On Twitter, a popular microblogging and social-networking service, statements about vaccines may have unexpected effects -- positive messages may backfire, according to a team of Penn State University researchers led by Marcel Salathé, an assistant professor of biology. The team tracked the pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine messages to which Twitter users were exposed and then observed how those users expressed their own sentiments about a new vaccine for combating influenza H1N1 -- a virus strain responsible for swine flu. The results, which may help health officials improve ...

This press release is available in German. Freiburg: Two metres of DNA are packed into the cell nucleus, presumably based on a strictly defined arrangement. Researchers working with biologist Patrick Heun from the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg have now succeeded in explaining a phenomenon, which was first observed 40 years ago. The centromeres, namely the structures at the primary constriction of the X-shaped chromosomes, are clustered in a few specific locations in the cell nucleus. Using fruit flies as a model, the researchers ...

Researchers from The Wistar Institute explain a new molecular mechanism behind the phenomenon of oncogene-induced senescence. By depriving the cell of the ability to make new nucleotides—the building blocks of DNA molecules—cells can suppress cancer development by forcing a damaged cell into a senescent state, where the cell remains alive yet cannot reproduce. According to the researchers, their findings may offer a new strategy to strengthen the effects of anti-cancer drugs and chemotherapies. Their results, which appear in the April 25 issue of Cell Reports (available ...

DALLAS – April 4, 2013 – UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers report that a pathogen annually blamed for an estimated 90 million cases of food-borne illness defeats a host's immune response by using a fat-snipping enzyme to cut off cellular communication. "Our findings provide insight into severe bacterial infectious diseases, as well as some forms of cancer, in which the attachment of fat molecules to proteins is an essential feature of the disease process," said Dr. Neal Alto, assistant professor of microbiology and senior author of the study in today's print ...

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified a new set of genetic markers for Alzheimer's that point to a second pathway through which the disease develops. Much of the genetic research on Alzheimer's centers on amyloid-beta, a key component of brain plaques that build up in the brains of people with the disease. In the new study, the scientists identified several genes linked to the tau protein, which is found in the tangles that develop in the brain as Alzheimer's progresses and patients develop dementia. The findings may help ...

Research from New Zealand's University of Otago detailing the fossil of a dwarf baleen whale from Northern California reveals that it avoided extinction far longer than previously thought. Otago Department of Geology PhD student Robert Boessenecker has found that the fossil of the 4-5 meter long Herpetocetus, thought to be the last survivor of the primitive baleen whale family called cetotheres, may be as young as 700,000 years old. Mr Boessenecker says the previously youngest-known fossils of this whale were from the pre-Ice Age Pliocene epoch; approximately 3 million ...

Sight is such a spontaneous activity that we are unaware of the complexity of the brain mechanisms it implies. For instance, we easily recognize objects, which appear to look always the same, without realizing that we observe them from ever-changing points of view and that their image – the luminance profile cast onto the retina –varies significantly each time we look at them. To maintain such "invariance" in the shape, our brain performs procedures that extract from the two-dimensional image "key" visual information that enables us to recognize the object under any condition. ...

In mammals, an individual's sex is determined by the chromosomes it inherits from its parents. Two X chromosomes lead to a female, whereas one X and one Y lead to a male. Y chromosomes are only passed from fathers to sons, so each Y chromosome represents the male genealogy of the animal in question. In contrast, mitochondria are passed on by mothers to all their offspring. This means that an analysis of the genetic material or DNA of mitochondria can give information on the female ancestry. For the modern horse, it is well known that mitochondrial DNA is extremely ...

PHILADELPHIA, April 4, 2013 – – A new report on teen driver safety released today by The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and State Farm® shows encouraging trends among teen passengers. In 2011 more than half of teen passengers (54 percent) reported "always" buckling up. From 2008 to 2011, risky behaviors of teen passengers (ages 15 to 19 years) declined: the number of teen passengers killed in crashes not wearing seat belts decreased 23 percent; the number of teen passengers driven by a peer who had been drinking declined 14 percent; and 30 percent fewer teen ...

Global population data spanning the years from 1900 to 2010 have enabled a research team from the Autonomous University of Madrid to predict that the number of people on Earth will stabilise around the middle of the century. The results, obtained with a model used by physicists, coincide with the UN's downward forecasts. According to United Nations' estimates, the world population in 2100 will be within a range between 15.8 billion people according to the highest estimates –high fertility variant– and 6.2 billion according to the lowest –low fertility variant–, a figure ...

Springtime spells tick-time. Lyme borreliosis is the most common tick-borne disease in Switzerland: around 10,000 people a year become infected with the pathogen. The actual hosts for Borrelia, however, are wild mice. Like in humans, the pathogen is also transmitted by ticks in mice. Interestingly, not all mice are equally susceptible to the bacterium and individual animals are immune to the pathogen. Scientists from the universities of Zurich and Lund headed by evolutionary biologist Barbara Tschirren reveal that the difference in vulnerability among the animals is genetic ...

Researchers at the University of Leeds may have solved a key puzzle about how objects from space could have kindled life on Earth. While it is generally accepted that some important ingredients for life came from meteorites bombarding the early Earth, scientists have not been able to explain how that inanimate rock transformed into the building blocks of life. This new study shows how a chemical, similar to one now found in all living cells and vital for generating the energy that makes something alive, could have been created when meteorites containing phosphorus minerals ...

Professor of neurology, physician, and author Oliver Sacks M.D. has outlined case studies of hallucinations of musical notation, and commented on the neural basis of such hallucinations, in a new paper for the neurology journal Brain. In this paper, Dr Sacks is building on work done by Dominic ffytche et al in 2000 [i], which delineates more than a dozen types of hallucinations, particularly in relation to people with Charles Bonnet syndrome (a condition that causes patients with visual loss to have complex visual hallucinations). While ffytche believes that hallucinations ...

Los Angeles, CA (April 04, 2013). Graduates are taking up jobs that don't fully use their skills and as a result are causing high turnover for employers, claims new research published today in the journal Human Relations, published by SAGE. The findings raise questions about today's high throughput in university education. Policy makers in many developed and developing countries envisioned high-value economies supported in part by a highly-skilled and well-paid workforce. As a result, many nations have increased higher education (HE) access, assuming that employers will ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — The costs of caring for people with dementia in the U.S. are comparable to – if not greater than – those for heart disease and cancer, according to new estimates by researchers at the University of Michigan Health System and nonprofit RAND Corporation. Annual healthcare costs tied to dementia, including both formal and unpaid care, reach $159-$215 billion – rivaling the most costly major diseases – according to the findings that appear in The New England Journal of Medicine. "Our findings show why dementia is sometimes described as a 'slow-motion ...

A standard camera takes flat, 2-D pictures. To get 3-D information, such as the distance to a far-away object, scientists can bounce a laser beam off the object and measure how long it takes the light to travel back to a detector. The technique, called time-of-flight (ToF), is already used in machine vision, navigation systems for autonomous vehicles, and other applications, but many current ToF systems have a relatively short range and struggle to image objects that do not reflect laser light well. A team of Scotland-based physicists has recently tackled these limitations ...

The number of online education offerings has exploded in recent years, but such "virtual" classes have also been plagued by one critical question – can classes offered online cut through the maze of distractions – email, the Internet, TV and more – that face students as they sit in front of a computer? The answer, Harvard researchers say, is to test students early and often. By interspersing online lectures with short tests, student mind wandering decreased by 50 percent, note-taking tripled and overall retention of the material improved, said Daniel Schacter, the ...

In a geological moment about 66 million years ago, something killed off almost all the dinosaurs and some 70 percent of all other species living on Earth. Only those dinosaurs related to birds appear to have survived. Most scientists agree that the culprit in this extinction was extraterrestrial, and the prevailing opinion has been that the party crasher was an asteroid. Not so, say two Dartmouth researchers. Professors Jason Moore and Mukul Sharma of the Department of Earth Sciences favor another explanation, asserting that a high-velocity comet led to the demise of ...

SOUTH BEND, IND. – Scientists from the University of Notre Dame, The Nature Conservancy, and Central Michigan University presented their findings of Asian carp DNA throughout the Great Lakes in a study published in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. "The good news is that we have found no evidence that Asian carp are widespread in the Great Lakes basin, despite extensive surveys in Southern Lake Michigan and parts of lakes Erie and St Clair," said Dr. Christopher Jerde, the paper's lead author and a scientist at the University of Notre Dame, "Looking ...

The genus Megachile is a cosmopolitan group of solitary bees, often called leafcutter bees. This is one of the largest genera of bees, with well over 1,500 species in over 50 subgenera. A new species, Megachile chomskyi, has been found only in Texas, US. What is specific and interesting about this bee is the fact that it is among those insects which exhibit a narrow, specialized preference for pollen sources. Presumably, the irreplaceable host of M. chomskyi are the beautiful flowers of the widespread Onagraceae, or the so-called Evening-Primrose Family. The study has been ...

Owing to the huge array of applications, catalysis has long been dubbed as one of the most significant areas of process and synthetic chemistry. In fact, the vast majority of all chemical industrial products – be it in the field of pharmaceutical, agricultural or polymer chemistry – involve catalysts at some stage of the manufacturing process. Catalytic processes are generally conducted in homogeneous phase using anhydrous organic solvents (e.g. halogenated solvents, toluene, etc.) which are very toxic and hard to eliminate. The development of environmentally friendly ...

The supernova, designated SN UDS10Wil [1], belongs to a special class of exploding stars known as Type Ia supernovae. These bright beacons are prized by astronomers because they can be used as a yardstick for measuring cosmic distances, thereby yielding clues to the nature of dark energy, the mysterious force accelerating the rate of expansion of the Universe. "This new distance record holder opens a window into the early Universe, offering important new insights into how these supernovae form," said astronomer David O. Jones of The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, ...

New Rochelle, NY, April 4, 2013—Pet therapy can help patients cope with the pain, stress, and emotional effects of a serious illness, but access to a companion animal is not always possible. Robotic animals may offer the same benefits, as explored in a fascinating study presented in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free online on the Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking website. Sandra Okita, PhD, Columbia University (New York, NY) evaluated the effectiveness ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C – Viruses have historically been classified into one of two types – those with an outer lipid-containing envelope and those without an envelope. For the first time, researchers at the University of North Carolina have discovered that hepatitis A virus, a common cause of enterically-transmitted hepatitis, takes on characteristics of both virus types depending on whether it is in a host or in the environment. "The whole universe of virology is divided into two types of viruses – viruses that are enveloped and viruses that are not enveloped. If you look ...

The observation that males appear to be superior to females in some fields of academic study has prompted a wealth of research hoping to shed light on whether this is attributable to nature or nurture. Although there is no difference in general intelligence between the sexes, studies over the past 35 years have consistently found that overall men do much better in tests of spatial ability than women. This difference may have something to do with why there are still fewer women in tertiary education studying science, technology, engineering and math – all subjects where ...