Some strains of the avian H7N9 influenza that emerged in China this year have developed resistance to the only antiviral drugs available to treat the infection, but testing for antiviral resistance can give misleading results, helping hasten the spread of resistant strains. The authors of a study published in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, characterized viruses taken from the first person known to be stricken with H7N9 influenza and found that 35% of those viruses are resistant to oseltamivir (commercially known as Tamiflu) ...

Standard toxicity testing is inadequate to assess the safety of a new technology with potential for creating pesticides and genetically modifying crops, according to a Forum article published in the August issue of BioScience. The authors of the article, Jonathan G. Lundgren and Jian J. Duan of the USDA Agricultural Research Service, argue that pesticides and insect-resistant crops based on RNA interference, now in exploratory development, may have to be tested under elaborate procedures that assess effects on animals' whole life cycles, rather than by methods that look ...

Whether you're reading the paper or thinking through your schedule for the day, chances are that you're hearing yourself speak even if you're not saying words out loud. This internal speech — the monologue you "hear" inside your head — is a ubiquitous but largely unexamined phenomenon. A new study looks at a possible brain mechanism that could explain how we hear this inner voice in the absence of actual sound. In two experiments, researcher Mark Scott of the University of British Columbia found evidence that a brain signal called corollary discharge — a signal that helps ...

Tropical trees and hanging vines burst into flower, showering the ground below with bright blossoms. Temperature, rather than cloud cover, may be key to the timing of tropical flowering events according to research at two sites in the Smithsonian Institution Global Earth Observatory Network published online in Nature Climate Change. Scientists discovered a significant increase in flower production—about 3 percent more flowers produced on average per year since 1987—on Barro Colorado Island's Forest Dynamics Plot in Panama. "Barro Colorado Island was chosen for this study ...

A UCLA-led study of HIV-positive women who were sexually abused as children has found that the more severe their past trauma, the greater their improvement in an intervention program designed to ease their psychological suffering. The study, conducted by researchers at UCLA's Collaborative Center for Culture, Trauma and Mental Health Disparities, suggests that such interventions should be tailored to individuals' experience and that a "one size fits all" approach may not be enough to successfully reduce women's depression, post-traumatic stress and anxiety symptoms. ...

Vitamin D influences many other physiological processes, including muscle function, cardiovascular homeostasis, nerve function, and immune response. Furthermore, accumulated evidence suggests that vitamin D also mediates the immune system response to infection. Infections are very common in patients from neurosurgical intensive care unit. A recent study published in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 8, No. 16, 2013) detected serum vitamin D level in 15 patients with clinically suspected infection and 10 patients with confirmed infection, who came from neurosurgical ...

Rodents are frequently used as animal models for ischemic stroke studies induced by middle cerebral artery occlusion. However, their anatomic structure is significantly different from humans. Thus, recent studies have focused on developing stroke models in large animals with similar anatomic structure as the human brain. The swine have several properties resembling the human brain, including brain volume and weight, quantity of cortical gyri and the percentage of white matter to gray matter. These properties allow evaluation of conventional cerebral imaging techniques and ...

Recent findings suggest that Toll-like receptor 4 expressed in the central nervous system, especially in glial cells, plays a vital role in neuroinflammation and neurodegenerative conditions. Traditional theory suggests that neurons are injured by inflammatory factors released from glial cells, and that neurons are the victims of neuroinflammation. However, it has recently been suggested that Toll-like receptor 4 is expressed by cerebral cortical neurons. Yae Hu and team from Medical School of Nantong University found that lipopolysaccharide participates in neuroinflammation ...

Studies of patients with immunodeficiencies involving single gene mutations can reveal a great deal about our immune systems, especially when actual symptoms do not accord with clinical expectations. Australian scientists acknowledge such a gap between expectation and reality in a new study, which examines people with 'Autosomal Dominant Hyper IgE Syndrome'. Hyper IgE Syndrome arises from a mutation in the STAT3 gene. This makes patients slightly more susceptible than normal to blood cancers known as 'lymphomas', and exposes them to recurrent skin infections and pneumonia. ...

The time period of satellite observations of the ice sheets of Greenland and the Antarctic is still too short to be able to say whether the accelerated loss of ice measured today will persist in the future. This is the result published today in the online edition of "Nature Geosciences" by a research team led by Bert Wouters from the University of Bristol. The GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences is also involved in the study. The researchers conclude that predictions of the contribution of both ice shields to the sea level up to the year 2100 may be more than 35 ...

An "obesity-risk" allele alters hunger-stimulating hormone production Individuals carrying the "obesity-risk" allele of the fat mass and obesity associated gene, FTO, are prone to obesity and obesity related eating behaviors such as increased food consumption, preference for high fat foods and lack of satiation after eating. How this particular gene regulates obesity prone behaviors is not fully understood. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Rachel Batterham and colleagues at University College London identify a link between FTO and the hunger-stimulating ...

Individuals carrying the "obesity-risk" allele of the fat mass and obesity associated gene, FTO, are prone to obesity and obesity related eating behaviors such as increased food consumption, preference for high fat foods and lack of satiation after eating. How this particular gene regulates obesity prone behaviors is not fully understood. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Rachel Batterham and colleagues at University College London identify a link between FTO and the hunger-stimulating hormone, ghrelin. Subjects homozygous for the "obesity-risk" ...

The use of a 1:1:1 blood transfusion protocol in patients with severe trauma is feasible in hospitals, although it is associated with higher waste of plasma, according to a randomized trial published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). Previous retrospective studies suggested that a 1:1:1 transfusion strategy or fixed-ratio transfusion could reduce the number of deaths from hemorrhage; therefore, the strategy has been widely adopted in trauma centres around the world and for nontrauma patients. It uses an equal ratio of red blood cells, plasma and platelets ...

How does a doctor tackle the delicate issue of end-of-life care planning with a patient? With an aging population and people living longer with chronic illness, it is increasingly important for patients and family members to decide how they and their loved ones would like to spend their final days. And for physicians in both hospital and primary care settings, it is crucial that they know how to address this issue with sensitivity. A new "conversation guide" in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) aims to guide physicians through these sensitive discussions with ...

Hamilton, ON (July 15, 2013) - How does a doctor tackle the delicate issue of end-of-life care planning with a patient? With an aging population and people living longer with chronic illness, it is increasingly important for patients and family members to decide how they and their loved ones would like to spend their final days. And for physicians in both hospital and primary care settings, it is crucial that they know how to address this issue with sensitivity. A new "conversation guide" in Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) aims to guide physicians through ...

PHILADELPHIA — Scientists at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) have generated a data set of cancer-specific genetic variations and are making these data available to the research community, according to a study published in Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. This will help cancer researchers better understand drug response and resistance to cancer treatments. "To date, this is the largest database worldwide, containing 6 billion data points that connect drugs with genomic variants for the whole human genome across cell lines ...

A team of scientists, led by researchers at The Wistar Institute, has determined that it might be possible to stimulate the immune system against multiple strains of influenza virus by sequentially vaccinating individuals with distinct influenza strains isolated over the last century. Their results also suggest that world health experts might need to re-evaluate standard tests used for surveillance of novel influenza strains. Their findings are published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, available online now. According to the Wistar researchers, their analysis ...

VIDEO: Scientists at MIT and Oxford University have shown that the motility of phytoplankton also helps them determine their fate in ocean turbulence. Click here for more information. CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Tiny ocean plants, or phytoplankton, were long thought to be passive drifters in the sea — unable to defy even the weakest currents, or travel by their own volition. In recent decades, research has shown that many species of these unicellular microorganisms can swim, and do ...

As a consequence of the Affordable Care Act, between 500,000 and 900,000 Americans may choose to stop working. That possibility is predicted in a new analysis of an analogous situation in reverse: the abrupt end of Tennessee's Medicaid expansion in 2005. That year, Tennessee dropped 170,000 of its citizens from Medicaid. It was the largest Medicaid disenrollment in the history of the program. Economists from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business ...

Researchers have uncovered a previously unknown role for the acetylcholine-activated inward-rectifying potassium current (IKACh) in cardiac pacemaker activity and heart rate regulation, according to a study in The Journal of General Physiology. The heart rate increases in response to fear or exercise, when the body's sympathetic nervous system activates the "fight or flight" stress response. After sympathetic stimulation, the heart rate is brought back to normal by the parasympathetic nervous system, which regulates the body at rest. Parasympathetic regulation of the ...

The number of tick-borne illnesses reported to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is on the rise. Lyme disease leads the pack, with some 35,000 cases reported annually. In the Northeast, the black-legged ticks (Ixodes scapularis) that spread Lyme disease also infect people with other maladies, among them anaplasmosis, babesiosis, and – as a new paper in the journal Parasites and Vectors reports – Powassan encephalitis. Powassan encephalitis is caused by Powassan virus and its variant, deer tick virus. The virus is spread to people by infected ticks, and ...

VIDEO: RecBCD enzymes are unwinding DNA at different speeds. The bright ball at left is a bead, the bright strand is a stretch of DNA that shortens as it is unwound... Click here for more information. Experiments by biochemists at the University of California, Davis show for the first time that a law of physics, the ergodic theorem, can be demonstrated by a collection of individual protein molecules -- specifically, a protein that unwinds DNA. The work will be published online ...

Chemotherapy is one of the primary treatments for cancer. However, one of the most disturbing findings of recent studies of cancer survivors is the apparent prevalence of chemotherapy-associated adverse neurological effects, including vascular complications, seizures, mood disorders, cognitive dysfunctions, and peripheral neuropathies. In addition, chemotherapy triggers changes in ion channels on dorsal root ganglia and dorsal horn neurons that generate secondary changes resulting in neuropathic pains. Although a number of protective agents have been developed, their effects ...

Increasing evidence has revealed that the activation of the JNK pathway participates in apoptosis of nerve cells and neurological function recovery after traumatic brain injury. However, which genes in the JNK family are activated and their role in traumatic brain injury remain unclear. Dr. Jiang Long and colleagues from the First Affiliated Hospital of Kunming Medical University, China found that JNK3 expression was downregulated at early stages of brain injury, which may be associated with apoptosis of nerve cells. Downregulation of JNK3 expression may promote the recovery ...

Microglial cells play an important role in the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. Chronic activation of microglial cells endangers neuronal survival through the release of various proinflammatory and neurotoxic factors, including tumor necrosis factor-alpha, interleukin-1beta, interleukin-6, nitric oxide and reactive oxygen species. According to a study reported in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 8, No. 18, 2013), organotypic hippocampal slice cultures and primary microglial cells from rat brain were stimulated ...