BETHESDA, MD -- The first study to sequence and analyze the entire genome of a HeLa cell line, along with access to its sequence data, has been published today (Wednesday, August 7) in its final version, by G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics, an open-access, scientific journal of the Genetics Society of America. The article, "The Genomic and Transcriptomic Landscape of a HeLa Cell Line," by Landry et al., was authored by scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, and was published in an early online version March 11, 2013. Genomic ...

Organic solar cells that convert light to electricity using carbon-based molecules have shown promise as a versatile energy source but have not been able to match the efficiency of their silicon-based counterparts. Now, researchers have discovered a synthetic, high-performance polymer that behaves differently from other tested materials and could make inexpensive, highly efficient organic solar panels a reality. The polymer, created at the University of Washington and tested at the University of Cambridge in England, appears to improve efficiency by wringing electrical ...

One of the most basic and intensively studied processes in biology—one which has been detailed in biology textbooks for decades—has gained a new level of understanding, thanks to the application of simple math to a problem that scientists never before thought could benefit from mathematics. The scientists who made the discovery, published in this week's advance online publication of Nature, found that the process bacteria use to quickly adapt to metabolize preferred energy sources such as glucose—a process called "catabolite repression"—is controlled not just by glucose, ...

Dogs yawn contagiously when they see a person yawning, and respond more frequently to their owner's yawns than to a stranger's, according to research published August 7 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Teresa Romero and colleagues from the University of Tokyo. Pet dogs in the study watched their owner or a stranger yawn, or mimic a yawning mouth movement, but yawned significantly more in response to their owners' actions than to the strangers' yawns. The dogs also responded less frequently to the fake movements, suggesting they have the ability to yawn contagiously. ...

NEW YORK, AUGUST 7, 2013 — A new study by thoracic surgeons and pathologists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center shows that a specific pattern found in the tumor pathology of some lung cancer patients is a strong predictor of recurrence. Knowing that this feature exists in a tumor's pathology could be an important factor doctors use to guide cancer treatment decisions. According to the study's authors, the findings offer the first scientific evidence that may not only help surgeons identify which patients are more likely to benefit from less radical lung-sparing ...

PHILADELPHIA - Patients with mild, moderate and severe psoriasis had increasingly higher odds of having at least one major medical disease in addition to psoriasis, when compared to patients without psoriasis. Reporting findings in JAMA Dermatology, researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, concluded that the severity of disease, as measured by the percentage of body surface area affected by psoriasis, was strongly linked to an increased presence of other diseases affecting the lungs, heart, kidneys, liver and pancreas. The research ...

Call it the Goldilocks Principle — animals can survive and reproduce only if the temperature is just right. Too hot and they will overheat. Too cold and they will freeze. To stay in their comfort zone, animals have evolved very sensitive temperature sensors to detect the relatively narrow margin in which they can survive. Until recently, scientists knew little about how these sensors operated. Now, a team of Brandeis University scientists has discovered a previously unknown molecular temperature sensor in fruit flies belonging to a protein family responsible for sensing ...

For the longest time, all that was known about this long-extinct mammal was a few little teeth with striking cusps on their occlusal surfaces. "Paleontologists have been wondering for over a hundred years what the animal that went with these teeth might have looked like," said Prof. Dr. Thomas Martin from the Steinmann-Institut of the University of Bonn. The matter was elucidated when locals found a completely preserved skeleton of the enigmatic mammal in Northeast China, which was then aquired by the Paleontological Museum of Liaoning in Shenyang. Together with Dr. Chang-Fu ...

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 ...