This press release is available in Spanish. Researchers with the joint program between IRB Barcelona and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) have devised a new strategy to study the shape of proteins. This study has been led by Modesto Orozco, head of the Molecular Modeling and Bioinformatics Group, and Xavier Salvatella, head of the Molecular Biophysics Group, both ICREA scientists at IRB Barcelona. According to Orozco, also senior professor of the University of Barcelona and director of the Life Sciences Department at BSC, "by combining computational modeling ...

A new study by University of Pennsylvania linguists shows that the Philadelphia accent has changed in the last century. The traditional Southern inflections associated with Philadelphia native-born speakers are increasingly being displaced by Northern influences. "A Hundred Years of Sound Change," published in the March issue of the journal Language, documents Philadelphia's changing accent through an analysis of speech patterns of city residents spanning more than a century. The study is co-authored by William Labov, professor of linguistics and director of Penn's ...

The level of education of parents has an influence on the frequency with which their children eat foods linked to obesity. The children of parents with low and medium levels of education eat fewer vegetables and fruit and more processed products and sweet drinks. An international group of experts from eight European countries have analysed the relation between parents' levels of education and the frequency with which their children eat food linked to overweight. The Identification and prevention of dietary- and lifestyle-induced health effects in children and infants ...

New research from the Massachusetts Eye and Ear, Harvard Medical School and Harvard Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology may have discovered a key piece in the puzzle of how hearing works by identifying the role of the olivocochlear efferent system in protecting ears from hearing loss. The findings could eventually lead to screening tests to determine who is most susceptible to hearing loss. Their paper is published today in the Journal of Neuroscience. Until recently, it was common knowledge that exposure to a noisy environment (concert, iPod, mechanical ...

Researchers are arguing about whether or not the Xenoturbella bocki worm is the progenitor of mankind. But new studies indicate that this is actually the case. Swedish researchers from the University of Gothenburg and the Gothenburg Natural History Museum are involved in the international study. The results have been published in Nature Communications. The Xenoturbella bocki worm is a one-centimetre long worm with a simple body plan that is only found regularly by the west coast of Sweden. The worm lacks a brain, sexual organs and other vital organs. Zoologists have ...

Some people may joke about living on caffeine, but scientists now have genetically engineered E. coli bacteria to do that — literally. Their report in the journal ACS Synthetic Biology describes bacteria being "addicted" to caffeine in a way that promises practical uses ranging from decontamination of wastewater to bioproduction of medications for asthma. Jeffrey E. Barrick and colleagues note that caffeine and related chemical compounds have become important water pollutants due to widespread use in coffee, soda pop, tea, energy drinks, chocolate and certain medications. ...

Now, a group of researchers led by two astronomers at the University of Toronto suggests that baby stars may grow to great mass if they happen to be born within a corral of older stars –with these surrounding stars favorably arranged to confine and thus feed gas to the younger ones in their midst. The astronomers have seen hints of this collective feeding, or technically "convergent constructive feedback," in a giant cloud of gas and dust called Westerhout 3 (W3), located 6,500 light years from us. Their results are published in April in The Astrophysical Journal. ### ...

PHILADELPHIA (March 27, 2013)— "We call it a 'fish-eat-fish world,' an ecosystem where you really needed to escape predation," said Dr. Ted Daeschler, describing life in the Devonian period in what is now far-northern Canada. This was the environment where the famous fossil fish species Tiktaalik roseae lived 375 million years ago. This lobe-finned fish, co-discovered by Daeschler, an associate professor at Drexel University in the Department of Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science, and associate curator and vice president of the Academy of Natural Sciences of ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Patients receiving antihistamines to suppress stomach acid are at greater risk of infection from Clostridium difficile, or C. diff, a common cause of diarrhea, particularly in health care settings, Mayo Clinic researchers have found. The study focused on histamine 2 receptor antagonists. The researchers found no significant risk for people taking over-the-counter antihistamine drugs, however. The findings appear in the online journal PLOS ONE. Researchers reviewed 35 observations based on 33 separate studies involving C. diff and antihistamines used ...

Electronic computing speeds are brushing up against limits imposed by the laws of physics. Photonic computing, where photons replace comparatively slow electrons in representing information, could surpass those limitations, but the components of such computers require semiconductors that can emit light. Now, research from the University of Pennsylvania has enabled "bulk" silicon to emit broad-spectrum, visible light for the first time, opening the possibility of using the element in devices that have both electronic and photonic components. The research was ...

CLEVELAND, Ohio (March 27, 2013)—Getting a good night's sleep isn't always easy for women at menopause. Exercise may help, but women can have a tough time carving out leisure time for it. The good news from a study published online today in Menopause, the journal of the North American Menopause Society, is that higher levels of routine daily physical activity may be the more important key to a better night's sleep for many women who have hot flashes or night sweats. Although exercise is known to improve sleep for people in general, studies in menopausal women haven't ...

The act of talking is not an area where ability is usually considered along gender lines. However, a new study published in Springer's journal Sex Roles has found subtle differences between the sexes in their story-relating ability and specifically the act of reminiscing. The research by Widaad Zaman from the University of Central Florida and her colleague Robyn Fivush from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, discusses how these gender differences in parents can affect children's emotional development. Previous research in this area has concluded that the act of parents ...

In an advance in efforts to reduce the use of animals in testing new cosmetic and other product ingredients for skin allergies, scientists are describing a new, highly accurate non-animal test for these skin-sensitizers. Their study appears in ACS' journal Chemical Research in Toxicology. Bruno Miguel Neves and colleagues explain that concerns about the ethics and costs of animal-based tests for skin sensitizers, plus regulations in the European Union, are fostering a search for alternative tests. Testing product ingredients prior to marketing is important, because allergic ...

Putnam Valley, NY. (March. 27, 2013) – A team of Korean researchers investigated whether "environmental enrichment" can improve the neurobehavioral function of six week-old mice after transplantation of adipose-derived stem cells (ASCs) to treat hypoxic-ischemic brain injury, and found that brain repair (neurogenesis) was aided in some animals through exercise-induced fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2), a strong pro-angiogenic factor. The post-transplantation environmental enrichment (EE) included use of a running wheel and exposure to "novel objects." The study ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Methadone treatment for opioid dependence remains widely unavailable behind bars in the United States, and many inmates are forced to discontinue this evidence-based therapy, which lessens painful withdrawal symptoms. Now a new study by researchers from the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights, a collaboration of The Miriam Hospital and Brown University, offers some insight on the consequences of these mandatory withdrawal policies. According to their research, published online by the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment and appearing in the ...

A new study raises concerns about possible health impacts of very small particles of soot released from the "improved cookstoves" that international aid agencies are promoting to replace open-fire cooking in developing countries. It appears in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology. Brian Just and colleagues point out that 3 billion people worldwide still cook meals on stoves or open fires that burn wood, animal dung or other biomass fuel. These fires, which sometimes are indoors, release air pollutants linked to 3.5 million deaths annually. Soot, or so-called ...

Pregnant women who experienced financial, emotional, or other personal stress in the year before their delivery had an increased chance of having a stillbirth, say researchers who conducted a National Institutes of Health network study. Stillbirth is the death of a fetus at 20 or more weeks of pregnancy. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, in 2006, there was one stillbirth for every 167 births. The researchers asked more than 2,000 women a series of questions, including whether they had lost a job or had a loved one in the hospital in the year before ...

The Antarctic Peninsula – a mountainous region extending northwards towards South America – is warming much faster than the rest of Antarctica. Temperatures have risen by up to 3 oC since the 1950s – three times more than the global average. This is a result of a strengthening of local westerly winds, causing warmer air from the sea to be pushed up and over the peninsula. In contrast to much of the rest of Antarctica, summer temperatures are high enough for snow to melt. This summer melting may have important effects. Meltwater may enlarge cracks in floating ice shelves ...

WORCESTER, MA – Important new research from UMass Medical School demonstrates how exosomes shuttle proteins from neurons to muscle cells where they take part in critical signaling mechanisms, an exciting discovery that means these tiny vehicles could one day be loaded with therapeutic agents, such as RNA interference (RNAi), and directly target disease-carrying cells. The study, published this month in the journal Neuron, is the first evidence that exosomes can transfer membrane proteins that play an important role in cell-to-cell signaling in the nervous system. "There ...

Stronger protections are needed to prevent people with HIV from also becoming infected with hepatitis, researchers argue in a new study led by Michigan State University. Behaviors that put people at higher risk of contracting HIV – sharing needles, having unprotected sex or getting blood transfusions, for instance – also raise their risk of getting hepatitis B or C, diseases that attack the liver and, if untreated, can be deadly. The study, which included all registered cases of HIV in Michigan, found about four percent of HIV-positive people also had hepatitis. That's ...

Homes and buildings chilled without air conditioners. Car interiors that don't heat up in the summer sun. Tapping the frigid expanses of outer space to cool the planet. Science fiction, you say? Well, maybe not any more. A team of researchers at Stanford has designed an entirely new form of cooling structure that cools even when the sun is shining. Such a structure could vastly improve the daylight cooling of buildings, cars and other structures by reflecting sunlight back into the chilly vacuum of space. Their paper describing the device was published March 5 in Nano ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- The proliferation of sensor-studded cellphones could lead to a wealth of data with socially useful applications — in urban planning, epidemiology, operations research and emergency preparedness, among other things. Of course, before being released to researchers, the data would have to be stripped of identifying information. But how hard could it be to protect the identity of one unnamed cellphone user in a data set of hundreds of thousands or even millions? According to a paper appearing this week in Scientific Reports, harder than you might think. Researchers ...

The European Collaborative Oncological Gen-Environmental Study (COGS) project, whose main goal is to decipher the complex genetic bases of breast, prostate and ovarian cancers, publishes today a total of 12 research articles in several prestigious journals, including Nature Genetics, Nature Communications, The American Journal of Human Genetics and PLOS Genetics. Using mass sequencing techniques, the study has identified up to 80 new regions of the genome associated with an increased susceptibility to developing breast, prostate and ovarian cancers. The conclusions are ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Engineers at Oregon State University have developed a new interactive system to create networks of small wetlands in Midwest farmlands, which could help the region prevent massive spring floods and also retain water and mitigate droughts in a warming climate. The planning tool, which is being developed and tested in a crop-dominated watershed near Indianapolis, is designed to identify the small areas best suited to wetland development, optimize their location and size, and restore a significant portion of the region's historic water storage ability by ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — Researchers at UC Davis and the University of British Columbia have shed new light on methylation, a critical process that helps control how genes are expressed. Working with placentas, the team discovered that 37 percent of the placental genome has regions of lower methylation, called partially methylated domains (PMDs), in which gene expression is turned off. This differs from most human tissues, in which 70 percent of the genome is highly methylated. While PMDs have been identified in cell lines, this is the first time they have been found in ...