Submarine canyons play an important role in maintaining high levels of biodiversity of small invertebrates in the seafloor sediments of the main and northwestern Hawaiian Islands, according to research from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. What's more, scientists have used this data to draw new connections between the levels of faunal diversity and the heterogeneity of submarine canyon landscapes at various spatial scales. "Submarine canyons encompass myriad habitat types," said Fabio C. De Leo, a doctoral graduate from UH Manoa's department of oceanography and the ...

Baltimore, MD—Cells in the body wear down over time and die. In many organs, like the small intestine, adult stem cells play a vital role in maintaining function by replacing old cells with new ones. Learning about the nature of tissue stem cells can help scientists understand exactly how our organs are built, and why some organs generate cancer frequently, but others only rarely. New work from Carnegie's Alexis Marianes and Allan Spradling used some of the most experimentally accessible tissue stem cells, the adult stem cells in the midsection of the fruit fly gut, ...

SINGAPORE – Stomach cancer, one of the leading causes of cancer death worldwide, actually falls into three broad subtypes that respond differently to currently available therapies, according to researchers at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore. The finding could greatly improve patient care with the development of a genetic test to classify tumors and match them to the therapies that offer the best outcomes. "One of the features that makes gastric cancer so lethal is that it arises from many genetic alterations, creating differences in how the tumors respond ...

WEST ORANGE, N.J. August 27, 2013. —Denise Krch, Ph.D., research scientist for Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) Research at Kessler Foundation, presented "Pilot results from a virtual reality executive function task," at the International Conference on Virtual Rehabilitation (ICVR). In the pilot study, Dr. Krch evaluated the Assessim Office (AO), a virtual reality office task, in participants with multiple sclerosis (MS) and TBI. "Impairments in executive functions (EF), such as planning and problem solving, negatively impact a person's ability to live independently and ...

A greater focus on the role of microbiology in agriculture combined with new technologies can help mitigate potential food shortages associated with world population increases according to a new report from the American Academy of Microbiology. "Microbes are essential partners in all aspects of plant physiology, but human efforts to improve plant productivity have focused solely on the plant," says Ian Sanders of University of Lausanne, chair of the colloquium that produced the report. "Optimizing the microbial communities that live in, on and around plants, can substantially ...

A new Energy Department study conducted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) indicates that by 2025 wind and solar power electricity generation could become cost-competitive without federal subsidies, if new renewable energy development occurs in the most productive locations. The report, "Beyond Renewable Portfolio Standards: An Assessment of Regional Supply and Demand Conditions Affecting the Future of Renewable Energy in the WestPDF," compares the cost of renewable electricity generation (without federal subsidy) from the West's most productive renewable ...

PHILADELPHIA – Despite significant restraints that can include arrests, detentions, and imprisonment, Iranian journalists strive to achieve high standards of journalistic professionalism, according to a new report published by the Iran Media Program at the Center for Global Communication Studies (CGCS), Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. The report, Facing Boundaries, Finding Freedom: An In-Depth Report on Iranian Journalists Working in Iran, is based on a field survey of 304 Iranian journalists from both state-run and independent media ...

Hercules, CA — August 27, 2013 — A recently reported blood test for the early detection of organ transplant injury could enable more timely therapeutic intervention in transplant patients and thus help to avoid longer term damage. As described by scientists at the University Medical Center Göttingen and Chronix Biomedical, a molecular diagnostics company, the new method uses Bio-Rad Laboratories' Droplet Digital PCR (ddPCR™) technology to overcome the obstacles of earlier tests, which were both time-consuming and costly. The method was presented at the American Association ...

Scientists expect the future climate to become warmer, and that this will apply to the Arctic in particular. Here the temperature is expected to increase considerably more than the average on Earth, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change average scenario (A1B). What will this mean for Greenland? A very significant change will be the emergence of forests, where there are currently only four species of trees and large bushes indigenous to Greenland – and they only grow in small areas in the south. An international research group including Professor of ...

WATERLOO, Ont (Wednesday, August 28, 2013) – A team of mathematicians has solved a problem first posed more than 40 years ago that has confounded modern mathematicians, until now. Professor Jim Geelen of the University of Waterloo and his colleagues, Professor Bert Gerards of Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica and the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, and Professor Geoff Whittle of Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand have proved the famous Rota's Conjecture. The three men worked for almost 15 years to solve this problem posed by the famous mathematician ...

Forensic psychologists and psychiatrists are ethically bound to be impartial when performing evaluations or providing expert opinions in court. But new research suggests that courtroom experts' evaluations may be influenced by whether their paycheck comes from the defense or the prosecution. The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings reveal that experts who believed they were working for prosecutors tended to rate sexually violent offenders as being at greater risk of re-offending than did experts ...

LA JOLLA, CA ---- For many migraine sufferers, bright lights are a surefire way to exacerbate their headaches. And for some night-shift workers, just a stroll through a brightly lit parking lot during the morning commute home can be enough to throw off their body's daily rhythms and make daytime sleep nearly impossible. But a new molecule that selectively blocks specialized light-sensitive receptors in the eyes could help both these groups of people, without affecting normal vision. "It took almost ten years to find and test a molecule that fit all the properties and ...

Hearing loss associated with a lack of cell-cell junctions Sound waves are filtered through the outer ear to the cochlea, where hair cells convert the sound into the electric impulses that travel through the auditory nerve to the brain. Cochlear hair cells are extremely sensitive to stress and loss of these cells is a common cause of deafness. The formation of tight junctions between cells allows epithelia to form barriers to prevent fluid and other molecules from moving freely throughout the body. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Saima Riazuddin ...

Sound waves are filtered through the outer ear to the cochlea, where hair cells convert the sound into the electric impulses that travel through the auditory nerve to the brain. Cochlear hair cells are extremely sensitive to stress and loss of these cells is a common cause of deafness. The formation of tight junctions between cells allows epithelia to form barriers to prevent fluid and other molecules from moving freely throughout the body. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Saima Riazuddin and colleagues at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital, identify ...

Patients that receive kidney transplants have an increased risk of an invasive form of skin cancer. It is unclear if donor tissue contributes to cancer formation. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Philippe Ratajczak and colleagues at INSERM demonstrate that donor tissue can lead to caner formation in transplant recipients. They examined tumor cells and transplant tissues from a small sample of kidney transplant patients that had subsequently developed skin squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). In one patient they identified the presence of skin tumor cells ...

Many cancer therapies function by activating proteins like Caspase-3 (CASP3) that promote cell death. Several forms of cancer develop resistance to these drugs by down regulating CASP3 through an unknown mechanism. In the absence of CASP3, tumor cells produce another cell death promoting protein CASP7, but it is rendered inactive by the X-linked inhibitor of apoptosis protein (XIAP). In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Po-Huang Liang and colleagues at Academia Sinica identify a compound (I-Lys) that disrupts the interaction between CASP7 and XIAP. Release ...

HIV-1 protease inhibitors are very effective antiviral drugs. These drugs target HIV-1 proteases, which are required for viral replication. Despite the success of protease inhibitors for suppressing HIV-1, some patients do not respond to protease inhibitor therapy. For most patients, the lack of response is not due to mutation of the HIV-1 protease. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Robert Silcano and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University identify the effects of protease inhibitors on different stages of viral replication. The authors found that protease ...

A severe hereditary bleeding disorder was described in a large family from east Texas in 2001. The affected family members routinely had bruising, nosebleeds, massive blood loss following injury or surgery, and often required blood transfusions. Routine tests for functional components of the blood coagulation pathway did not reveal any obvious defects. Genomic sequencing revealed a mutation in the gene encoding coagulation factor 5 (FV), but it was not considered to contribute to disease, since clotting assays were normal. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, ...

CINCINNATI – New research in the Journal of Clinical Investigation provides evidence that gene-environment interactions are a major contributor to preterm birth and that using a combinatory treatment strategy can prevent preterm delivery in a mouse model. In findings posted online Aug. 27, scientists from Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center say their study provides important new insights into a major global health problem – one that remains stubbornly persistent in the United States. Preterm birth causes more than 1 million deaths a year and can leave premature ...

CINCINNATI – New research in the Journal of Clinical Investigation suggests that blocking a protein normally credited with suppressing leukemia may be a promising therapeutic strategy for an aggressive form of the disease called acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Researchers from Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center report their results in a study posted online Aug. 27 by the journal. The protein scientists targeted is a transcription factor known as RUNX1, which also plays an important role in helping regulate the normal development of blood cells. The researchers ...

CINCINNATI – Researchers identify an underlying molecular process that causes a genetic form of non-syndromic deafness in a new study that also suggests affected families may be at risk of damage to other organs. A multi-national research team led by scientists at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center report their findings in a study posted online Aug. 27 by the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The research opens the door to finding possible treatments for the condition (called DFNB49 non-syndromic hearing loss) and points to possible cellular damage in other ...

Amsterdam, The Netherlands – Tuesday 27 August 2013: Personalised management is the only way to close the mortality gap for patients with atrial fibrillation (AF), according to an ESC consensus paper presented at ESC Congress 2013 by Professor Paulus Kirchhof (UK). The Atrial Fibrillation competence NETwork (AFNET) and European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA) consensus paper is published online in the European Journal of Pacing, Arrhythmias, and Cardiac Electrophysiology (EP-Europace)1 and presented during the ESC Congress session on personalised cardiology. Professor ...

August 27, 2013, Shenzhen, China - A consortium of researchers from The University of Queensland, the Queensland Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF Qld) and BGI has discovered that sorghum, a drought-tolerant African crop, holds vastly more genetic variation than previously reported. This study published in Nature Communications today provides an invaluable resource for the genetic improvement of sorghum and other grass species. Sorghum is not only a food and feed cereal crop, but also can be used as the basis of biofuel. Its resistance to heat and ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (August 27, 2013) – By creating a powerful new gene regulation system called CRISPR-on, Whitehead Institute researchers now have the ability to increase the expression of multiple genes simultaneously and precisely manipulate each gene's expression level. The system is effective in both mouse and human cells as well as in mouse embryos. "CRISPR-on is a tool that will be very useful for studying many biological processes, particularly for studying gene functions and gene networks," says Whitehead Founding Member Rudolf Jaenisch. "In contrast to RNA interference, ...

European hunter-gatherers acquired domesticated pigs from nearby farmers as early as 4600BC, according to new evidence. The international team of scientists, including researchers at Durham and Aberdeen universities, showed there was interaction between the hunter-gatherer and farming communities and a 'sharing' of animals and knowledge. The interaction between the two groups eventually led to the hunter-gatherers incorporating farming and breeding of livestock into their culture, say the scientists. The research, published in Nature Communications today (27 August), ...