URBANA. Ill. – Pork producers need accurate information on the energy value of fat in feed ingredients to ensure that diets are formulated economically and in a way that maximizes pork fat quality. Researchers at the University of Illinois have determined the true ileal and total tract digestibility of fat in four corn co-products, as well as in full fat soybeans and corn oil. Hans H. Stein, a professor of animal sciences at U of I, led the team of researchers in the study in which they looked at four corn co-products: distillers dried grains with solubles (DDGS), high-protein ...

Every time one of your cells divides, it exposes its most essential component to great danger: its genome, the sum total of all its genetic information, embodied in the double-stranded helix of DNA. Prior to cell division, this DNA splits into two single strands, each bearing sequences of biochemical bases that form templates for the genomes of the daughter cells. These single strands are particularly vulnerable to assaults by reactive oxygen species — toxic byproducts of respiration — that could cause changes in the genetic information they contain. Left unchecked, ...

Washington, D.C.— Hydrogen is deceptively simple. It has only a single electron per atom, but it powers the sun and forms the majority of the observed universe. As such, it is naturally exposed to the entire range of pressures and temperatures available in the whole cosmos. But researchers are still struggling to understand even basic aspects of its various forms under high-pressure conditions. Experimental difficulties contribute to the lack of knowledge about hydrogen's forms. The containment of hydrogen at high pressures and the competition between its many similar ...

HOUSTON (July 29, 3013) – When you sprint, the "fast" muscle fibers give you that winning kick. In a marathon or just day-to-day activity, however, the "slow," or type 1 fibers, keep you going for hours. In people with myotonic dystrophy, the second most common form of muscular dystrophy and the one most likely to occur in adults, these slow or type 1 fibers do not work well, wasting away as the genetic disorder takes its grim toll. In a report that appears online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Thomas A. Cooper, professor of pathology & immunology ...

WASHINGTON – Men who decide to be screened for prostate cancer and those who forgo PSA screening stick with their decisions after receiving materials explaining the risks and benefits of the test. The decision aids greatly increased their knowledge about screening and reduced their conflict about what to do, but did not have an impact on their screening decision when measured a year later. That's the finding of a new study published today in JAMA Internal Medicine that examined both web-based and printed tools aimed at helping men make informed decisions about PSA testing. In ...

College football players, especially linemen, may develop high blood pressure over the course of their first season, according to a small study in the American Heart Association's journal Circulation. Researchers documented higher blood pressure levels among 113 first-year college players. Only one player had already been diagnosed with hypertension before the season and 27 percent had a family history of hypertension. At post-season, researchers noted: 47 percent of players were considered pre-hypertensive, while 14 percent had stage 1 hypertension. While previous ...

Management of back pain appears to be variable, despite numerous published clinical guidelines, according to a report published by JAMA Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication. Spinal symptoms are among the most common reasons patients visit a physician and more than 10 percent of visits to primary care physicians relate to back and neck pain, the authors write in the study background. John N. Mafi, M.D., of Harvard Medical School, Boston, and colleagues used nationally representative data from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey and the National Hospital ...

Patients who received their first kidney transplant at ages 14 to 16 years appear to be at increased risk for transplant failure, with black adolescents having a disproportionately higher risk of graft failure, according to a report published by JAMA Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication. Existing medical literature does not adequately describe the risks of graft failure among kidney transplant recipients by age. Organ losses by adolescents are partly due to physiologic or immunologic changes with age but psychological and sociological factors play a role, especially ...

Both web-based and print-based decision aids appear to improve patients' informed decision making about prostate cancer screening up to 13 months later, but does not appear to affect actual screening rates, according to a study by Kathryn L. Taylor, Ph.D., of Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., and colleagues. A total of 1,893 men participated in the study, with 628 men randomly given a print-decision aid, 625 men used a web-based interactive decision aid, and 626 men received usual care. Researchers measured the participants' prostate cancer knowledge, decisional ...

Breastfeeding longer is associated with better receptive language at 3 years of age and verbal and nonverbal intelligence at age 7 years, according to a study published by JAMA Pediatrics, a JAMA Network publication. Evidence supports the relationship between breastfeeding and health benefits in infancy, but the extent to which breastfeeding leads to better cognitive development is less certain, according to the study background. Mandy B. Belfort, M.D., M.P.H., of Boston Children's Hospital, and colleagues examined the relationships of breastfeeding duration and exclusivity ...

Glucose intolerance or insulin resistance do not appear to be associated with pathological features of Alzheimer disease (AD) or detection of the accumulation of the brain protein β-amyloid (Αβ), according to a report published by JAMA Neurology, a JAMA Network publication. Glucose intolerance and diabetes mellitus have been proposed as risk factors for the development of AD, but evidence of this has not been consistent, the study background notes. Madhav Thambisetty, M.D., Ph.D., of the National Institute on Aging, Baltimore, and colleagues investigated ...

Healthcare professionals are urged to counsel heart and stroke patients on how to resume a healthy sex life, according to a joint statement published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation and the European Heart Journal. It is the first scientific statement to offer detailed guidance for patients. "Patients are anxious and often afraid sex will trigger another cardiac event – but the topic sometimes gets passed over because of embarrassment or discomfort," said Elaine Steinke, A.P.R.N., Ph.D., lead author of the statement and professor of nursing at Wichita ...

BOSTON – Patient care could be enhanced and the health care system could see significant cost savings if health care professionals followed published clinical guidelines to manage and treat back pain, according to researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and published in the July 29 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine. "Back pain treatment is costly and frequently includes overuse of treatments that are not supported by clinical guidelines, and that don't impact outcomes," says lead author John N. Mafi, MD, a fellow in the Division of General Medicine and Primary ...

A team led by researchers at the National Institutes of Health has overcome a major biological hurdle in an effort to find improved treatments for patients with a rare disease called methylmalonic acidemia (MMA). Using genetically engineered mice created for their studies, the team identified a set of biomarkers of kidney damage—a hallmark of the disorder—and demonstrated that antioxidant therapy protected kidney function in the mice. Researchers at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of NIH, validated the same biomarkers in 46 patients with MMA ...

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have created and confirmed the accuracy of a mathematical model that predicts how weight and body fat in children respond to adjustments in diet and physical activity. The results will appear online July 30 in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology. While the model may help to set realistic expectations, it has not been tested in a controlled clinical trial to determine if it is an effective tool for weight management. The model evolved from one developed at the NIH in 2011 to predict weight change in adults. The model ...

In 2011, Nature announced that scientists had discovered a single-celled organism that is a primitive farmer. The organism, a social amoeba called Dictyostelium discoideum, picks up edible bacteria, carries them to new locations and harvests them like crops. D. discoideum enjoyed a brief spell in the media spotlight, billed as the world's smallest farmer. Now a collaboration of scientists at Washington University in St. Louis and Harvard University has taken a closer look at one lineage, or clone, of a D. discoideum farmer. This farmer carries not one but two strains ...

In perhaps the most comprehensive and definitive effort to date, scientists have explained the processes that drove male mammals to adopt social monogamy as a breeding strategy. Because male mammals have a much higher potential to produce offspring in a single breeding season than do their female counterparts (who must endure long gestation periods), it would seem that mating with one female per cycle would be limiting. Yet a percentage of mammalian males do this -- and researchers have debated why, seeking to identify selective advantages social monogamy offers, for ...

The chemical components crucial to the start of life on Earth may have primed and protected each other in never-before-realized ways, according to new research led by University of Washington scientists. It could mean a simpler scenario for how that first spark of life came about on the planet, according to Sarah Keller, UW professor of chemistry, and Roy Black, UW affiliate professor of bioengineering, both co-authors of a paper published online July 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Scientists have long thought that life started when the right ...

Boston, Mass.—A new method of vaccine design, called the Multiple Antigen Presentation System (MAPS), may result in vaccines that bring together the benefits of whole-cell and acellular or defined subunit vaccination. The method, pioneered by researchers at Boston Children's Hospital, permits rapid construction of new vaccines that activate mulitple arms of the immune system simultaneously against one or more pathogens, generating robust immune protection with a lower risk of adverse effects. As reported by Fan Zhang, PhD, Ying-Jie Lu, PhD, and Richard Malley, MD, from ...

Astronomers have found a new way of measuring the spin in supermassive black holes, which could lead to better understanding about how they drive the growth of galaxies. The scientists at Durham University, UK, observed a black hole - with mass 10 million times that of our Sun - at the centre of a spiral galaxy 500 million light years from Earth while it was feeding on the surrounding disc of material that fuels its growth and powers its activity. By viewing optical, ultra-violet and soft x-rays generated by heat as the black hole fed, they were able to measure how ...

Scientists studying an aggressive form of leukaemia have discovered that rather than displacing healthy stem cells in the bone marrow as previously believed, the cancer is putting them to sleep to prevent them forming new blood cells. The finding offers the potential that these stem cells could somehow be turned back on, offering a new form of treatment for the condition, called Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML). The work was led by scientists at Queen Mary, University of London with the support of Cancer Research UK's London Research Institute. Around 2,500* people are diagnosed ...

A team of researchers has devised a way to measure the internal properties of stars—a method that offers more accurate assessments of their orbiting planets. The research, which appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was conducted by a multi-national team of scientists, including physicists at New York University, Princeton University, and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research. The researchers examined HD 52265—a star approximately 92 light years away and nearly 20 percent more massive than our Sun. More than a decade ago, scientists ...

Hamilton, ON -- Researchers at McMaster University have discovered a solution to a long-standing medical mystery in Huntington's disease (HD). HD is a brain disease that can affect 1 in about 7,000 people in mid-life, causing an increasing loss of brain cells at the centre of the brain. HD researchers have known what the exact DNA change is that causes Huntington's disease since 1993, but what is typically seen in patients does not lead to disease in animal models. This has made drug discovery difficult. In this week's issue of the science journal, the Proceedings of ...

Social monogamy, where one breeding female and one breeding male are closely associated with each other over several breeding seasons, appears to have evolved as a mating strategy, new research reveals. It was previously suspected that social monogamy resulted from a need for extra parental care by the father. The comparative study, by University of Cambridge researchers Dieter Lukas and Tim Clutton-Brock, shows that the ancestral system for all mammalian groups is of females living in separate ranges with males defending overlapping territories, and that monogamy evolved ...

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY'S HAAS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS –Have you ever applied for a job and wondered why it is offered to someone who appears to be less qualified than you? A new study by Berkeley-Haas Associate Professor Don Moore finds employment managers tend to ignore the context of past performance. The article, "Attribution Errors in Performance Evaluation," (PLOS ONE, July 24, 2013), is co-authored by Samuel A. Swift, a Berkeley-Haas post-doctoral fellow; Zachariah S. Sharek, director of strategy and innovation at CivicScience; and Francesco Gino, associate ...