Sustainability programs are a Goldilocks proposition – some groups are too big, some are too small, and the environment benefits when the size of a group of people working to save it is just right. It has long been debated how many people working together can change the world. Whether it's joining forces to conserve gas, save a forest or stave off climate change, arguments have been made for the power of a dedicated few or the strength of numbers. It also has been a mystery what tips a group dynamic from powerful to unproductive. Scientists at Michigan State University ...

RSV is a common cause of respiratory infection, but there is no vaccine available. It causes flu-like symptoms in healthy adults, but becomes life-threatening in young children and the elderly. It is estimated to cause over 100 000 deaths yearly worldwide. The teams of Research Director Sarah Butcher (Institute of Biotechnology, University of Helsinki) and Professor Ari Helenius (ETH Zurich) have now solved the three-dimensional structure of RSV. "The structural model helps us to understand how infectious viruses are formed. This information can be useful in the intelligent ...

Using drugs to treat an infection could allow other co-existing conditions to flourish, a study in wild animals has shown. Researchers studying wild mice – which typically carry multiple parasitic infections at once – found that when these animals were treated for one type of bug, other infections they had tended to worsen. The findings suggest that infections that co-exist in our bodies can compete with each other to alter disease. Treating one infection may have unintended consequences by enabling others to gain a stronger foothold – perhaps to the overall detriment ...

SAN FRANCISCO—- Testosterone therapy is associated with decreased pain perception in men with low testosterone levels related to opioid (narcotic) pain relievers (analgesics), a new study finds. The results were presented Monday at The Endocrine Society's 95th Annual Meeting in San Francisco. "In this study, we attempted to determine whether testosterone replacement improves pain perception and tolerance, and quality of life in men with low testosterone levels due to narcotic analgesics," said the study's lead author Shehzad Basaria, MD, Medical Director, Section ...

SAN FRANCISCO—- An investigational new drug significantly improved a common and debilitating circadian rhythm sleep disorder that frequently affects people who are completely blind, a multicenter study finds. The results were presented Monday at The Endocrine Society's Annual Meeting in San Francisco. The new drug, called tasimelteon, selectively targets the master body clock in the brain, which controls the timing of the sleep-wake cycle, alertness patterns and the timing of some hormones, as well as many other aspects of physiology and metabolism. This study found that ...

SAN FRANCISCO—- Postmenopausal women had better improvement in verbal learning and memory after receiving treatment with testosterone gel, compared with women who received sham treatment with a placebo, a new study found. Results were presented Monday at The Endocrine Society's 95th Annual Meeting in San Francisco. "This is the first large, placebo-controlled study of the effects of testosterone on mental skills in postmenopausal women who are not on estrogen therapy," said principal investigator Susan Davis, MBBS (MD), PhD, of Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. ...

SAN FRANCISCO-- Exposure to a high-fat diet in the womb and after birth can permanently change the cells in the brain that control food intake, predisposing monkeys to overeating and an increased preference for fatty and sugary foods, a new study finds. The results were presented Monday at The Endocrine Society's 95th Annual Meeting in San Francisco. The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, also found that male offspring of maternal monkeys that ate a high-fat diet had increased body weight, ...

SAN FRANCISCO-- The naturally occurring hormone kisspeptin effectively induces egg maturation during infertility treatment, according to a clinical in vitro fertilization (IVF) study. The results were presented Monday at The Endocrine Society's 95th Annual Meeting in San Francisco. Aptly named after the popular chocolate Hershey's kiss candy, kisspeptin was discovered in Hershey, PA, in 1996. Released by the brain in both males and females, the hormone triggers the development of secondary sexual characteristics and other changes of puberty. Each year, thousands of ...

An antibiotic has been found to stimulate its own production. The findings, to be published in PNAS, could make it easier to scale up antibiotic production for commercialisation. Scientists Dr Emma Sherwood and Professor Mervyn Bibb from the John Innes Centre were able to use their discovery of how the antibiotic is naturally produced to markedly increase the level of production. "We have shown for the first time that an antibiotic with clinical potential can act as signalling molecule to trigger its own synthesis," said Professor Bibb. The antibiotic called planosporicin ...

This news release is available in German. Washington/Leipzig/Sydney. The pesticides, many of which are currently used in Europe and Australia, are responsible for reducing the regional diversity of invertebrates in streams and rivers by up to 42 percent, researchers report in the Proceedings of the US Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Mikhail A. Beketov and Matthias Liess from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig, together with Ben Kefford from the University of Technology, Sydney and Ralf B. Schäfer from the Institute for Environmental Sciences ...

A new drug called pyrvinium pamoate inhibits aggressive forms of prostate cancer that are resistant to standard drugs, according to a study conducted in an animal model. The results will be presented Monday at The Endocrine Society's 95th Annual Meeting in San Francisco. "Our novel prostate cancer drug works by a unique mechanism of action," said study lead author Jeremy Jones, PhD, assistant professor of molecular pharmacology at City of Hope, Beckman Research Institute, in Duarte, CA. "Thus, it has the potential to treat cancers resistant to currently approved therapies." Prostate ...

Low testosterone worsens the harmful effects of obesity in the nervous system, a new study in mice finds. The results will be presented Monday at The Endocrine Society's 95th Annual Meeting in San Francisco. "Low testosterone and obesity are common in aging men, and each is associated with type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer's disease," said the study's lead investigator, Anusha Jayaraman, PhD, of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "Our new findings demonstrate that obesity and low testosterone combine to not only increase the risk of diabetes but also damage ...

A special type of in vitro fertilization, or IVF, may increase the risk for insulin resistance among children conceived in this way, according to a new study from Greece. The results will be presented Monday at The Endocrine Society's 95th Annual Meeting in San Francisco. During natural fertilization, as well as other IVF treatments, the egg is exposed to many sperm. In both of these cases, the strongest, healthiest sperm has the best chance of reaching and fertilizing the egg. In contrast, the type of assisted reproductive technology, or ART, examined in this study ...

A missing brain enzyme increases concentrations of a protein related to pain-killer addiction, according to an animal study. The results will be presented Monday at The Endocrine Society's 95th Annual Meeting in San Francisco. Opioids are pain-killing drugs, derived from the opium plant, which block signals of pain between nerves in the body. They are manufactured in prescription medications like morphine and codeine, and also are found in some illegal drugs, like heroin. Both legal and illegal opioids can be highly addictive. In addition to the synthetic opioids, natural ...

A new study shows that the predator-prey relationship can affect the flow of carbon through an ecosystem. This previously unmeasured influence on the environment may offer a new way of looking at biodiversity management and carbon storage for climate change. The study, conducted by researchers at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, comes out this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It looks at the relationship between grasshoppers and spiders—herbivores and predators in the study's food chain—and how it affects the movement of ...

CHICAGO --- Young women who have cancer treatment often lose their fertility because chemotherapy and radiation can damage or kill their immature ovarian eggs, called oocytes. Now, Northwestern Medicine® scientists have found the molecular pathway that can prevent the death of immature ovarian eggs due to chemotherapy, potentially preserving fertility and endocrine function. Scientists achieved this in female mice by adding a currently approved chemotherapy drug, imatinib mesylate, to another chemotherapy drug cisplatin. The results will be presented Monday, June 17, ...

BOSTON -- Many men with low-risk, localized prostate cancers can safely choose active surveillance or "watchful waiting" instead of undergoing immediate treatment and have better quality of life while reducing health care costs, according to a study by researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital. Writing in the June 18 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine, the authors said their statistical models showed that "observation is a reasonable and, in some situations, cost-saving alternative to initial treatment" for the estimated 70 percent ...

San Francisco, CA— Desiccated thyroid extract (DTE), derived from crushed preparations of animal thyroid glands, is a safe and effective alternative to standard T4 therapy in hypothyroid patients, a new study finds. The results will be presented Monday at The Endocrine Society's 95th Annual Meeting in San Francisco. In adults, untreated hypothyroidism leads to poor mental and physical performance. It also can cause high blood cholesterol levels that can lead to heart disease. The condition is treated with Levothyroxine, a synthetic (laboratory-made) form of T4 that is ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Mayo Clinic and other researchers have shown that a vaccine given to newborns is at least 60 percent effective against rotavirus in Ghana. Rotavirus causes fever, vomiting and diarrhea, which in infants can cause severe dehydration. In developed nations, the condition often results in an emergency room visit or an occasional hospitalization, but is rarely fatal. In developing countries, however, rotavirus-related illness causes approximately 500,000 deaths per year. The findings appear this week in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. Currently, there ...

ST. LOUIS -- In research published in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, Saint Louis University researchers describe a technology that can detect new, previously unknown viruses. The technique offers the potential to screen patients for viruses even when doctors have not identified a particular virus as the likely source of an infection. In the new approach, scientists use blood serum as a biological source to categorize and discover viruses. Taking advantage of the complete deciphering of the human genome, SLU researchers used a next-generation ...

An initiative that combines a multidisciplinary health care approach with a range of preventive measures could cut the rate of a common airway infection among children in intensive care by more than half, a new study suggests. The research, led by a team at Nationwide Children's Hospital, appears in the June issue of the journal Pediatric Critical Care Medicine. Ventilator-associated tracheobronchitis—VAT for short—is a lower respiratory infection caused by a buildup of bacteria in the airway. Ordinarily, these small organisms are easily cleared, but being on a ventilator ...

NEW YORK (June 17, 2013)—Obese adolescents are more likely than their normal-weight counterparts to have hearing loss, according to results of a new study. Findings showed that obese adolescents had increased hearing loss across all frequencies and were almost twice as likely to have unilateral (one-sided) low-frequency hearing loss. The study was recently e-published by The Laryngoscope, a journal published by the American Laryngological, Rhinological and Otological Society. "This is the first paper to show that obesity is associated with hearing loss in adolescents," ...

When it comes to confronting childhood obesity, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health conclude that community-based approaches are important. A systematic review of childhood obesity prevention programs found that community-based intervention programs that incorporate schools and focus on both diet and physical activity are more effective at preventing obesity in children. The results of the study appear online in Pediatrics. "In measuring the effectiveness of community-based programs that impact childhood obesity – more comprehensive interventions ...

NEW YORK, NY (June 17, 2013) – A team from the New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute and the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center of Columbia University has generated patient-specific beta cells, or insulin-producing cells, that accurately reflect the features of maturity-onset diabetes of the young (MODY). The researchers used skin cells of MODY patients to produce induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, from which they then made beta cells. Transplanted into a mouse, the stem cell-derived beta cells secreted insulin in a manner similar to that of the beta ...

LA JOLLA, CA – June 17, 2013 – An international team led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University has identified a highly promising new anti-tuberculosis compound that attacks the tuberculosis (TB) bacterium in two different ways. "These findings represent an effort to help solve one of the major global health crises of our time—the resurgence of TB and its dangerous drug-resistant strains," said Peter G. Schultz, the Scripps Family Chair Professor of Chemistry ...