Eprobe®, a highly efficient and reliable fluorescent probe for PCR DNA amplification techniques and DNA analysis in hybridization experiments, has been developed by researchers from RIKEN and Japanese firm K.K.DNAFORM. This technology will enable the development of new, advanced assays for DNA-based genetic testing and help to bring the benefits of genome-wide sequencing studies to patients in the clinic. Takeshi Hanami, Diane Delobel and colleagues from the RIKEN Center for Life Science Technologies, the RIKEN Preventive Medicine & Diagnosis Innovation Program, and K.K.DNAFORM ...

Life is not a walk in the park for the world's largest bacteria, that live as soft, noodle-like, white strings on the bottom of the ocean depths. Without being able to fend for themselves, they get invaded by parasitic microorganisms that steal the nutrition, that they have painstakingly retreived. This newly discovered bizarre deep ocean relationship may ultimately impact ocean productivity, report researchers from University of Southern Denmark now in the scientific journal Nature. At the bottom of the eastern Pacific off Mexico we find one of the largest bacteria in ...

People experiencing sudden cardiac arrest at exercise facilities have a higher chance of survival than at other indoor locations, likely due to early CPR and access to an automated external defibrillator (AED), among other factors, according to a study published online today in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The findings underscore the importance of having AEDs in places where people exert themselves and are at greater risk of sudden cardiac arrest. Previous studies have shown that regularly exercising greatly reduces a person's overall risk of sudden ...

Ice ages and warm periods have alternated fairly regularly in the Earth's history: the Earth's climate cools roughly every 100,000 years, with vast areas of North America, Europe and Asia being buried under thick ice sheets. Eventually, the pendulum swings back: it gets warmer and the ice masses melt. While geologists and climate physicists found solid evidence of this 100,000-year cycle in glacial moraines, marine sediments and arctic ice, until now they were unable to find a plausible explanation for it. Using computer simulations, a Japanese, Swiss and American ...

This news release is available in French. Delivering a two-year intervention programme to disruptive kindergarten children could help prevent substance use in adolescence, according to a new study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry. Alcohol and drug use are highly prevalent and problematic among young people, and the link between childhood behaviour problems and adolescent substance misuse is well-recognised. In this study, Canadian researchers set out to examine whether a two-year prevention programme in childhood could stop substance misuse problems ...

Organic solar cells, a new class of solar cell that mimics the natural process of plant photosynthesis, could revolutionise renewable energy - but currently lack the efficiency to compete with the more costly commercial silicon cells. Currently, organic solar cells can achieve as much as 12 per cent efficiency in turning light into electricity, compared with 20 to 25 per cent for silicon-based cells. Now, researchers have discovered that manipulating the 'spin' of electrons in these solar cells dramatically improves their performance, providing a vital breakthrough ...

One of the many counterintuitive and bizarre insights of quantum mechanics is that even in a vacuum—what many of us think of as an empty void—all is not completely still. Low levels of noise, known as quantum fluctuations, are always present. Always, that is, unless you can pull off a quantum trick. And that's just what a team led by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has done. The group has engineered a miniature silicon system that produces a type of light that is quieter at certain frequencies—meaning it has fewer quantum fluctuations—than ...

Genomic sequencing experts at Johns Hopkins partnered with pharmacologists at Stony Brook University to reveal a striking mutational signature of upper urinary tract cancers caused by aristolochic acid, a plant compound contained in herbal remedies used for thousands of years to treat a variety of ailments such as arthritis, gout and inflammation. Their discovery is described in the Aug. 7 issue of Science Translational Medicine. Aristolochic [pronounced a-ris-to-lo-kik] acid is found in the plant family "Aristolochia," a vine known widely as birthwort, and while the ...

While it is well known that there is a strong genetic basis to both diabetes and obesity, and that they are linked, Australian researchers say that there are many rare genetic variants involved, which will pose a significant challenge in the quest to develop effective therapies. Type 2 diabetes is a metabolic disorder that occurs when the body becomes less able to produce and use insulin effectively, a hormone essential for maintaining normal metabolism of food. The disorder is commonly associated with a high-sugar, high-fat diet combined with lack of exercise. A ...

This news release is available in German. Recognising movement and its direction is one of the first and most important processing steps in any visual system. By this way, nearby predators or prey can be detected and even one's own movements are controlled. More than fifty years ago, a mathematical model predicted how elementary motion detectors must be structured in the brain. However, which nerve cells perform this job and how they are actually connected remained a mystery. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried have now come one ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- The human brain has 100 billion neurons, connected to each other in networks that allow us to interpret the world around us, plan for the future, and control our actions and movements. MIT neuroscientist Sebastian Seung wants to map those networks, creating a wiring diagram of the brain that could help scientists learn how we each become our unique selves. In a paper appearing in the Aug. 7 online edition of Nature, Seung and collaborators at MIT and the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Germany have reported their first step toward this goal: ...

VIDEO: This 3-D image (looking toward the east) from TRMM PR data reveals that towering storms in the northeastern side of Henriette's eye were reaching height of almost 16.75km (~10.41 miles).... Click here for more information. NASA's TRMM satellite peered into the clouds of Hurricane Henriette as is continues moving through the Eastern Pacific Ocean, and found powerful thunderstorms that topped 10 miles high. The higher the thunderstorms are, the more powerful the uplift ...

Tropical Storm Mangkhut had some strong thunderstorms around its center as it began making landfall in northern Vietnam on Aug. 7. Infrared data from NASA's Aqua satellite showed very cold cloud top temperatures of those strong thunderstorms as it passed overhead. On Aug. 6 at 20:55 UTC (4:55 p.m. EDT) NASA's Aqua satellite flew over Mangkhut as it tracked west-northwest through the Gulf of Tonkin on its way to a landfall. Aqua's Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument captured infrared data that showed that cloud top temperatures of some thunderstorms around ...

NEW YORK, NY (August 7, 2013) — Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center, working with their collaborators at the Hospital for Special Surgery, have created a fleet of molecular "robots" that can home in on specific human cells and mark them for drug therapy or destruction. The nanorobots—a collection of DNA molecules, some attached to antibodies —were designed to seek a specific set of human blood cells and attach a fluorescent tag to the cell surfaces. Details of the system were published July 28, 2013, in the online edition of Nature Nanotechnology. "This ...

SAN FRANCISCO – August 7, 2013 – Researchers in Taiwan have discovered that people with sleep apnea are far more likely to develop glaucoma compared to those without the sleep condition. The results of this study, which is the first to calculate the risk of the disease among people with the sleep disorder following diagnosis, is published in this month's edition of Ophthalmology, the journal of the American Academy of Ophthalmology. Conducted by researchers at Taipei Medical University, the retrospective study, "Obstructive Sleep Apnea and Increased Risk of Glaucoma," ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – If you forget where you put your car keys and you can't seem to remember things as well as you used to, the problem may well be with the GluN2B subunits in your NMDA receptors. And don't be surprised if by tomorrow you can't remember the name of those darned subunits. They help you remember things, but you've been losing them almost since the day you were born, and it's only going to get worse. An old adult may have only half as many of them as a younger person. Research on these biochemical processes in the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State ...

As cloud tops fall, their temperature rises, and infrared data from NASA's Aqua satellite saw that happening as Tropical Storm Gil weakened. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument captured an infrared picture of Tropical Storm Gil on Aug. 6 at 22:59 UTC (6:59 p.m. EDT). The AIRS data showed that cloud top temperatures had warmed since the day before, indicating that the thunderstorms that make up the tropical cyclone didn't have as much punch, or uplift to form more powerful storms. AIRS imagery is false-colored to show temperature and is created at NASA's ...

An experimental drug designed to block the advance of type 1 diabetes in its earliest stages has proven strikingly effective over two years in about half of the patients who participated in the phase 2 clinical trial. Patients who benefited most were those who still had relatively good control of their blood sugar levels and only a moderate need for insulin injections when the trial began. With the experimental drug, teplizumab, they were able to maintain their level of insulin production for the full two years -- longer than with most other drugs tested against ...

On July 26, 2013, thunderstorms passed over southern Oregon, and lightning ignited dozens of difficult-to-control wildfires. Persistently dry weather since the beginning of 2013 had primed forests to burn, and nearly all of southern Oregon was in a state of severe or moderate drought. In early August, forecasters were expecting the situation to worsen. On August 5, 2013, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on Aqua captured the top image, which shows smoke rising from the Douglas Complex fire and the Big Windy Complex fire in southern Oregon. To the ...

RESTON, VIRGINIA – Research findings published today in PLOS ONE report that the setting in which a scientific peer review panel evaluates grant applications does not necessarily impact the outcome of the review process. However, the research found that the average amount of discussion panelists engage in during the review is reduced. The investigation examined more than 1,600 grant application reviews coordinated by the American Institute of Biological Sciences Scientific Peer Advisory and Review Services (AIBS SPARS) on behalf of a federal agency over a four-year period. ...

The summer of 2012 was the most severe wildfire season Russia had faced in a decade. 2013 might be headed in the same direction after an unusual heat wave brought a surge of fire activity in northern Siberia in July. A persistent high-pressure weather pattern in the Russian Arctic—a blocking high—contributed to the heat wave, which saw temperatures reach 32° Celsius (90° Fahrenheit) in the northern city of Norilsk. For comparison, daily July highs in Norilsk average 16° Celsius (61° Fahrenheit). Blocking highs are so named because they block the jet stream from moving ...

High pressures and temperatures cause materials to exhibit unusual properties, some of which can be special. Understanding such new properties is important for developing new materials for desired industrial uses and also for understanding the interior of Earth, where everything is hot and squeezed. A paper in Nature Geoscience highlights a new technique in which small amounts of a sample can be studied while being hot and squeezed within an electron microscope. Use of such a microscopy method permits determination of details down to the scale of a few atoms, including ...

New Rochelle, NY, August 7, 2013—Europa, the ice-covered moon of the planet Jupiter, may be able to support life. NASA has commissioned a team of expert scientists to consider the science goals for a landed spacecraft mission to the surface of Europa, and to investigate the composition and geology of its icy shell and the potential for life within its interior ocean. The NASA-appointed Science Definition Team outlines the main priorities of a future lander mission to Europa to study its potential habitability in an article in Astrobiology, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary ...

The invasion of brain-tumor cells into surrounding tissue requires the same protein molecule that neurons need to migrate into position as they differentiate and mature, according to new research from the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine and published August 7 in the online journal PLOS ONE. The researchers investigated similarities between the transition of neural stem cells into neurons and the process whereby cancer cells invade surrounding tissues. "Both processes involve the mobilization of cells," says Anjen Chenn, director of clinical pathology ...

MAYWOOD, Il. – The media have widely reported that retired NFL players are at risk for a neurodegenerative disorder called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which causes symptoms such as aggression, depression, suicidality and progressive dementia. But a study of retired NFL players, led by Christopher Randolph, PhD, of Loyola University Medical Center, has found no evidence to support this theory. Randolph and colleagues report their findings in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society. While there are no clearly defined diagnostic criteria ...