlie the condition in other patients. However, it is a multifaceted illness that occurs through a combination of biological factors as well as socioeconomic ...

Todd Dunlap, 62, arrived at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center's emergency room on Aug. 8 suffering from shortness of breath, fatigue and extreme cold. When a CT scan revealed a 24-inch clot stretching from his legs into his heart, doctors feared the mass could break loose and lodge in his lungs, blocking oxygen and killing him instantly. Dr. John Moriarty gave his patient a choice. Dunlap could have open-heart surgery or undergo a new minimally invasive procedure using a device called AngioVac to vacuum the massive clot out of his heart. The catch? The procedure had ...

Energy budget adjustments Energy is the currency of life, and a central topic of wildlife ecological research is to understand how animals regulate their energy budgets with respect to its limited supply in the environment. Chris Turbill and colleagues set out to test the hypothesis that high rank, i.e. social dominance might be associated with higher metabolic rate. They measured heart rate and body temperature (proxy indicators for metabolic rate) using minimally invasive rumen transmitters in a herd of female red deer (Cervus elaphus) during winter. Red deer have a ...

Results of EORTC trial 10853 appearing in the Journal of Clinical Oncology show that breast conserving treatment combined with radiotherapy reduces the risk of local recurrence in women with ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS). The incidence of DCIS has been increasing in the past decades, and this has been attributed to increased detection through breast cancer screening using mammograms. In the EORTC study, adjuvant radiotherapy after local excision reduced the incidence of both in situ and invasive local recurrences by a factor of two and resulted in an overall lower risk ...

Recurrent episodes of malaria cause chronic inflammation in blood vessels that might predispose to future infections and may increase susceptibility to cardiovascular disease, a Wellcome Trust study in Malawian children finds. The findings could explain the indirect burden of malaria on childhood deaths in areas where the disease is highly prevalent and children experience multiple clinical episodes of malaria in a year. Malaria is caused by infection with a parasite that starts by infecting the liver and then moves into red blood cells. The most deadly of the malaria ...

A new technique that allows scientists to measure the electrical activity in the communication junctions of the nervous systems has been developed by a researcher at Queen Mary University of London. The junctions in the central nervous systems that enable the information to flow between neurons, known as synapses, are around 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair (one micrometer and less) and as such are difficult to target let alone measure. By applying a high-resolution scanning probe microscopy that allows three-dimensional visualisation of the structures, ...

North Carolina State University researchers have developed a way for search engines to provide users with more accurate, personalized search results. The challenge in the past has been how to scale this approach up so that it doesn't consume massive computer resources. Now the researchers have devised a technique for implementing personalized searches that is more than 100 times more efficient than previous approaches. At issue is how search engines handle complex or confusing queries. For example, if a user is searching for faculty members who do research on financial ...

Romanian scientists have discovered a novel approach for the optical manipulation of macromolecules and biological cells. Their findings, published in EPJ B, stem from challenging the idea that visible light would induce no physical effect on them since it is not absorbed. Instead, Sorin Comorosan, working as a physicist at the National Institute for Physics and Nuclear Engineering based in Magurele, Romania, and as a biologist at the Fundeni Clinical Institute, Bucharest, Romania, and colleagues, had the idea to use green photon beams. With them, it is possible to perform ...

CHICAGO (September 18, 2013) – Patient satisfaction has an increasing impact on hospitals' bottom lines, factoring into Medicare reimbursement of hospital care. A new study finds patients placed in Contact Precautions (Contact Isolation) were twice as likely to report perceived problems with care compared to patients without Contact Precautions, placing the common infection control practice at odds with hospital interests. The study was published in the October issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of ...

CHICAGO (September 18, 2013) – With the evolving changes in the delivery of healthcare to children worldwide, which frequently include long-distance travel and lodging for specialized medical treatments, the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA) partnered with Ronald McDonald House Charities to release the first-ever infection prevention and control guidelines for "home away from home" pediatric residential facilities to help prevent the spread of infectious pathogens among vulnerable pediatric populations. The new guidelines were published in the October ...