MAYWOOD, Il. - A Loyola University Medical Center study suggests that a procedure to treat acid reflux could help prevent chronic rejection in lung transplant patients. The study also found that certain proteins found in lung fluid can help predict whether a patient's transplanted lung is more likely to fail. Results are published in the July, 2013 issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons. Authors are P. Marco Fisichella, MD, FACS (first author), Christopher S. Davis, MD, MPH; Erin Lowery, MD, MS; Luis Ramirez, BS; Richard L. Gamelli, MD, FACS and Elizabeth ...

UPTON, NY-In chemical reactions, left and right can make a big difference. A "left-handed" molecule of a particular chemical composition could be an effective drug, while its mirror-image "right-handed" counterpart could be completely inactive. That's because, in biology, "left" and "right" molecular designs are crucial: Living organisms are made only from left-handed amino acids. So telling the two apart is important-but difficult. Now, a team of scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and Ohio University has developed a new, simpler ...

This may look like a tangle of squiggly lines, but you're actually looking at a molecular machine called a ribosome. Its job is to translate DNA sequences into proteins, the workhorse compounds that sustain you and all living things. The image is also a milestone. It's the first time the atom-by-atom structure of the ribosome has been seen as it's attached to a molecule that controls its motion. That's big news if you're a structural biologist. But there's another way to look at this image, one that anyone who's suffered a bacterial infection can appreciate. The image ...

JUPITER, FL, June 28, 2013 – For the first time, scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have identified small molecules that allow for complete control over a genetic defect responsible for the most common adult onset form of muscular dystrophy. These small molecules will enable scientists to investigate potential new therapies and to study the long-term impact of the disease. "This is the first example I know of at all where someone can literally turn on and off a disease," said TSRI Associate Professor Matthew Disney, whose new research ...

Psittacosaurus, the 'parrot dinosaur' is known from more than 1000 specimens from the Cretaceous, 100 million years ago, of China and other parts of east Asia. As part of his PhD thesis at the University of Bristol, Qi Zhao, now on the staff of the Institute for Vertebrate Paleontology in Beijing, carried out the intricate study on bones of babies, juveniles and adults. Dr Zhao said: "Some of the bones from baby Psittacosaurus were only a few millimetres across, so I had to handle them extremely carefully to be able to make useful bone sections. I also had to be sure ...

A new study from researchers at Uppsala University and University of Havana uses mathematic modeling and experiments on ants to show that a group is capable of developing flexible resource management strategies and characteristic responses of its own. The results are now published in Physical Review Letters. Group-living animals are led to regulate their activity and to make decisions on how to manage resources, under the action of a variety of environmental stimuli and of their intrinsic interactions. The latter are typically cooperative, in the sense that the activity ...

Sophie Holles, a PhD researcher at the University of Bristol and one of the study's authors, said: "Natural underwater sound is used by many animals to find suitable habitat, and traffic noise is one of the most widespread pollutants. If settlement is disrupted by boat traffic, the resilience of habitats like reefs could be affected." Sound travels better underwater than in air and reefs are naturally noisy places: fish and invertebrates produce feeding and territorial sounds while wind, waves and currents create other background noise. Boats can be found around all ...

The double delta wing is a simplified configuration used for studying aircraft aerodynamics. It is composed of a highly-swept delta wing connected in front of the main delta wing with a smaller sweep, reflecting the combination of a leading edge extension and the swept main wing. The aerodynamic performance of such wings, which includes the behavior of the leeside vortical flows at moderate and high angles of attack (AoA) at low speed, is of research interest. The prominent aerodynamic feature of the delta wing is the dominant leading edge vortex pair on the lee side, ...

Scientists at an Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence have discovered a new mechanism regulating the immune response that can leave a person susceptible to autoimmune diseases. A fresh study by Turku Centre for Biotechnology and Aalto University in Finland is the first to report a new mechanism that regulates specification of lymphocytes, the white blood cells pivotal to immune response. By combining state-of-the art techniques, next-generation deep sequencing and computational data mining, the researchers discovered new epigenetic factors regulating lymphocyte function. ...

PITTSBURGH, June 28, 2013 -- A single systemic dose of special immune cells prevented rejection for almost four months in a preclinical animal model of kidney transplantation, according to experts at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Their findings, now available in the online version of the American Journal of Transplantation, could lay the foundation for eventual human trials of the technique. Organ transplantation has saved many lives, but at the cost of sometimes lifelong requirements for powerful immunosuppressive medication that can have serious side ...

Putnam Valley, NY. (Jun. 28 2013) – A team of researchers from Rush University, Yale University, the University of Colorado and the St. Kitts Biomedical Research Foundation transplanted human embryonic stem cells into primate laboratory animals modeled with Parkinson's disease and found "robust survival" of the cells after six weeks and indications that the cells were "well integrated" into the host animals. The study appears as an early e-publication for the journal Cell Transplantation, and is now freely available on-line at http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cog/ct/pre-prints/ct1000wakeman. ...

Putnam Valley, NY. (June 28 2013) – A team of researchers in Poland who treated three of six paraplegics with spinal cord injury using transplanted olfactory ensheathing cells found that the three treated patients showed neurological improvement and no adverse effects while the three control patients who did not receive transplants saw no improvement. The study appears as an early e-publication for the journal Cell Transplantation, and is now freely available on-line at http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cog/ct/pre-prints/ct0799tabakow. "Most accepted treatments ...

WASHINGTON D.C., June 27, 2013 -- To the ancients, probing the philosophical question of how to distinguish the living from the dead centered on the "mystery of the vital heat." To modern microbiology, this question was always less mysterious than it was annoying -- researchers have known that biological processes should produce thermal signatures, even within single cells, but nobody ever knew how to measure them. Now, a group of mechanical engineers from Pohang University of Science and Technology in Korea have discovered a way to measure the "thermal conductivity" ...

Putnam Valley, NY. (June 28 2013) –A study carried out in India examining the safety and efficacy of self-donated (autologous), transplanted bone marrow stem cells in patients with type 2 diabetes (TD2M), has found that patients receiving the transplants, when compared to a control group of TD2M patients who did not receive transplantation, required less insulin post-transplantation. The study appears as an early e-publication for the journal Cell Transplantation, and is now freely available on-line at http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cog/ct/pre-prints/ct0920bhansali. "There ...

COLLEGE STATION -- Scientists using sophisticated imaging techniques have observed a molecular protein folding process that may help medical researchers understand and treat diseases such as Alzheimer's, Lou Gehrig's and cancer. The study, reported this month in the journal Cell, verifies a process that scientists knew existed but with a mechanism they had never been able to observe, according to Dr. Hays Rye, Texas A&M AgriLife Research biochemist. "This is a step in the direction of understanding how to modulate systems to prevent diseases ...

Americans are more respectful now than ever before when it comes to the religious traditions of their peers, according to findings from the longitudinal Rice University Portraits of American Life Study (PALS). Other findings: Americans are more divided on the legal definition of marriage, favor restrictions on abortion, support pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and are less politically engaged (with the exception of African-Americans). PALS is a six-year national study tracking religion, morality, politics and other social issues in the U.S. The study ...

MAYWOOD, Il. - Up to 15 percent of patients who take cholesterol-lowering statin medications experience muscle pain or other side effects, and many patients simply stop taking the drugs. But a Loyola University Medical Center study has found that "statin-intolerant" patients still can significantly reduce their cholesterol by going to a lipid clinic staffed with physicians specially trained in treating cholesterol problems. Among 22 statin-intolerant patients referred to Loyola's Lipid Clinic, total cholesterol dropped from 257 mg/dl to 198 mg/dl. LDL ("bad") cholesterol ...

Tampa, FL (June 28, 2013) -- A cardiac hormone signaling receptor abundantly expressed both in inflamed tissues and cancers appears to recruit stem cells that form the blood vessels needed to feed tumor growth, reports a new study by scientists at the University of South Florida Nanomedicine Research Center. The research may lead to the development of new drugs or delivery systems to treat cancer by blocking this receptor, known as natriuretic peptide receptor A (NPRA). The findings appeared online recently in the journal Stem Cells. "Our results show that NRPA signaling ...

Washington, D.C.—To prevent coral reefs around the world from dying off, deep cuts in carbon dioxide emissions are required, says a new study from Carnegie's Katharine Ricke and Ken Caldeira. They find that all existing coral reefs will be engulfed in inhospitable ocean chemistry conditions by the end of the century if civilization continues along its current emissions trajectory. Their work will be published July 3 by Environmental Research Letters. Coral reefs are havens for marine biodiversity and underpin the economies of many coastal communities. But they are very ...

West Nile virus, Lyme disease and hantavirus. All are infectious diseases spreading in animals and in people. Is human interaction with the environment somehow responsible for the increase in these diseases? The ecology and evolution of infectious diseases will be highlighted at two symposia at the Ecological Society of America's annual meeting, held from Aug. 5-9 in Minneapolis, Minn. One symposium will address human influences on viral and bacterial diseases through alteration of landscapes and ecological processes. Another will focus on the emerging field of eco-epidemiology, ...

A technique developed several years ago at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for improving optical microscopes now has been applied to monitoring the next generation of computer chip circuit components, potentially providing the semiconductor industry with a crucial tool for improving chips for the next decade or more. The technique, called Through-Focus Scanning Optical Microscopy (TSOM), has now been shown able to detect tiny differences in the three-dimensional shapes of circuit components, which until very recently have been essentially two-dimensional ...

A team of scientists at USC has verified that quantum effects are indeed at play in the first commercial quantum optimization processor. The team demonstrated that the D-Wave processor housed at the USC-Lockheed Martin Quantum Computing Center behaves in a manner that indicates that quantum mechanics plays a functional role in the way it works. The demonstration involved a small subset of the chip's 128 qubits. This means that the device appears to be operating as a quantum processor – something that scientists had hoped for but have needed extensive testing to verify. The ...

WASHINGTON — A young, healthy man injured himself so severely while weight lifting that he required surgery and nearly a full week in the hospital to recover. The unusual case report of compartment syndrome to the shoulder will be reported online today in Annals of Emergency Medicine ("An Unusual Complication of Weightlifting: A Case Report"). "Typically, compartment syndrome is associated with the lower extremities, not the shoulder, and with trauma, not exercise," said lead study author Leonard Bunting, MD, FACEP, of Wayne State University in Detroit, Mich. "Our patient ...

Washington, DC (June 27, 2013) — Elderly patients with kidney failure may not gain the same benefits from what's considered the gold standard for accessing the blood for dialysis compared with younger patients, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN). The findings suggest that vascular access procedures should be tailored to individual dialysis patients in the elderly population. The elderly represent the most rapidly growing group of patients on dialysis for kidney failure. Research clearly shows ...

Scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have trapped the ribosome, a protein-building molecular machine essential to all life, in a key transitional state that has long eluded researchers. Now, for the first time, scientists can see how the ribosome performs the precise mechanical movements needed to translate genetic code into proteins without making mistakes. "This is something that the whole field has been pursuing for the past decade," said Harry Noller, Sinsheimer Professor of Molecular Biology at UC Santa Cruz. "We've trapped the ribosome in the ...