BOSTON (Wednesday, October 9, 2013, 5:00 pm ET) — Researchers from Tufts University School of Medicine and the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences have identified a possible topical treatment for age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in a study of mice that shows promise for clinical use. The research findings, published today in PLOS ONE, are the first to report successful topical use of a compound capable of inhibiting symptoms associated with both dry AMD (the earlier form) and wet AMD (the rarer, later form) and could represent a breakthrough for treatment ...

Forest cover around the world will continue a slow shrinking before stabilizing at a lower level, according to a new study from the University of Guelph. Researchers analyzed forest trends from around the world and developed a mathematical model to show future land use changes. They found the most likely model shows forests will decline from 30 per cent of Earth's land mass today to 22 per cent within the next two centuries. The model discusses different scenarios, such as global forest growth reversing deforestation, or reforestation cut short by renewed losses. ...

A panel of 15 medical experts from the fields of radiology, obstetrics-gynecology and emergency medicine, convened by the Society of Radiologists in Ultrasound (SRU), has recommended new criteria for use of ultrasonography in determining when a first trimester pregnancy is nonviable (has no chance of progressing and resulting in a live-born baby). These new diagnostic thresholds, published Oct. 10 in the New England Journal of Medicine, would help to avoid the possibility of physicians causing inadvertent harm to a potentially normal pregnancy. "When a doctor tells a ...

An individual’s race or ethnic background could be a determining factor when it comes to risk of atrial fibrillation, the most frequently diagnosed type of irregular heart rhythm, according to researchers at UC San Francisco. In a study to be published online October 8 and in the November 12 issue of Circulation, researchers discovered that self-described non-Hispanic whites are more likely to develop atrial fibrillation than people from other race or ethnic groups. “We found that consistently, every other race had a statistically significant lower risk of atrial ...

A research team, headed by Theodore Friedmann, MD, professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, says a gene mutation that causes a rare but devastating neurological disorder known as Lesch-Nyhan syndrome appears to offer clues to the developmental and neuronal defects found in other, diverse neurological disorders like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases. The findings, published in the October 9, 2013 issue of the journal PLOS ONE, provide the first experimental picture of how gene expression errors impair the ...

Using the Food and Drug Administration's Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), a hospital electronic health records database, and an animal model, a team of researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai report that by adding a second drug to the diabetes drug rosiglitazone, adverse events dropped enormously. That suggests that drugs could be repurposed to improve drug safety, including lowering the risk of heart attacks. The research is published online Oct. 9 in the journal Science Translational Medicine. The approach is part of an emerging strategy ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Video ratings data of surgeons' operating skills successfully predicted whether patients would suffer complications after they leave the operating room, according to a University of Michigan Health System study. The study assessed the relationship between the technical skill of 20 bariatric surgeons and post-surgery complications in 10,343 patients undergoing common, but complex laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery. High skill surgeons, as rated by their peers, had significantly fewer post-surgery complications such as bleeding or infections, according ...

Some breast cancer drugs can penetrate the blood-brain barrier (BBB), but they have not been very effective against brain metastases, whereas other, more effective anti-breast cancer drugs cannot penetrate the BBB at all. In a study published October 9 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, researchers used a new approach to selectively permeabilize the BBB at sites of brain metastases, even those 200 times smaller than currently detectable in the clinic. To facilitate drug delivery to brain metastases, John Connell of the CRUK/MRC Gray Institute for Radiation ...

LA JOLLA, CA—October 9, 2013—Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have identified a set of compounds that may be used to treat multiple sclerosis (MS) in a new way. Unlike existing MS therapies that suppress the immune system, the compounds boost a population of progenitor cells that can in turn repair MS-damaged nerve fibers. One of the newly identified compounds, a Parkinson's disease drug called benztropine, was highly effective in treating a standard model of MS in mice, both alone and in combination with existing MS therapies. "We're excited about ...

Ecological and societal disruptions by modern climate change are critically determined by the time frame over which climates shift. Camilo Mora and colleagues in the College of Social Sciences' Department of Geography at the University of Hawaii, Manoa have developed one such time frame. The study, entitled "The projected timing of climate departure from recent variability," will be published in the October 10 issue of Nature and provides an index of the year when the mean climate of any given location on Earth will shift continuously outside the most extreme records experienced ...

Researchers have come one step closer to understanding unstable atomic nuclei. A team of researchers from RIKEN, the University of Tokyo and other institutions in Japan and Italy has provided evidence for a new nuclear magic number in the unstable, radioactive calcium isotope 54Ca. In a study published today in the journal Nature, they show that 54Ca is the first known nucleus with 34 neutrons (N) where N = 34 is a magic number. The protons and neutrons inside the atomic nucleus exhibit shell structures in a manner similar to electrons in an atom. For naturally stable ...

A new method of imaging cells is allowing scientists to see tiny structures inside the 'control centre' of the cell for the first time. The microscopic technique, developed by researchers at Queen Mary University of London, represents a major advance for cell biologists as it will allow them to investigate structures deep inside the cell, such as viruses, bacteria and parts of the nucleus in depth. Recent advances in optical physics have made it possible to use fluorescent microscopy to study complex structures smaller than 200 nanometres (nm) – around 500 times smaller ...

New technology has enabled scientists to prove that most people with type 1 diabetes have active beta cells, the specialised insulin-making cells found in the pancreas. Type 1 diabetes occurs when the body's immune system destroys the cells making insulin, the substance that enables glucose in the blood to gain access to the body's cells. It was previously thought that all of these cells were lost within a few years of developing the condition. However, new research led by the University of Exeter Medical School, which has been funded by Diabetes UK and published in ...

A group of physicists from Canada have been growing their own icicles in a lab in the hope of solving a mystery that has, up until now, continued to puzzle scientists. The presence of characteristic ripples along the surface of icicles, which remarkably have the same wavelength no matter how big the icicle or where in the world it grows, have led to several studies examining exactly how the ripples form. In a new study published today, 10 October, in the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society's New Journal of Physics, the researchers, from the University ...

The global wheat industry sometimes loses as much as $1 billion a year because prolonged rainfall and high humidity contribute to grains germinating before they are fully mature. The result is both a lower yield of wheat and grains of inferior quality. This phenomenon, known as pre-harvest sprouting or PHS, has such important economic repercussions for farmers around the world that scientists have been working on finding a solution to the problem for at least a couple of decades. Their focus has been on genetic factors, and on the interaction between genotypes and the environment ...

(Cincinnati, OH) - Today, a new study from P&G Beauty, the makers of SecretTM deodorants, and lead investigator Pamela Dalton, PhD. MPH, member of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, confirms for the first time that the smell of stress sweat does, in fact, significantly alter how women are perceived by both males and females. Results of the study, published on October 9, 2013 in PLOS ONE, indicate that the odor from stress-related sweat specifically impacts social judgments of one's confidence, trustworthiness and competence. The ability of human body odor to communicate ...

VIDEO: These are movies of three icicles grown under identical conditions of ambient temperature, water supply rate, and nozzle temperature. (1) was made with distilled water only; (2) was made with... Click here for more information. TORONTO, ON – Though it's barely the beginning of autumn, scientists at the University of Toronto are one step closer to explaining why winter's icicles form with Michelin Man-like ripples on their elongated shapes. Experimental physicist ...

Four decades of nutrition research funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be invalid because the method used to collect the data was seriously flawed, according to a new study by the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina. The study, led by Arnold School exercise scientist and epidemiologist Edward Archer, has demonstrated significant limitations in the measurement protocols used in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). The findings, published in PLOS ONE (The Public Library of Science), ...

Using mice, lab-grown cells and clues from a related disorder, Johns Hopkins researchers have greatly increased understanding of the causes of systemic sclerosis, showing that a critical culprit is a defect in the way certain cells communicate with their structural scaffolding. They say the new insights point the way toward potentially developing drugs for the disease, which affects approximately 100,000 people in the United States. "Until now we've had little insight and no effective treatment strategies for systemic sclerosis, and many patients die within a year of ...

October 9, 2013 - There is no such thing as objectivity when it comes to your friends: According to a new study, people evaluate their friends' behavior more positively than do strangers, regardless of actual performance on a series of tasks. Researchers say that we should then think twice before allowing people who know each other to be in positions to judge each other – from job interviews to legal settings. "In judging people we already know, we are more or less unable to ignore our previously established images of those people," says Daniel Leising of Technische ...

Alexandria, VA – An important question asked of recent graduates with geoscience majors is why they chose to major in the earth sciences. Recent analysis of over 400 responses from the National Geoscience Student Exit Survey from 71 geoscience departments identified several common answers among the respondents. Of those surveyed, many declared a geoscience major during their formative undergraduate years for a variety of reasons: enjoyment working in the outdoors, a lifelong interest in the subject and desire for career opportunities are among some of the most common. For ...

Fairfax, Va., October 9, 2013—Standard and reduced high-dose volume radiation therapy for muscle-invasive bladder cancer provide comparable tumor control and decreased late toxicity when compared to surgery, according to a study published in the October 1, 2013 print edition of the International Journal of Radiation Oncology ● Biology ● Physics, the official scientific journal of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO). The research is part of the United Kingdom's BC2001 clinical trial, one of the largest randomized trials conducted involving radiation ...

Researchers know that feeding some patients intravenously can save their lives – but also can cause liver damage. Now scientists at the University of Colorado and Children's Hospital Colorado have figured out the likely culprit, one of the ingredients in intravenous food, behind the liver problems. The discovery, published Oct. 9 in Science Translational Medicine, could point the way to better treatments for patients who are medically vulnerable and, often, very young. "We still have more to learn about the optimal mix of lipids for intravenous nutrition," said Ron ...

Terahertz (THz) radiation — radiation in the wavelength range of 30 to 300 microns — is gaining attention due to its applications in security screening, medical and industrial imaging, agricultural inspection, astronomical research, and other areas. Traditional methods of generating terahertz radiation, however, usually involve large and expensive instruments, some of which also require cryogenic cooling. A compact terahertz source — similar to the laser diode found in a DVD player —operating at room temperature with high power has been a dream device in the terahertz community ...

HOUSTON – (Oct. 9, 2013) – Carbyne will be the strongest of a new class of microscopic materials if and when anyone can make it in bulk. If they do, they'll find carbyne nanorods or nanoropes have a host of remarkable and useful properties, as described in a new paper by Rice University theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and his group. The paper appears this week in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano. Carbyne is a chain of carbon atoms held together by either double or alternating single and triple atomic bonds. That makes it a true one-dimensional material, ...