A gene related to neural tube defects in dogs has for the first time been identified by researchers at the University of California, Davis, and University of Iowa. The researchers also found evidence that the gene may be an important risk factor for human neural tube defects, which affect more than 300,000 babies born each year around the world, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Neural tube defects, including anencephaly and spina bifida, are caused by the incomplete closure or development of the spine and skull. The new findings appear ...

Stem-cell researchers at UC San Francisco have found a key role for a protein called BMI1 that may help scientists direct the development of tissues to replace damaged organs in the human body. “Scientists have known that Bmi1 is a central control switch within the adult stem cells of many tissues, including the brain, blood, lung and mammary gland,” said Ophir Klein, MD, PhD, who directs the Craniofacial and Mesenchymal Biology (CMB) Program and serves as chair of the Division of Craniofacial Anomalies at UCSF. “Bmi1 also is a cancer-causing gene that becomes ...

TORONTO, July 19, 2013—The life-threatening MERS coronavirus that has emerged in the Middle East could spread faster and wider during two international mass gatherings involving millions of people in the next few months, according to researchers who describe the most likely pathways of international spread based upon worldwide patterns of air travel. Researchers led by Dr. Kamran Khan of St. Michael's Hospital encouraged health care providers to learn from the experience of SARS by anticipating rather than reacting to the introduction of MERS in travelers returning from ...

Most of the time, it takes decades of accumulating genetic errors for a tumor to develop. While this explains the general occurrence of cancer in adults, it leaves a gap in understanding of the cause of pediatric tumors. In a study published in the July issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found a missing piece of the pediatric cancer puzzle. Changxian Shen, PhD, senior research associate at the Center for Childhood Cancer and Blood Diseases at The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital, and Peter Houghton, PhD, director ...

The European Space Agency/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, captured this image of a gigantic coronal hole hovering over the sun's north pole on July 18, 2013, at 9:06 a.m. EDT. Coronal holes are dark, low density regions of the sun's outermost atmosphere, the corona. They contain little solar material, have lower temperatures, and therefore, appear much darker than their surroundings. Coronal holes are a typical feature on the sun, though they appear at different places and with more frequency at different times of the sun's activity cycle. The activity ...

UC San Francisco researchers have found a way to knock down cancers caused by a tumor-driving protein called “myc,” paving the way for patients with myc-driven cancers to enroll in clinical trials for experimental treatments. Myc acts somewhat like a master switch within cells to foster uncontrolled growth. Until now, it has been impossible to target with drugs. The discovery of an unexpected biochemical link within tumor cells should lead to clinical trials for experimental drug treatments that indirectly target myc and that already are being evaluated in human ...

Uruguay has it. So does Latvia, and Senegal. In fact, more than half of the world's countries have some degree of a guaranteed, specific right to public health and medical care for their citizens written into their national constitutions. The United States is one of 86 countries whose constitutions do not guarantee their citizens any kind of health protection. That's the finding of a new study from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health that examined the level and scope of constitutional protection of specific rights to public health and medical care, as well as ...

In a bit of cosmic irony, planets orbiting cooler stars may be more likely to remain ice-free than planets around hotter stars. This is due to the interaction of a star's light with ice and snow on the planet's surface. Stars emit different types of light. Hotter stars emit high-energy visible and ultraviolet light, and cooler stars give off infrared and near-infrared light, which has a much lower energy. It seems logical that the warmth of terrestrial or rocky planets should depend on the amount of light they get from their stars, all other things being equal. But new ...

If you could hit the reset button on evolution and start over, would essentially the same species appear? Yes, according to a study of Caribbean lizards by researchers at the University of California, Davis, Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts. The work is published July 19 in the journal Science. The predictability of evolution over timescales of millions of years has long been debated by biologists, said Luke Mahler, a postdoctoral fellow at UC Davis and first author on the paper. For example, the late Stephen Jay Gould predicted that if you "rewound ...

Controversy exists over what some mental health experts call "hypersexuality," or sexual "addiction." Namely, is it a mental disorder at all, or something else? It failed to make the cut in the recently updated Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5, considered the bible for diagnosing mental disorders. Yet sex addiction has been blamed for ruining relationships, lives and careers. Now, for the first time, UCLA researchers have measured how the brain behaves in so-called hypersexual people who have problems regulating their viewing of sexual ...

One of the most crucial problems affecting the world today is the scarcity of potable water. In a bid to make clean water available at low cost, Mr Ramakrishna Mallampati, a PhD candidate at the National University of Singapore (NUS), experimented with water treatment techniques using materials that are easily available, and came up with novel ways to purify water using the peels of apples and tomatoes. This is the first time that the peels of the two fruits have been used to remove different types of pollutants in water. The studies were conducted under the guidance ...

A new study reports that subdiaphragmatic vagotomy reduces intake of sweet-tasting solutions in rats, and eliminate the hedonic perception produced by sucrose and saccharin in rats. Previous studies have shown that taste information and digestion information in animals during diet intake interact with each other in the central nervous system. So, how does subdiaphragmatic vagotomy influence the intake of sweet-tasting solution in rats? According to a study published in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 8, No. 17, 2013), rats in the sham-surgery group drank more saccharin ...

Maternal alcohol consumption during pregnancy has detrimental effects on fetal central nervous system development. Maternal alcohol consumption prior to and during pregnancy significantly affects cognitive functions in offspring, which may be related to changes in cyclin-dependent kinase 5 because it is associated with modulation of synaptic plasticity and impaired learning and memory. Prof. Ruiling Zhang and team from Xinxiang Medical University explored the correlation between cyclin-dependent kinase 5 expression in the hippocampus and neurological impairments following ...

Recent studies have found that anesthesia drugs have neurotoxicity on the developing neurons, causing learning and memory disorders and behavioral abnormalities. Ketamine is commonly used in pediatric anesthesia. A clinical retrospective study found that children below 3 years old who receive a long time surgery, or because of surgery require ketamine repeatedly will exhibit the performance of school-age learning and memory disorders and behavioral abnormalities. Research group speculates that these abnormalities may be related to the potential neurotoxicity of ketamine. ...

EVANSTON, Ill. --- A new low-cost, high-resolution tool is primed to revolutionize how nanotechnology is produced from the desktop, according to a new study by Northwestern University researchers. Currently, most nanofabrication is done in multibillion-dollar centralized facilities called foundries. This is similar to printing documents in centralized printing shops. Consider, however, how the desktop printer revolutionized the transfer of information by allowing individuals to inexpensively print documents as needed. This paradigm shift is why there has been community-wide ...

The supply of dissolved iron to oceans around continental shelves has been found to be more variable by region than previously believed – with implications for future climate prediction. Iron is key to the removal of carbon dioxide from the Earth's atmosphere as it promotes the growth of microscopic marine plants (phytoplankton), which mop up the greenhouse gas and lock it away in the ocean. A new study, led by researchers based at the National Oceanography Centre Southampton, has found that the amount of dissolved iron released into the ocean from continental ...

An anti-cancer drug has been proven to be equally as effective in treating the most common cause of blindness in older adults as a more expensive drug specifically formulated for this purpose. The results of a two-year trial, led by Queen's scientist Professor Usha Chakravarthy, and published in The Lancet today (Friday 19 July), show that two drug treatments Lucentis and Avastin are equally effective in treating neovascular or wet age-related macular degeneration (wet AMD). Wet AMD is a common cause of sight loss in older people with at least 23,000 older people diagnosed ...

Babies have an innate biological need to be attached to caregivers, usually their parents. But what happens when babies spend a night or more per week away from a primary caregiver, as increasingly happens in cases where the parents share custody, but do not live together? In a new national study, University of Virginia researchers found that infants who spent at least one night per week away from their mothers had more insecure attachments to the mother compared to babies who had fewer overnights or saw their fathers only during the day. The finding is reported in the ...

Just over a century ago, Harvey Cushing published an account of a young woman who showed unusual symptoms because her glands were making excessive amounts of something. Subsequent research has shown that the thing in question is a set of hormones known as glucocorticoids that are produced by the adrenal glands, so "Cushing's disease" is now more commonly known as hyperadrenocorticism, at least by those who can pronounce it. The condition is particularly common in dogs, particularly as the animals grow older. Most cases result from a tumor in the pituitary gland but some ...

This news release is available in German. To write this little piece of text, the brain sends commands to arms and fingers to tap on the keyboard. Neuronal cells with their cable-like extensions, such as axons, transfer this information as electrical pulses that trigger muscles to move. The axonal signal speed can be to up to 100m/s in myelinated axons along the spinal cord. For a long time, scientists assumed that axonal signal conduction is by and large digital: either there is a signal, "1", or there is no signal, "0". Strong propagation speed variations Now, ...

Depth cameras and other motion-tracking devices allow people to use natural gestures to play computer games, yet the experience remains unnatural because they can't feel what their eyes can see. Disney Research, Pittsburgh, has developed a solution, however, that could enhance not only games, but a variety of virtual experiences. Called AIREAL, the new technology uses controlled puffs of compressed air – something akin to smoke rings – to create the impression of a ball bouncing off a hand, of an arm tingling from the flutter of a butterfly's wings, or of the rippling ...

Investigators at Disney Research, Zürich have developed a method for using hundreds of photographic images to build 3D computer models of complex, real-life scenes that meet the increasing demands of today's movie, TV and game producers for high-resolution imagery. Building 3D models from multiple 2D images captured from a variety of viewing positions is nothing new, but doing so for highly detailed or cluttered environments at high resolution has proved difficult because of the large amounts of data involved. The Disney Research, Zürich team, however, developed an algorithm ...

This news release is available in German. For a car to accelerate there has to be friction between the tire and the surface of the road. The amount of friction generated depends on numerous factors, including the minute intermolecular forces acting between the two surfaces in contact – so-called van der Waals forces. The importance of these intermolecular interactions in generating friction has long been known, but has now been demonstrated experimentally for the first time by a research team led by Physics Professor Karin Jacobs from Saarland University and Professor ...

During heat waves -- when ozone production rises -- plants' ozone absorption is curtailed, leaving more pollution in the air, and costing an estimated 460 lives in the UK in the hot summer of 2006. Vegetation plays a crucial role in reducing air pollution, but new research by the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) at the University of York shows that they may not protect us when we need it most: during extreme heat, when ozone formation from traffic fumes, industrial processes and other sources is at its worst. The reason, explained lead author Dr Lisa Emberson, is ...

Researchers at the University of Warwick have recovered tuberculosis (TB) genomes from the lung tissue of a 215-year old mummy using a technique known as metagenomics. The team, led by Professor Mark Pallen, Professor of Microbial Genomics at Warwick Medical School, working with Helen Donoghue at University College London and collaborators in Birmingham and Budapest, sought to use the technique to identify TB DNA in a historical specimen. The term 'metagenomics' is used to describe the open-ended sequencing of DNA from samples without the need for culture or target-specific ...