Researchers of the University of Arizona's Tucson Marine Phage Lab have discovered a dozen new types of unknown viruses that infect different strains of marine bacteria. Bacteriophages – viruses that prey on bacteria – are less familiar to most people than their flu- or cold-causing cousins, but they control processes of global importance. For example, they determine how much oxygen goes from the oceans into the atmosphere in exchange for carbon dioxide, they influence climate patterns across the Earth and they alter the assemblages of microorganisms competing in the ...

NEW YORK, NY (July 25, 2013) — Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) scientists have identified new genetic mutations that can cause pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), a rare fatal disease characterized by high blood pressure in the lungs. The mutations, found in the gene KCNK3, appear to affect potassium channels in the pulmonary artery, a mechanism not previously linked to the condition. Cell culture studies showed that the mutations' effects could be reversed with a drug compound known as a phospholipase inhibitor. The study was published today in the online ...

A 2,000-square-kilometer zone in the Yukon Flats of interior Alaska--one of the most flammable high-latitude regions of the world--has seen a dramatic increase in both the frequency and severity of fires in recent decades, according to research funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Wildfire activity in this area is higher than at any other time in the past 10,000 years, the researchers report. The research, funded by NSF's Division of Polar Programs, adds to the evidence that relatively frequent and powerful fires are converting the conifer-rich boreal ...

Less may mean more when it comes to the levee systems designed to protect New Orleans from hurricanes. That's the conclusion of a new study by a team of University of Notre Dame researchers led by Joannes Westerink, co-developer of the authoritative computer model for storm surge used by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the state of Louisiana to determine water levels due to hurricane surge and to design levee heights and alignments. The lower Mississippi River south of New Orleans protrudes into the Gulf of Mexico ...

LA JOLLA, CA – July 24, 2013 – Biologists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have made a significant discovery that could lead to a new therapeutic strategy for Parkinson's disease. The findings, recently published online ahead of print in the journal Molecular and Cell Biology, focus on an enzyme known as parkin, whose absence causes an early-onset form of Parkinson's disease. Precisely how the loss of this enzyme leads to the deaths of neurons has been unclear. But the TSRI researchers showed that parkin's loss sharply reduces the level of another protein that ...

NASA scientists have established a new way to use satellites to measure what's occurring inside plants at a cellular level. Plants grow and thrive through photosynthesis, a process that converts sunlight into energy. During photosynthesis, plants emit what is called fluorescence – light invisible to the naked eye but detectable by satellites orbiting hundreds of miles above Earth. NASA scientists have now established a method to turn this satellite data into global maps of the subtle phenomenon in more detail than ever before. Healthy plants use the energy from sunlight ...

Most obese individuals with kidney failure can prolong their lives by receiving a kidney transplant, although this survival benefit is lower in severely obese individuals. That's the conclusion of a new study published in the American Journal of Transplantation. The findings will hopefully decrease differences in access to transplantation for obese patients. Obesity is increasing in patients with kidney failure. In some studies, obese kidney failure patients who are on dialysis have a lower risk of dying prematurely than non-obese patients. In contrast, obese kidney ...

Cincinnati, OH -- In the US, child-resistant packaging for most medications has contributed to the prevention of thousands of pediatric deaths. Nevertheless, over 500,000 calls are made to poison control centers each year after accidental ingestion of medications by young children, and the number of emergency department visits for unsupervised medication ingestions is rising. In a new study scheduled for publication in The Journal of Pediatrics, researchers studied whether adding flow restrictors to bottles can limit the amount of liquid medication a child could access ...

An international team of researchers has found that over 90 percent of dementia cases in China go undetected, with a high level of undiagnosed dementia in rural areas. The team of public health experts led by Dr Ruoling Chen at King's College London argues that more mental health education targeting high-risk populations is now needed to improve diagnosis rates, and increase support for sufferers and their families. Dementia affects 10 million in China and up to 50 million worldwide, of which around 35 million sufferers are undiagnosed. Dementia causes deterioration in ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — A new stem cell-based approach to studying epilepsy has yielded a surprising discovery about what causes one form of the disease, and may help in the search for better medicines to treat all kinds of seizure disorders. The findings, reported by a team of scientists from the University of Michigan Medical School and colleagues, use a technique that could be called "epilepsy in a dish". By turning skin cells of epilepsy patients into stem cells, and then turning those stem cells into neurons, or brain nerve cells, the team created a miniature testing ...

Every day, people donate to charities, volunteer to clean up city parks, or scale back their driving to curb air pollution. But some take these public goods for granted and ride free on the efforts of others. They watch public television but never make a donation to fund it. Or they run their lawn sprinklers during a drought while their neighbors follow government pleas to limit water consumption. A new report in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, examines more than 25 years' worth of studies on the use ...

Remove even one bumblebee species from an ecosystem and the effect is swift and clear: Pollination is less effective, and plants produce significantly fewer seeds. This according to research published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that focuses on the interactions between bumblebees and larkspur wildflowers in Colorado's Rocky Mountains. The findings show that reduced competition among pollinators disrupts floral fidelity, or specialization, among the remaining bees in the system, leading to less successful plant reproduction. "We ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Though humans generally have a tendency to look at a region just below the eyes and above the nose toward the midline when first identifying another person, a small subset of people tend to look further down –– at the tip of the nose, for instance, or at the mouth. However, as UC Santa Barbara researchers Miguel Eckstein and Matthew Peterson recently discovered, "nose lookers" and "mouth lookers" can do just as well as everyone else when it comes to the split-second decision-making that goes into identifying someone. Their findings are in a recent ...

In a paper on decision making, human factors/ergonomics (HF/E) researchers found that choosing the best available emergency response could be improved by showing decision makers a depiction of the emergency decision space that allows them to compare their options visually. The researchers have developed the theory of option awareness (how people perceive and understand the desirability of available options), which can increase decision-making speed as well as accuracy, and confidence. In the Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making article, "Supporting Complex ...

The motor relearning program can significantly improve various functional disturbance induced by ischemic cerebrovascular diseases. However, its mechanism of action remains poorly understood. According to a study published in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 8, No. 16, 2013), models of ischemic brain injury in the rhesus macaque were induced by electrocoagulation of the M1 segment of the right middle cerebral artery, then the motor relearning program was after model establishment. Glial fibrillary acidic protein and neurofilament protein expression changes could reflect ...

Scars are prone to appear at high tension parts, such as the sternum, shoulder and back, which are serious clinical problems. Surgeons reduce scar formation through Z, W, V-Y flap variation and reducing blade tension, but its specific mechanism are still not very clear. Hu Xiao and colleagues from Shandong Provincial Hospital Affiliated to Shandong University verified that mechanical tension contributed to the formation of a hyperplastic scar in the back skin of rats, in conjunction with increases in both nerve density and nerve growth factor expression in the scar tissue. ...

A recent study entitled "Neuropeptide Y and leptin receptor expression in the hypothalamus of rats with chronic immobilization stress" showed that the body weight and food intake of rats subjected to chronic immobilization stress were significantly decreased; the expression of leptin receptor and the co-localization coeffient in these leptic receptor neurons in the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus were both upregulated, while the number of neuropeptide Y neurons was decreased. These findings which were in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 8, No. 18, 2013) indicated ...

TORONTO, ON – Some males will go to great lengths to pursue a female and take extreme measures to hold on once they find one that interests them, even if that affection is unrequited. New research from evolutionary biologists at the University of Toronto shows that the male guppy grows claws on its genitals to make it more difficult for unreceptive females to get away during mating. Genitalia differ greatly in animal groups, even among similar species – so much so that even closely related species may have very different genitalia. The reasons for these differences are ...

Scientists have reported that very small embryonic-like stem cells (VSELs), which can be isolated from blood or bone marrow rather than embryos, could represent an alternative to mouse and human embryonic stem cells for research and medicine. But their very existence is hotly debated, and a study appearing online on July 24th in the ISSCR's journal Stem Cell Reports, published by Cell Press, provides strong evidence against the existence of VSELs capable of turning into different cell types. The findings call into question current plans to launch a clinical trial aimed ...

Researchers have developed a new screening method to diagnose autism, which unlike current methods does not rely on subjective criteria. These results are published in a series of studies in the open-access journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. The studies, funded by a US$ 650,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, were led by Elizabeth Torres, a computational neuroscientist, and Dimitri Metaxas, a computer scientist, both at Rutgers University, in collaboration with Jorge V. Jose, a theoretical physicist and computational neuroscientist from Indiana University. ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Research on human embryonic stem cells has been a political and religious lightning rod for more than a decade. The cells long have been believed to be the only naturally occurring pluripotent cells. (Under the right conditions, pluripotent cells can become any other cell in the body.) But some people object to the fact that the embryo is destroyed during their isolation. Induced pluripotent stem cells, created by experimentally manipulating an adult cell such as a skin or nerve cell, are much more ethically palatable. But many researchers feel it is ...

For almost a century, scientists have been studying brain waves to learn about mental health and the way we think. Yet the way billions of interconnected neurons work together to produce brain waves remains unknown. Now, scientists from EPFL's Blue Brain Project in Switzerland, at the core of the European Human Brain Project, and the Allen Institute for Brain Science in the United States, show in the July 24th edition of the journal Neuron how a complex computer model is providing a new tool to solve the mystery. The brain is composed of many different types of neurons, ...

For the first time, scientists have documented an acceleration in the melt rate of permafrost, or ground ice, in a section of Antarctica where the ice had been considered stable. The melt rates are comparable with the Arctic, where accelerated melting of permafrost has become a regularly recurring phenomenon, and the change could offer a preview of melting permafrost in other parts of a warming Antarctic continent. Tracking data from Garwood Valley in the McMurdo Dry Valleys region of Antarctica, Joseph Levy, a research associate at The University of Texas at Austin's ...

If you are trying to lose weight or save for the future, new research suggests avoiding temptation may increase your chances of success compared to relying on willpower alone. The study on self-control by researchers from the Universities of Cambridge and Dusseldorf was published today in the journal Neuron. The researchers compared the effectiveness of willpower versus voluntarily restricting access to temptations, called 'precommitment'. (Examples of precommitment include avoiding purchasing unhealthy food and putting money in savings accounts with hefty withdrawal ...

STONY BROOK, NY, July 24, 2013–Research conducted in six bays of Long Island, NY, and led by scientists from the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University (SBU) showed that local populations of winter flounder are inbred, which is a situation that is not usually considered in marine fisheries management. The scientists also determined that the effective number of breeders in each bay was below 500 fish, suggesting that the spawning populations of this historically common fish are now relatively small in the area. "Severe inbreeding and small ...