DETROIT – Insulin is the most potent physiological anabolic agent for tissue-building and energy storage, promoting the storage and synthesis of lipids, protein and carbohydrates, and inhibiting their breakdown and release into the circulatory system. It also plays a major role in stimulating glucose entry into muscle tissue, where the glucose is metabolized and removed from the blood following meals. But gaps exist in understanding the precise molecular mechanisms by which insulin regulates glucose uptake in fat and muscle cells. A research team led by Assia Shisheva, ...

Researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center and colleagues at Louisiana State University have developed a method for identifying aggressive prostate cancers that require immediate therapy. It relies on understanding the genetic interaction between single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). The goal is to better predict a prostate cancer's aggressiveness to avoid unnecessary radical treatment. Their study was published in the online journal PLOS ONE in April. According to the authors, prostate cancer accounts for 20 percent of all cancers and 9 percent of cancer deaths. It is ...

Taking inspiration from trees, scientists have developed a battery made from a sliver of wood coated with tin that shows promise for becoming a tiny, long-lasting, efficient and environmentally friendly energy source. Their report on the device — 1,000 times thinner than a sheet of paper — appears in the journal Nano Letters. Liangbing Hu, Teng Li and colleagues point out that today's batteries often use stiff, non-flexible substrates, which are too rigid to release the stress that occurs as ions flow through the battery. They knew that wood fibers from trees are supple ...

A new variety of canary seeds bred specifically for human consumption qualifies as a gluten-free cereal that would be ideal for people with celiac disease (CD), scientists have confirmed in a study published in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Joyce Irene Boye and colleagues point out that at least 3 million people in the United States alone have CD. They develop gastrointestinal and other symptoms from eating wheat, barley, rye and other grains that contain gluten-related proteins. Boye's team sought to expand dietary options for CD — which now include ...

The mystery of how pearls form into the most perfectly spherical large objects in nature may have an unlikely explanation, scientists are proposing in a new study. It appears in ACS' journal Langmuir, named for 1932 Nobel Laureate Irving Langmuir. Julyan Cartwright, Antonio G. Checa and Marthe Rousseau point out that the most flawless and highly prized pearls have perhaps the most perfectly spherical, or ball-like, shape among all the objects in nature that are visible without a microscope. Pearls develop as nacre (mother of pearl) and other liquids accumulate around ...

Species of mammals and birds are threatened with extinction as a result of rising human population density, according to Jeffrey McKee and colleagues from The Ohio State University in the US. Their work is also the first to show that the exponential growth of the human population will continue to pose a threat to other species. In other words, there does not appear to be a threshold above which population growth would cease to have an incremental negative effect. The study is published online in Springer's journal, Human Ecology. It has long been suspected that the number ...

Could drugs that block the body's system for repairing damage to the genetic material DNA become a boon to health? As unlikely as it may seem, those compounds are sparking optimism as potential treatments for ovarian and breast cancers driven by a mutation in BRCA, a gene that made headlines when actress Angelina Jolie revealed she carries the mutation. The compounds, termed PARP inhibitors, are the topic of the cover story in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News. C&EN is the weekly news magazine of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific ...

Ann Arbor, Mich. — Children had half as many emergency department visits if their primary care office had evening office hours on five or more days a week, according to new research from child health experts at C.S. Mott Children's Hospital and Johns Hopkins University. The new study was published online this month in The Journal of Pediatrics and will be presented at the AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting. "These findings are an important step in understanding where primary care practices and medical home programs can be most effective in making changes to enhance ...

In a scientific paper published in the journal Polar Biology, researchers report using DNA from tissues samples collected in 1955 to study what may be a new type of killer whale (Orcinus orca). In 1955, a pod of unusual-looking killer whales stranded on a New Zealand beach and a skeleton was saved in a museum in Wellington. Photographs were also taken but it was almost 50 years before this unique form of killer whale, characterized by a very small white eye-patch and bulbous forehead, was documented alive in the wild. Scientists have suspected for some time that ...

A team of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh has developed antibacterial compounds, derived from the outer coating of HIV, that could be potential treatments for drug-resistant bacterial infections and appear to avoid generating resistance. These new agents are quite small, making them inexpensive and easy to manufacture. The research was published in the June 2013 issue of the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. The first of many probable applications will likely be the chronic bacterial infections in the lungs of cystic fibrosis patients "that frequently ...

A University of Iowa study reveals significant disparities between minority and white clients in success rates for completing substance abuse treatment programs. Moreover, these disparities vary widely from state to state. "Our findings suggest that for most states there's something amiss," says Stephan Arndt, Ph.D., UI professor of psychiatry and biostatistics. "There are strong racial and ethnic disparities for people in being able to complete substance abuse treatment programs successfully, and those disparities are something we need to set as targets to remove. "On ...

A research team led by UCSF scientists has found that exposure in infancy to nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a component of motor vehicle air pollution, is strongly linked with later development of childhood asthma among African Americans and Latinos. The researchers said their findings indicate that air pollution might, in fact, be a cause of the disease, and they called for a tightening of U.S government standards for annual exposure to NO2. The study is reported online currently in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine ahead of print publication. ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Anyone who has ever owned a pet will tell you that it has a unique personality. Yet only in the last 10 years has the study of animal personality started to gain ground with behavioral ecologists, said Jennifer Verdolin of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, in Durham, NC. She and a colleague have now found distinct personalities in the grey mouse lemur (Microcebus murinus), the tiny, saucer-eyed primate native to the African island of Madagascar. In a study published in the journal Primates, Verdolin gave fourteen gray mouse lemurs living ...

Boston, Mass., June 18, 2013 – 3D printing can now be used to print lithium-ion microbatteries the size of a grain of sand. The printed microbatteries could supply electricity to tiny devices in fields from medicine to communications, including many that have lingered on lab benches for lack of a battery small enough to fit the device, yet provide enough stored energy to power them. To make the microbatteries, a team based at Harvard University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign printed precisely interlaced stacks of tiny battery electrodes, each less ...

There is no cure for age-related macular degeneration, an eye disease that is the leading cause of vision loss and blindness in older Americans. Last year, the National Institutes of Health reported that two drugs injected into the eyes, Avastin and Lucentis, eased symptoms for sufferers, especially those in the advanced, "wet" stage of the disease, when blood vessels in the eye become swollen and leak fluids in the eye. Yet for some AMD patients, the two drugs either don't work for long or fail to work at all. It's a dead end for treatment, or so it seemed. Now, a ...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- TED Talks, the most popular conference and events website in the world with over 1 billion informational videos viewed, provides academics with increased popular exposure but does nothing to boost citations of their work by peers, new research led by Indiana University has found. In the comprehensive study of over 1,200 TED Talks videos and their presenters, lead author Cassidy R. Sugimoto, an assistant professor in IU Bloomington's Department of Information and Library Science, and a team of researchers from Great Britain and Canada, also looked ...

TORONTO, June 18, 2013 /CNW/ - The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) has released a summary report outlining policy strategies to reduce the harms related to alcohol, with a focus on the province of Ontario, Canada. In the report titled 'Reducing Alcohol-Related Harms and Costs in Ontario: A Provincial Summary Report,' CAMH Senior Scientist Norman Giesbrecht outlines Ontario's policy strengths and provides recommendations to help decrease the $2.9 billion attributed annually to the direct and indirect costs of alcohol use in Ontario. "While there are policy ...

It's not a hacker lab. At Brandeis University, sophisticated computational models and advances in graphical processing units are helping scientists understand the complex interplay between genomic data, virus structure and the formation of the virus' outer "shell" — critical for replication. "We hope that some of what we are finding will help researchers alter virus assembly, leaving viruses unable to replicate," says post-doctoral fellow Jason Perlmutter, first author of the scientific paper describing the technique, published in the open access journal eLife. Scientists ...

Senior Brandeis research scientist Daniel Perlman has discovered a way to make phytosterol molecules from plants dispersible in beverages and foods that are consumed by humans, potentially opening the way to dramatic reductions in human cholesterol levels. A U.S. patent (#8,460,738) on the new process and composition was issued on June 11. Phytosterols in plants and cholesterol molecules in animals are highly similar and when both are dispersed together they are attracted to one another. When they mix in the gut of an animal, the cholesterol molecules are competitively ...

MANHATTAN, Kan. -- Like a stealthy enemy, blast disease invades rice crops around the world, killing plants and cutting production of one of the most important global food sources. Now, a study by an international team of researchers has shed light on how the rice blast fungus, Magnaporthe oryzae, invades plant tissue. The finding is a step toward learning how to control the disease, which by some estimates destroys enough rice to feed 60 million people annually. The team, led by Barbara Valent, Kansas State University distinguished professor in plant pathology, found ...

Scientists are expecting a very large "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico and a smaller than average hypoxic level in the Chesapeake Bay this year, based on several NOAA-supported forecast models. NOAA-supported modelers at the University of Michigan, Louisiana State University, and the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium are forecasting that this year's Gulf of Mexico hypoxic "dead" zone will be between 7,286 and 8,561 square miles which could place it among the ten largest recorded. That would range from an area the size of Connecticut, Rhode Island and the District ...

Boulder, Colo., USA – Each of the six new papers published in Geosphere on 13 June address geoscience compiled in specially themed issues: CRevolution 2: Origin and Evolution of the Colorado River System II; The 36-18 Ma southern Great Basin, USA, ignimbrite province and flareup: Swarms of subduction-related supervolcanoes; New Developments in Grenville Geology; and Origin and Evolution of the Sierra Nevada and Walker Lane. Abstracts for these and other Geosphere papers are available at http://geosphere.gsapubs.org/. Representatives of the media may obtain complimentary ...

Swainson' s Thrushes, from a local population near Bolinas, CA spend their winters together in Mexico, according to a new tracking study released by Point Blue Conservation Science, (Point Blue, formerly PRBO). This result is important because it shows that the conservation of habitat for these local populations in California is tightly linked with climate and habitat changes in Mexico, where these birds spend their winters, 1,600 miles away. The Swainson's Thrush is one of the most melodic of all the songbirds, and can be heard singing now by hikers, walkers, and cyclists ...

Is the US Tea Party movement a racial backlash against President Obama? A new study by Angie Maxwell from the University of Arkansas, and Wayne Parent from Louisiana State University, assesses whether racial attitudes are contributing to Tea Party membership, and if so, the exact nature of this racial prejudice. Their work is published online in Springer's journal, Race and Social Problems. The Tea Party is an American political movement that began in 2009 and which is focused on fiscal conservatism. The first major protests took place in 40 states just 37 days after ...

People with HIV are more likely to keep their scheduled medical appointments — and their disease under control — if they feel their physician listens, explains things clearly and knows them as a person, not just a "case," new Johns Hopkins research suggests. "If people feel their doctor really knows them and listens to them, they feel that doctor has their best interests at heart and may be more likely to follow medical advice," says study leader Tabor E. Flickinger, M.D., M.P.H., a fellow in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School ...