Bethesda, MD—Chronic inflammation is a major factor in a wide range of problems from arthritis to cardiovascular disease, and DHA (found in fish oil) is known to temper this problem. A new research report appearing in the July 2013 issue of The FASEB Journal, helps explain why DHA is important in reducing inflammation, and provides an important lead to finding new drugs that will help bring people back to optimal health. Specifically, researchers found that macrophages (a type of white blood cell) use DHA to produce "maresins," which serve as the "switch" that turns inflammation ...

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University have traced chronic health problems of adult inner-city women to traumas from childhood abuse and neglect. The latest findings, reported in the journal Child Abuse & Neglect, complement prior studies of other socioeconomic groups and provide further evidence linking childhood mistreatment to serious health issues as adults, said Meeyoung O. Min, assistant professor of social work at Case Western Reserve's Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences. The National Institute on Drug Abuse funded the study. Min's ...

Every parent has a different strategy for trying to get his or her kid to eat more vegetables, from growing vegetables together as a family to banning treats until the dinner plate is clean. New research suggests that teaching young children an overarching, conceptual framework for nutrition may do the trick. The new findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, show that a conceptual framework encourages children to understand why eating a variety of foods is ideal and also causes them to eat more vegetables by ...

Reacting to terrorist groups: Injustice leads to anger, power to fear Perceptions really matter when it comes to how we react to terrorist threats. Across two studies, researchers found that the more a terrorist group is seen as unjust, the more anger we feel, whereas the more the group is seen as powerful, the more fearful we become. Surveying 1,072 Americans in one study about fictional terrorist groups, the researchers found that fear from powerful portrayals led participants to support offensive, defensive, and negotiated measures to deal with the terrorists. On the ...

Bethesda, MD -- Gene mutations caused by a father's lifestyle can be inherited by his children, even if those mutations occurred before conception. What's more, these findings show that mutations in the germ-line are present in all cells of the children, including their own germ cells. This means that a father's lifestyle has the potential to affect the DNA of multiple generations and not just his immediate offspring. These findings were published in the July 2013 issue of The FASEB Journal. "Our study should be regarded as a pilot study," said Roger Godschalk, Ph.D., ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (July 1,2013) – Seventy percent of U.S. plastic surgeons have used fat grafting techniques for breast operations, but they are more likely to use it for breast reconstruction rather than cosmetic breast surgery, reports a survey study in the July issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). Once discouraged, fat grafting to the breast is an increasingly common plastic surgery technique, according to the new report. But more data is needed to optimize the technique and ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (July 1, 2013) – Preoperative evaluations before facial cosmetic surgery find that about half of patients are taking herbal and other supplements, reports a study in the July issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). "It is extremely important to investigate the use of herbal medicines, as many of these supplements can put the surgical patient at risk," writes ASPS Member Surgeon Dr. Bahman Guyuron and colleagues of Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland. They advise ...

A new study that calculates the influence of cloud behavior on climate doubles the number of potentially habitable planets orbiting red dwarfs, the most common type of stars in the universe. This finding means that in the Milky Way galaxy alone, 60 billion planets may be orbiting red dwarf stars in the habitable zone. Researchers at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University based their study, which appears in Astrophysical Journal Letters, on rigorous computer simulations of cloud behavior on alien planets. This cloud behavior dramatically expanded the habitable ...

Identification of a protein that appears to play an important role in the immune system's removal of amyloid beta (A-beta) protein from the brain could lead to a new treatment strategy for Alzheimer's disease. The report from researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has been published online in Nature Communications. "We identified a receptor protein that mediates clearance from the brain of soluble A-beta by cells of the innate immune system," says Joseph El Khoury, MD, of the Center for Immunology and Inflammatory Diseases in the MGH Division of Infectious ...

WASHINGTON -- A new study by Valerie Hu, Ph.D., professor of biochemistry and molecular medicine at the George Washington University (GW) School of Medicine and Health Sciences (SMHS), reports that RORA, a novel candidate gene for autism discovered by her group in a 2010 study, regulates a large number of other genes associated with autism. "We are focusing on this gene, in part, because this gene can act as a master regulator of other genes," said Hu, whose study was published in the journal Molecular Autism. "Called nuclear hormone receptors, they are capable of ...

Epilepsy, irregular heartbeats and other conditions caused by malfunctions in the body's nerve cells, also known as neurons, can be difficult to treat. The problem is that one medicine may help some patients but not others. Doctors' ability to predict which drugs will work with individual patients may be influenced by recent University of Missouri research that found seemingly identical neurons can behave the same even though they are built differently under the surface. "To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, 'every unhappy nervous system is unhappy in its own way,' especially ...

Plants that emit an airborne distress signal in response to herbivory may actually attract more enemies, according to a new study published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Plant Science . A team of researchers from Switzerland found that the odor released by maize plants under attack by insects attract not only parasitic wasps, which prey on herbivorous insects, but also caterpillars of the Egyptian cotton leafworm moth Spodoptera littoralis, a species that feeds on maize leaves. When damaged, many plants release hydrocarbons called volatile organic compounds, ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - It's a GEMM of a system. Genetically engineered mouse models that is. Using them allows scientists to study cancer in a way that more naturally mimics how human tumors exist within the complex environment of the body. UNC scientists used GEMMs to develop biomarkers for challenging molecular subtypes of human breast cancer, those for which there are fewer targets and therapies. Their work helps to further establish genetically engineered mouse models as predictors of human response to therapy. The molecular subtypes of breast cancer that the UNC ...

WASHINGTON, DC, July 1, 2013 — For the first time, a study has suggested that the position of grandparents in the British class system has a direct effect on which class their grandchildren belong to. It has long been accepted that parents' social standing has a strong influence on children's education, job prospects, and earning power. However, this study by researchers from the University of Oxford and Durham University shows that even when the influence of parents has been taken into account, the odds of grandchildren going into professional or managerial occupations ...

In the past decade, China as sunk some impressive numbers to preserve its forests, but until now there hasn't been much data to give a true picture of how it has simultaneously affected both the people and the environment. Michigan State University, partnered with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has capitalized on their long history of research in the Wolong Nature Reserve to get a complete picture of the environmental and socioeconomic effects of payments for ecosystem services programs. "Performance and prospects of payments for ecosystem services programs: evidence ...

WASHINGTON — Tobacco control measures put in place in 41 countries between 2007 and 2010 will prevent some 7.4 million premature deaths by 2050, according to a study published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization today. The study is one of the first to look at the effect of measures since the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) was established in 2005. Jt demonstrates the success of the WHO FCTC in reducing tobacco use and, thus, saving lives. "It's a spectacular finding that by implementing these simple tobacco control ...

Most of our physiological functions fluctuate throughout the day. They are coordinated by a central clock in the brain and by local oscillators, present in virtually every cell. Many molecular gearwheels of this internal clock have been described by Ueli Schibler, professor at the Faculty of Science of the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland. To study how the central clock synchronizes subordinate oscillators, the researcher's group used a variety of genetic and technological tools developed in collaboration with a team of UNIGE physicians. In this way, the scientists ...

With death rates from cancer have remained largely unchanged over the past 60 years, a physicist is trying to shed more light on the disease with a very different theory of its origin that traces cancer back to the dawn of multicellularity more than a billion years ago. In this month's special issue of Physics World devoted to the "physics of cancer", Paul Davies, principal investigator at Arizona State University's Center for Convergence of Physical Sciences and Cancer Biology, explains his radical new theory. Davies was brought in to lead the centre in 2009 having ...

LA JOLLA, CA – June 30, 2013 – A team led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) has identified a family of tiny RNA molecules that work as powerful regulators of the immune response in mammals. Mice who lack these RNA molecules lose their normal infection-fighting ability, whereas mice that overproduce them develop a fatal autoimmune syndrome. "This finding gives us insights into immune regulation that could be very helpful in a range of medical applications, from viral vaccines to treatments for autoimmune diseases," said Changchun Xiao, assistant professor ...

Chemists have discovered that an 'impossible' reaction at cold temperatures actually occurs with vigour, which could change our understanding of how alcohols are formed and destroyed in space. To explain the impossible, the researchers propose that a quantum mechanical phenomenon, known as 'quantum tunnelling', is revving up the chemical reaction. They found that the rate at which the reaction occurs is 50 times greater at minus 210 degrees Celsius than at room temperature. It's the harsh environment that makes space-based chemistry so difficult to understand; the extremely ...

PHILADELPHIA - Anyone who's ever heard a Beethoven sonata or a Beatles song knows how powerfully sound can affect our emotions. But it can work the other way as well – our emotions can actually affect how we hear and process sound. When certain types of sounds become associated in our brains with strong emotions, hearing similar sounds can evoke those same feelings, even far removed from their original context. It's a phenomenon commonly seen in combat veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), in whom harrowing memories of the battlefield can be ...

This news release is available in French. A protein first shown to function in the liver plays a crucial role in pregnancy in mice and has a key role in the human menstrual cycle, according to researchers at the University of Montreal. Mice that were genetically engineered not to produce the liver receptor homolog-1 (Lrh-1) molecule were unable to create the uterine conditions necessary for establishing and sustaining pregnancy, resulting in the formation of defective placentas. The researchers then showed that Lhr-1 was present in the human uterus and the essential ...

Researchers at EPFL have built a matchbox-sized device that can test for the presence of bacteria in a couple of minutes, instead of up to several weeks. A nano-lever vibrates in the presence of bacterial activity, while a laser reads the vibration and translates it into an electrical signal that can be easily read—the absence of a signal signifies the absence of bacteria. Thanks to this method, it is quick and easy to determine if a bacteria has been effectively treated by an antibiotic, a crucial medical tool especially for resistant strains. Easily used in clinics, it ...

MADISON -- In the world, there are a lot of small molecules people would like to get rid of, or at least convert to something useful, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison chemist Robert J. Hamers. Think carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas most responsible for far-reaching effects on global climate. Nitrogen is another ubiquitous small-molecule gas that can be transformed into the valuable agricultural fertilizer ammonia. Plants perform the chemical reduction of atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia as a matter of course, but for humans to do that in an industrial setting, ...

Scientists at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have identified the neuronal circuits in the spinal cord of mice that control the ability to produce the alternating movements of the legs during walking. The study, published in the journal Nature, demonstrates that two genetically-defined groups of nerve cells are in control of limb alternation at different speeds of locomotion, and thus that the animals' gait is disturbed when these cell populations are missing. Most land animals can walk or run by alternating their left and right legs in different coordinated patterns. ...