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Medicine11 Sep 2013

Obesity combined with exposure to cigarette smoke may pose new health concerns

Contact: Michael Bernstein m_bernstein@acs.org 317-262-5907 (Indianapolis Press Center, Sept. 6-11) 202-872-6042 Michael Woods m_woods@acs.org 317-262-5907 (Indianapolis Press Center, Sept. 6-11) 202-872-6293 American Chemical Society Obesity combined with exposure to cigarette smoke may pose new health concerns INDIANAPOLIS -- Millions of people who are obese and smoke tobacco may face additional health problems -- including their responses to common prescription medicines -- that extend beyond the well-known links with cancer, heart attacks and stroke, ...

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Medicine11 Sep 2013

Latest research on ingredients that make chocolate, olive oil, tea healthful foods

Contact: Michael Bernstein m_bernstein@acs.org 317-262-5907 (Indianapolis Press Center, Sept. 6-11) 202-872-6042 Michael Woods m_woods@acs.org 317-262-5907 (Indianapolis Press Center, Sept. 6-11) 202-872-6293 American Chemical Society Latest research on ingredients that make chocolate, olive oil, tea healthful foods INDIANAPOLIS, Sept. 11, 2013 — The scientific spotlight focuses today on the healthful antioxidant substances in red wine, dark chocolate, olive oil, coffee, tea, and other foods and dietary supplements that are enticing millions of consumers ...

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Medicine11 Sep 2013

T-rays offer potential for earlier diagnosis of melanoma

Contact: Michael Bernstein m_bernstein@acs.org 317-262-5907 (Indianapolis Press Center, Sept. 6-11) 202-872-6042 Michael Woods m_woods@acs.org 317-262-5907 (Indianapolis Press Center, Sept. 6-11) 202-872-6293 American Chemical Society T-rays offer potential for earlier diagnosis of melanoma INDIANAPOLIS, Sept. 11, 2013 — The technology that peeks underneath clothing at airport security screening check points has great potential for looking underneath human skin to diagnose cancer at its earliest and most treatable stages, a scientist said here today. The ...

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Technology11 Sep 2013

New technology transforms research in viral biology

Researchers at The Mount Sinai Medical Center have developed an innovative system to test how a virus interacts with cells in the body — to see, for example, what happens in lung cells when a deadly respiratory virus attacks them. In the journal Cell Host & Microbe, investigators say such a technique will not only speed basic research into viral biology, it will also help scientists improve vaccine production, generate novel antiviral compounds, and advance the development of viruses that attack cancer cells. "We have a powerful system in place today to investigate ...

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Technology11 Sep 2013

Robots take over

CORAL GABLES, FL (September 9, 2013) — Recently, the global financial market experienced a series of computer glitches that abruptly brought operations to a halt. One reason for these "flash freezes" may be the sudden emergence of mobs of ultrafast robots, which trade on the global markets and operate at speeds beyond human capability, thus overwhelming the system. The appearance of this "ultrafast machine ecology" is documented in a new study published on September 11 in Nature Scientific Reports. The findings suggest that for time scales less than one second, the financial ...

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Science11 Sep 2013

The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons releases Choosing Wisely list

Rosemont, Ill. – The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) today released a list of specific tests or procedures that are commonly ordered but not always necessary in orthopaedics as part of the Choosing Wisely® campaign, an initiative of the ABIM Foundation. The list identifies five targeted, evidence-based recommendations that can support conversations between patients and physicians about what care is really necessary. The Academy's list identified the following five recommendations: Avoid performing routine post-operative deep vein thrombosis ultrasonography ...

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Science11 Sep 2013

Biologists uncover mechanisms for cholera toxin's deadly effects

Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have identified an underlying biochemical mechanism that helps make cholera toxin so deadly, often resulting in life-threating diarrhea that causes people to lose as much as half of their body fluids in a single day. Two groups of scientists working on fruit flies, mice and cultured human intestinal cells studied cholera toxin, produced by the highly infectious bacterium Vibrio cholerae. They discovered the toxin exerts some of its devastating effects by reducing the delivery of proteins to molecular junctions that ...

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Science11 Sep 2013

Hottest days in some parts of Europe have warmed 4 times more than the global average

Some of the hottest days and coldest nights in parts of Europe have warmed more than four times the global average change since 1950, according to a new paper by researchers from the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Warwick, which is published today (11 September 2013) in the journal 'Environmental Research Letters'. The researchers translated observations of weather into observations of climate change using a gridded dataset of observations stretching back to ...

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Social Science11 Sep 2013

Autistic children with better motor skills more adept at socializing

CORVALLIS, Ore. – In a new study looking at toddlers and preschoolers with autism, researchers found that children with better motor skills were more adept at socializing and communicating. Published online today in the journal Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, this study adds to the growing evidence of the important link between autism and motor skill deficits. Lead author Megan MacDonald is an assistant professor in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences at Oregon State University. She is an expert on the movement skills of children with autism spectrum ...

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Science11 Sep 2013

Tiny number of Asian carp could be big problem for the Great Lakes

WATERLOO, Ont. (Wednesday, September 11, 2013) – A tiny number of Asian carp could establish a population of the invasive fish in the Great Lakes, according to new research from the University of Waterloo. Published this week in the journal Biological Invasions, research from Professor Kim Cuddington of the Faculty of Science at Waterloo indicates that the probability of Asian carp establishment soars with the introduction of 20 fish into the Great Lakes, under some conditions. "Although established Asian carp populations including the Silver and Bighead carps are widely ...

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Science11 Sep 2013

A phone call can change your life: Study finds

They say a phone call can change your life and for colorectal or bowel cancer survivors this is true, a new study by a QUT researcher has found. Associate Professor Anna Hawkes, from QUT's Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation, evaluated the effects of a telephone delivered program called CanChange aimed at improving health outcomes for people diagnosed with bowel cancer. The study was conducted at the Cancer Council Queensland and funded by the Australian Government, Cancer Australia. The CanChange program targeted health behaviours such as levels of physical ...

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Science11 Sep 2013

Global warming could change strength of El Niño

Wednesday, September11: Global warming could impact the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), altering the cycles of El Niño and La Niña events that bring extreme drought and flooding to Australia and many other Pacific-rim countries. New research published in Nature Geoscience using coral samples from Kiribati has revealed how the ENSO cycle has changed over the past 4300 years. This research suggests that external changes have an impact on the strength and timing of El Niño events. "Our research has showed that while the development of La Niña and El Niño events is chaotic ...

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Science11 Sep 2013

Selection drives functional evolution of large enzyme families

Researchers at Umeå University in Sweden, together with researchers at the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, show in a new study how natural selection drives functional evolution of a large protein family in conifer trees. The study sheds light on the mechanisms and adaptive significance of gene family evolution. Most structural and regulatory genes in eukaryotes are members of gene families. Over the course of evolution, some duplicate genes are short-lived, losing functionality and ultimately being removed. However, some duplicates persist and diversify ...

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Medicine11 Sep 2013

Mosquito bites deliver potential new malaria vaccine

This study suggests that genetically engineered malaria parasites that are stunted through precise gene deletions (genetically attenuated parasites, or "GAP") could be used as a vaccine that protects against malaria infection. This means that the harmless (attenuated) version of the parasite would interact with the body in the same way as the infective version, but without possibility of causing disease. GAP-vaccination would induce robust immune responses that protect against future infection with malaria. According to the World Health Organization, there were 219 million ...

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Medicine11 Sep 2013

New study discovers copper destroys highly infectious norovirus

Scientists from the University of Southampton have discovered that copper and copper alloys rapidly destroy norovirus – the highly-infectious sickness bug. Worldwide, norovirus is responsible for more than 267 million cases of acute gastroenteritis every year. In the UK, norovirus costs the National Health Service at least £100 million per year, in times of high incidence, and up to 3,000 people admitted to hospital per year in England. There is no specific treatment or vaccine, and outbreaks regularly shut down hospital wards and care homes, requiring expensive deep-cleaning, ...

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Environment11 Sep 2013

Airbrushing could facilitate large-scale manufacture of carbon nanofibers

Researchers from North Carolina State University used airbrushing techniques to grow vertically aligned carbon nanofibers on several different metal substrates, opening the door for incorporating these nanofibers into gene delivery devices, sensors, batteries and other technologies. "Because we're using an airbrush, this technique could easily be incorporated into large-scale, high-throughput manufacturing processes," says Dr. Anatoli Melechko, an adjunct associate professor of materials science and engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the work. ...

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Medicine11 Sep 2013

Versatile microRNAs choke off cancer blood supply, suppress metastasis

HOUSTON – A family of microRNAs (miR-200) blocks cancer progression and metastasis by stifling a tumor's ability to weave new blood vessels to support itself, researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center report today in Nature Communications. Patients with lung, ovarian, kidney or triple-negative breast cancers live longer if they have high levels of miR-200 expression, the researchers found. Subsequent experiments showed for the first time that miR-200 hinders new blood vessel development, or angiogenesis, and does so by targeting cytokines interleukin-8 ...

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Medicine11 Sep 2013

Transplanting fat may be effective treatment for metabolic disease

Transplanting fat may treat such inherited metabolic diseases as maple syrup urine disease (MSUD) by helping the body process the essential amino acids that these patients cannot, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers. The researchers are targeting maple syrup urine disease because it disproportionately affects the Amish and Mennonites who reside in the central Pennsylvania communities surrounding the College of Medicine and its hospital, Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. The team transplanted up to two grams of fat into either abdomens ...

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Medicine11 Sep 2013

How schizophrenia affects the brain

It's hard to fully understand a mental disease like schizophrenia without peering into the human brain. Now, a study by University of Iowa psychiatry professor Nancy Andreasen uses brain scans to document how schizophrenia impacts brain tissue as well as the effects of anti-psychotic drugs on those who have relapses. Andreasen's study, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, documented brain changes seen in MRI scans from more than 200 patients beginning with their first episode and continuing with scans at regular intervals for up to 15 years. The study is considered ...

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Medicine11 Sep 2013

Drug treatment means better, less costly care for children with sickle cell disease

The benefits of hydroxyurea treatment in people with sickle cell disease are well known -- fewer painful episodes, fewer blood transfusions and fewer hospitalizations. Now new research from the Johns Hopkins Children's Center and other institutions reveals that by preventing such complications, the drug can also considerably lower the overall cost of medical care in children with this condition. The cost-benefit analysis, described online Sept. 2 in the journal Pediatrics and believed to be the first of its kind in pediatric patients, showed that children whose standard ...

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Science11 Sep 2013

New system allows cloud customers to detect program-tampering

CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- For small and midsize organizations, the outsourcing of demanding computational tasks to the cloud — huge banks of computers accessible over the Internet — can be much more cost-effective than buying their own hardware. But it also poses a security risk: A malicious hacker could rent space on a cloud server and use it to launch programs that hijack legitimate applications, interfering with their execution. In August, at the International Cryptology Conference, researchers from MIT and Israel's Technion and Tel Aviv University presented a new system that ...

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Medicine11 Sep 2013

Development of a new program that simulates protein movements

This news release is available in Spanish and Spanish. Proteins are molecules involved in most of the biological processes that take place in our bodies. They have to move in order to fulfil many of their functions. For example, they open or close to keep and transport the molecules inside them. Until now, costly methods were the only available option for studying these movements: supercomputers were needed and the calculations took many days. The department of mechanics of the Faculty of Engineering in Bilbao has now developed a shorter method. On the basis of ...

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Science11 Sep 2013

'Merlin' is a matchmaker, not a magician

Johns Hopkins researchers have figured out the specific job of a protein long implicated in tumors of the nervous system. Reporting on a new study described in the Sept. 12 issue of the journal Cell, they detail what they call the "matchmaking" activities of a fruit fly protein called Merlin, whose human counterpart, NF2, is a tumor suppressor protein known to cause neurofibromatosis type II when mutated. Merlin (which stands for Moesin-Ezrin-Radixin-Like Protein) was already known to influence the function of another protein, dubbed Hippo, but the particulars of that ...

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Science11 Sep 2013

Fires in Argentina Sept. 11, 2013

Wildfires have broken out in four provinces in Argentina including forest land in Cordoba. The high temperatures and gusty winds have wreaked havoc on the growth of these wildfires and the local meteorologists predict more of the same conditions in the coming days. According to the Miami Herald: "Cordoba Social Development Minister Daniel Passerini said Tuesday that firefighters are having the toughest time in the central province (near Cordoba) with flames fanned by wind gusts and high temperatures. Passerini says the blaze in Cordoba province has caused the evacuation ...

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Space11 Sep 2013

NASA 3-D image clearly shows wind shear's effect on Tropical Storm Gabrielle

Data obtained from NASA's TRMM satellite was used to create a 3-D image of Tropical Storm Gabrielle's rainfall that clearly showed wind shear pushed all of the storm's the rainfall east of its center. NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite known as "TRMM" flew directly above tropical Storm Gabrielle on September 10, 2013 at 2124 UTC (5:24 p.m. EDT) as the storm approached Bermuda. TRMM's Precipitation Radar (PR) data found that rain was falling at a rate of over 127mm/~5 inches per hour in a line of intense storms southeast of Bermuda. TRMM PR also found ...

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