Researchers have uncovered mutations in the phosphatase Wip1 that enable cancer cells to foil the tumor suppressor p53, according to a study in The Journal of Cell Biology. The results could provide a new target for the treatment of certain cancers. Like a battlefield surgeon who has to decide which casualties can be saved, p53 performs triage on cells with injured DNA. If the damage is serious, p53 spurs the cells to die or stop proliferating. But after milder hits, p53 activates a DNA damage response (DDR) mechanism, which instigates repairs, and temporarily prevent ...

Physicians from the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) and the University of Calgary have published a review article in the CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) to help family doctors diagnose and treat fibromyalgia. The article represents the first time researchers have published Canadian guidelines to help manage the condition. Fibromyalgia is a chronic condition that affects the central nervous system causing pain throughout the body. It is often accompanied by fatigue, depression and sleep problems. It affects mostly women and their multiple symptoms ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) -- A consortium of scientists from across the country has found that breathing ultrafine particles from a large family of materials that increasingly are found in a host of household and commercial products, from sunscreens to the ink in copy machines to super-strong but lightweight sporting equipment, can cause lung inflammation and damage. The research on two of the most common types of engineered nanomaterials is published online today in Environmental Health Perspectives, the journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). ...

Luxembourg, 6 May 2013 – Scientists from the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) of the University of Luxembourg have discovered that immune cells in the brain can produce a substance that prevents bacterial growth: namely itaconic acid. Until now, biologists had assumed that only certain fungi produced itaconic acid. A team working with Dr. Karsten Hiller, head of the Metabolomics Group at LCSB, and Dr. Alessandro Michelucci has now shown that even so-called microglial cells in mammals are also capable of producing this acid. "This is a ground breaking result," ...

Washington D.C., May 6, 2013 – A study published in the May 2013 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry found that mental health resources provided by schools are significantly associated with whether adolescents with mental disorders receive needed mental health services. In particular, adolescents with disorders attending schools that engage in early identification of emotional problems, are significantly more likely to receive mental health services. Using data from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication Adolescent Supplement ...

VIDEO: Reverse cannibalism: Some male spiders prefer to eat old females rather than mate with them. Click here for more information. The Black Widow spider gets its name from the popular belief that female spiders eat their male suitors after mating. However, a new study has shown that the tendency to consume a potential mate is also true of some types of male spider. The study by Lenka Sentenska and Stano Pekar from Masaryk University in the Czech Republic finds that male ...

A single antibody could be the key to treating multiple myeloma, or cancer of the blood, currently without cure or long-term treatment. "We tested the antibody in various ways, including on tumour cells from myeloma patients that have been transplanted into mice. The tests showed that the antibody is able to destroy myeloma cells", explains Markus Hansson, a researcher at Lund University in Sweden. Using a 'biological library' of thousands of antibodies from the company BioInvent in Lund, the team singled out antibody BI-505, shown to have a powerful effect on the ...

Philadelphia, PA, May 6, 2013 - Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is the most effective acute treatment for severe major depression. However, even with newer forms of ECT, there remains a significant risk of adverse cognitive effects, particularly memory problems. Current theories hold that the regions that need to be stimulated to treat the depression (the cortex) are different and separate from the regions that result in memory problems (the hippocampus and temporal lobes). Theoretically, a more precise form of ECT could have all of the efficacy and few or none of the ...

New York, NY—May 3, 2013—Columbia Engineering researchers have developed a technique to isolate a single water molecule inside a buckyball, or C60, and to drive motion of the so-called "big" nonpolar ball through the encapsulated "small" polar H2O molecule, a controlling transport mechanism in a nanochannel under an external electric field. They expect this method will lead to an array of new applications, including effective ways to control drug delivery and to assemble C60-based functional 3D structures at the nanoscale level, as well as expanding our understanding of ...

Media reports about substances that are supposedly hazardous to health may cause suggestible people to develop symptoms of a disease even though there is no objective reason for doing so. This is the conclusion of a study of the phenomenon known as electromagnetic hypersensitivity. Those affected report experiencing certain symptoms on exposure to electromagnetic waves, such as those emitted by cell phones, and these take the form of physical reactions. With the help of magnetic resonance imaging, it has been demonstrated that the regions of the brain responsible for pain ...

DURHAM, N.C. – Seven years ago, Duke University engineers demonstrated the first working invisibility cloak in complex laboratory experiments. Now it appears creating a simple cloak has become a lot simpler. "I would argue that essentially anyone who can spend a couple thousand dollars on a non-industry grade 3-D printer can literally make a plastic cloak overnight," said Yaroslav Urzhumov, assistant research professor in electrical and computer engineering at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering. Three-dimensional printing, technically known as stereolithographic fabrication, ...

Daejeon, Republic of Korea, May 6th, 2013–-A team led by Professor Keon Jae Lee from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at KAIST has developed in vivo silicon-based flexible large scale integrated circuits (LSI) for bio-medical wireless communication. Silicon-based semiconductors have played significant roles in signal processing, nerve stimulation, memory storage, and wireless communication in implantable electronics. However, the rigid and bulky LSI chips have limited uses in in vivo devices due to incongruent contact with the curvilinear surfaces of ...

PHILADELPHIA (May 6, 2013)— A subtle change to hospital data collection policies could make a big difference in preventing occupational health and safety hazards, according to workplace safety researchers at the Drexel University School of Public Health. In a new article published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, the researchers call on industry, occupational medicine and public health communities to support a change to data collection methods to include industry and occupation data. Every year, nearly four million Americans suffer a workplace ...

PITTSBURGH—A robot can struggle to discover objects in its surroundings when it relies on computer vision alone. But by taking advantage of all of the information available to it — an object's location, size, shape and even whether it can be lifted — a robot can continually discover and refine its understanding of objects, say researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. The Lifelong Robotic Object Discovery (LROD) process developed by the research team enabled a two-armed, mobile robot to use color video, a Kinect depth camera and non-visual information ...

Environment moulds behaviour - and not just that of people in society, but also at the microscopic level. This is because, for their function, neurons are dependent on the cell environment, the so-termed extracellular matrix. Researchers at the Ruhr-Universität have found evidence that this complex network of molecules controls the formation and activity of the neuronal connections. The team led by Dr. Maren Geißler und Prof. Andreas Faissner from the Department of Cell Morphology and Molecular Neurobiology reports in the "Journal of Neuroscience" in collaboration with ...

People who gain weight are more likely to give in to temptations but also are more thoughtful about their actions, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. To understand how fluctuations in body weight might relate to personality changes, psychological scientist Angelina Sutin of the Florida State University College of Medicine and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) examined data from two large-scale longitudinal studies of Baltimore residents. "We know a great deal about ...

This news release is available in Spanish. This research study attempts to identify just how predictable we consumers are with respect to shopping patterns. As explained by one of its authors, Esteban Moro of the Department of Mathematics at UC3M, "the main conclusion we have drawn is that people's behavior is repetitive when it comes to visiting and spending in shops, and as such it is possible to have some success in predicting where we are going to buy in the future". Published in Scientific Reports, the open journal of the Nature group, the study was also produced ...

New Orleans, LA – A national movement to eliminate non-medically indicated (NMI) delivery before 39 weeks has prompted nearly two-thirds of all U.S. hospitals handling non-emergency births to adopt specific policies against the practice, according to new research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The results of the nationwide survey represent a strong step in promoting maternal and perinatal health, and reducing the number of infants requiring admission to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The full results of the survey are being ...

A new species of theropod, or meat-eating dinosaur, an ancient ancestor of today's birds, has been named by newly appointed Wits Evolutionary Studies Institute Senior Researcher Dr. Jonah Choiniere and a team of international researchers. The study about the find, which has been two years in the making, appears in the 3 May 2013 online edition of the prestigious scholarly publication Journal of Systematic Palaeontology. The dinosaur, discovered in a remote region of Xinjiang, northwestern China, is named Aorun zhaoi, after the Dragon King in the Chinese epic tale Journey ...

Amsterdam, NL, May 6, 2013 – Each year more than 1.7 million people in the United States sustain a traumatic brain injury (TBI). The incidence of TBI in older adults poses special diagnostic, management and treatment challenges, say experts in a special collection of papers on TBI in the elderly in NeuroRehabilitation: An Interdisciplinary Journal. "As our understanding of TBI increases, it is becoming clear that its impact is not uniform across the lifespan and that the response of a young brain to a TBI is different from that of an old brain," writes Guest Editor Wayne ...

University of Illinois researchers have developed a new way to produce highly uniform nanocrystals used for both fundamental and applied nanotechnology projects. "We have developed unique approach for the synthesis of highly uniform icosahedral nanoparticles made of platinum (Pt)," explained Hong Yang, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "This is important both in fundamental studies—nanoscience and nanotechnology—and in applied sciences such as high performance fuel cell catalysts." Yang's research ...

DENVER (May 6, 2013) – Despite the popular image of the rich older man or woman supporting an attractive younger spouse, a new study shows those married to younger or older mates have on average lower earnings, lower cognitive abilities, are less educated and less attractive than couples of similar ages. "Hugh Hefner is an outlier," said Hani Mansour, Ph.D., an assistant professor of economics at the University of Colorado Denver who co-authored the study with Terra McKinnish, Ph.D., associate professor of economics at the University of Colorado Boulder. "Our results ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Duke University biomedical engineers have grown three-dimensional human heart muscle that acts just like natural tissue. This advancement could be important in treating heart attack patients or in serving as a platform for testing new heart disease medicines. The "heart patch" grown in the laboratory from human cells overcomes two major obstacles facing cell-based therapies – the patch conducts electricity at about the same speed as natural heart cells and it "squeezes" appropriately. Earlier attempts to create functional heart patches have largely been ...

This news release is available in French. Montreal, May 6, 2013 – Just over a month ago, a young high school student from Halifax committed suicide after photos of her being raped were posted on the Internet. Her story wasn't just about bullying. It was also about the complex feelings her friends and family faced with her decision to take her own life. Such a reaction is common to cultures around the word. New research from Concordia University shows that, no matter where it occurs, a veil of shame and sense of taboo surround suicide. These attitudes often force those ...

A roughly 3.5-mile high Martian mound that scientists suspect preserves evidence of a massive lake might actually have formed as a result of the Red Planet's famously dusty atmosphere, an analysis of the mound's features suggests. If correct, the research could dilute expectations that the mound holds evidence of a large body of water, which would have important implications for understanding Mars' past habitability. Researchers based at Princeton University and the California Institute of Technology suggest that the mound, known as Mount Sharp, most likely emerged as ...