HEIDELBERG, 19 July 2013 – Scientists have identified higher levels of a receptor protein found on the surface of human breast tumour cells that may serve as a new drug target for the treatment of breast cancer. The results, which are published today in EMBO Molecular Medicine, show that elevated levels of the protein Ret, which is short for "Rearranged during transfection", are associated with a lower likelihood of survival for breast cancer patients in the years following surgery to remove tumours and cancerous tissue. "Our findings suggest that Ret kinase might be an ...

Boston—If you were working on something at your computer and a gorilla floated across your computer screen, would you notice it? You would like to think yes, however, research shows that people often miss such events when engaged in a difficult task. This is a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness (IB). In a new study from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) in Boston, researchers have found that even expert searchers, operating in their domain of expertise, are vulnerable to inattentional blindness. This study published this week Psychological Science. "When engaged ...

TORONTO, ON, July 19, 2013 — Kidney patients who take calcium supplements to lower their phosphorous levels may be at a 22 per cent higher risk of death than those who take other non-calcium based treatments, according to a new study by Women's College Hospital's Dr. Sophie Jamal. The study, published today in the Lancet, calls into question the long-time practice of prescribing calcium to lower phosphate levels in patients with chronic kidney disease. The researchers suggest some of the calcium is absorbed into the blood stream and may expedite hardening of the arteries, ...

Achieving a desired motion in an animated physical character, whether it be a small toy or a full-sized figure, demands highly specialized engineering skills. But research teams at Disney Research have created a pair of software packages that can open the design process to people with a broader spectrum of skills and provide more creative choices. One set of software tools can take a drawing of an articulated character and produce a type of animation that pre-dates video and film – gear-driven mechanical characters, such as a dancing clock, a galloping horse or a Sisyphean ...

Providing a "second screen" experience for audiences at movie theaters, stadiums and other public venues need not require a special wireless infrastructure. Instead, a system developed by Disney Research, Zürich, uses the venue's regular sound system to transmit text, games or other information to smartphones using only an audio signal. The smartphones carried by many audience members provide not only a means for viewing content that supplements a movie or sporting event, but comprise an ad hoc microphone network that helps transmit the content among all of the participants ...

Face-to-face communication begins with the eyes, a crucial factor in the design of interactive physical characters. By employing 3D printing, Disney Research, Pittsburgh has developed a new technology that is uniquely expressive, robust and adaptable for creating interactive characters' eyes. The technology, PAPILLON, will be demonstrated at ACM SIGGRAPH 2013, the International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, July 21-25 in Anaheim, California. The classic approach in the entertainment industry is to build mechanically actuated eyes. Though ...

Under the microscope, they look like they could be from another planet, but these microscopic organisms inhabit the depths of our oceans in nearly infinite numbers. To begin to identify where, when, and how much oceanic plankton can be found around the globe, a group of international researchers have compiled the first ever global atlas cataloguing marine plankton ranging in size from bacteria to jellyfish. The atlas was published today in a special issue of the journal Earth System Science Data. The atlas, known as the Marine Ecosystem Biomass Data (MAREDAT), is the ...

New research conducted by Harvard scientists is laying out a roadmap to one of the holy grails of modern medicine – a cure for cancer. As described paper recently published in eLife, Nowak, a professor of Mathematics and of Biology and director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, and co-author Ivana Bozic, a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics, show that, under certain conditions, using two drugs in a "targeted therapy" – a treatment approach designed to interrupt cancer's ability to grow and spread – nearly all cancers could be effectively cured. Though not ...

By monitoring artists as they sketch human faces, stroke by stroke, scientists at Disney Research, Pittsburgh, have built computer models that learn each artist's drawing style, how they use strokes and how they select features to highlight as they interpret a face into a portrait. A better understanding of this abstraction process, the researchers stated, not only is interesting from an artistic point of view, but also can help in developing artificial drawing tools. "There's something about an artist's interpretation of a subject that people find compelling," said ...

Researchers have long understood that genetics can play a role in how susceptible people are to contracting cholera, but a team of Harvard scientists is now uncovering evidence of genetic changes that might also help protect some people from contracting the deadly disease. Based on genetic data gathered from hundreds of people in Bangladesh, a research team made up of Harvard faculty and scientists from the Broad Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital were able to a number of areas in the genome – some of which are responsible for certain immune system functions, ...

For nearly a century, the only bears known to reside in Missouri were on the state flag or in captivity. Unregulated hunting and habitat loss had wiped out most black bears in Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma by the 1920s. Now, thanks to a reintroduction program in Arkansas during the 50s and 60s, hundreds of bears amble through the forests of southern Missouri, according to a joint study by University of Missouri, Mississippi State University, and Missouri Department of Conservation biologists, who warn that although the bear population is still small, outdoor recreationists ...

Most big data centers, the global backbone of the Internet, could slash their greenhouse gas emissions by 88 percent by switching to efficient, off-the-shelf equipment and improving energy management, according to new research. The carbon emissions generated by a search on Google or a post on Facebook are related mostly to three things: the computing efficiency of IT (information technology) data center equipment, like servers, storage and network switches; the amount of electricity a data center's building uses for things other than computing, primarily cooling; and ...

HOUSTON – (July 19, 2013) – A discovery facilitated by Rice University's contribution to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will impact scientists' search for dark matter in the universe. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced in Switzerland this morning that researchers on two separate LHC experiments have succeeded in measuring "one of the rarest measurable processes in physics," the decay of B-subscript-s mesons into two muons. The evidence, which scientists have been seeking for 25 years, matches predictions made using the Standard Model of ...

NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of California's Mountain Fire on July 18 as the satellite passed overhead in space. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument that flies aboard Aqua captured an image of the smoke and heat from California's Mountain Fire on July 18 at 21:00 UTC (5 p.m. EDT/2 p.m. PDT). MODIS has the ability to detect hot spots or fires and they appear red in the image. At the time of the image, the light brown smoke plume was blowing west-northwest. The Mountain Fire started on July 15 at 1:43 p.m. near the junction ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- Research from the Regenstrief Institute and the Indiana University Center for Aging Research has found that many family caregivers of older adults with dementia are willing to consider stopping cancer screening of the elderly individual; they are also relieved when the older adult's physician brings it up. "This openness of dementia caregivers to considering cancer screening cessation for older adults provides potential to reduce both patient burden and health care costs as well as family caregiver distress, while improving the overall quality of care ...

ARGONNE, Ill. – A protein found in the membranes of ancient microorganisms that live in desert salt flats could offer a new way of using sunlight to generate environmentally friendly hydrogen fuel, according to a new study by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory. Argonne nanoscientist Elena Rozhkova and her colleagues combined a pigment called bacteriorhodopsin with semiconducting nanoparticles to create a system that uses light to spark a catalytic process that creates hydrogen fuel. Scientists have been aware of the potential ...

TORONTO -- Today TRIUMF, a Canadian laboratory for nuclear and particle physics that works in partnership with York University and University of Toronto, announced a new breakthrough in understanding neutrinos -- nature's most elusive particles. The international Tokai to Kamioka (T2K) collaboration designed an experiment to investigate how neutrinos change from one form to another as they travel. TRIUMF researcher Michael Wilking spoke at the prestigious European Physical Society meeting in Stockholm, Sweden, confirming definitive proof of a new type of neutrino oscillation ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — For health professionals, the message from a new study in the American Journal of Public Health is clear: Asking patients about a history of childhood abuse can directly help assess their risk of attempting suicide. The evidence, authors say, shows that childhood abuse can have life-and-death consequences for the rest of a person's life. The longitudinal study of more than 1,600 drug users in Vancouver, Canada, found that "severe-to-extreme" abuse – particularly emotional or sexual – contributed significantly to the risk of future ...

Researchers found a strong, graded association between worse kidney function and the presence of hypertension that is resistant to medications. More than 50% of individuals with moderate CKD had resistant hypertension. Among people with CKD, blacks and those with a larger waist circumference, diabetes, and a history of heart attacks or strokes were more likely to have resistant hypertension. 60 million people globally have chronic kidney disease. Washington, DC (July 18, 2013) — More than 50% of individuals with moderate kidney disease have hypertension that is ...

PITTSBURGH—Despite the lack of any concrete evidence that menu labels encourage consumers to make healthier food choices, they have become a popular tool for policymakers in the fight against obesity. Carnegie Mellon University researchers recently put menu labels to the test by investigating whether providing diners with recommended calorie intake information along with the menu items caloric content would improve their food choices. The study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, showed that recommended calorie intake information did not help consumers ...

Breaking a sweat while working out regularly may reduce your risk of stroke, according to new research in the American Heart Association journal Stroke. In a study of more than 27,000 Americans, 45 years and older who were followed for an average of 5.7 years, researchers found: One-third of participants reported being inactive, exercising less than once a week. Inactive people were 20 percent more likely to experience a stroke or mini-stroke than those who exercised at moderate to vigorous intensity (enough to break a sweat) at least four times a week. Among men, ...

Boston, Mass., July 18, 2013 - Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital have identified a genetic cause of severe obesity that, though rare, raises new questions about weight gain and energy use in the general obese population. The research, published in the journal Science on July 19, involved genetic surveys of several groups of obese humans and experiments in mice. Mice with the genetic mutation gained weight even while eating the same amount of food as their normal counterparts; the affected gene, Mrap2, has a human counterpart (MRAP2) and appears to be involved ...

There has been a "worrying" increase in alcohol related deaths among young women in England and Scotland, since the middle of the last decade, finds research published online in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. This is despite an overall fall in such deaths in both countries since the mid 2000s, say the authors, who describe the trends as a warning signal that must be heeded. The researchers focused on Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester, all of which have similar levels of poor health, deprivation, and industrialisation, to see if there were any factors ...

Missed diagnoses―particularly of cancer, heart attack, and meningitis―and drug errors make up the bulk of malpractice claims brought against doctors in primary care, finds an analysis of published data in the online journal BMJ Open. The risk of litigation has not been given a great deal of attention in primary care, say the authors. But with most healthcare contacts taking place in primary care, it is important to characterise the causes and types of claims arising from these encounters, they add. They carried out an extensive trawl of published research ...

You are not just yourself. You are also the thousands of microbes that you carry. In fact, they represent an invisible majority that may be more you than you realize. These microscopic fellow travelers are collectively called the microbiome. Realization that every species of plant and animal is accompanied by a distinctive microbiome is old news. But evidence of the impact that these microbes have on their hosts continues to grow rapidly in areas ranging from brain development to digestion to defense against infection to producing bodily odors. Now, contrary to current ...