Something big is about to happen on the sun. According to measurements from NASA-supported observatories, the sun's vast magnetic field is about to flip. "It looks like we're no more than three to four months away from a complete field reversal," said solar physicist Todd Hoeksema of Stanford University. "This change will have ripple effects throughout the solar system." The sun's magnetic field changes polarity approximately every 11 years. It happens at the peak of each solar cycle as the sun's inner magnetic dynamo re-organizes itself. The coming reversal will ...

A Penn State-led research team has found that changes to proteins called histones, which are associated with DNA, can control whether or not a gene is allowed to function. The changes may be important in maintaining the genes' "expression potential" so that future cells behave as their parent cells did. The discovery, which may have implications for the study of diseases such as cancer, will be published in a print edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research was led by Lu Bai, an assistant professor of biochemistry, molecular biology, ...

UC San Francisco researchers have developed a two-minute assessment tool to help hospital staff predict a patient’s risk of delirium, a change in mental cognition characterized by severe confusion and disorientation that can prolong hospital stays. The condition, which occurs in as many as one in five hospitalized patients, tends to develop rapidly and can lead to higher death rates and increased health care costs. The new tool is designed to be simple, efficient and accurate in helping to assess and treat patients at risk of developing delirium, the scientists ...

Everyone knows all about the epic breeding journey taken each year by generations of monarch butterflies between Mexico and Canada, right? Not so fast, say researchers including University of Guelph biologists. Until now, linking adult butterflies and their birthplaces during a complicated annual migration spanning all of eastern North America and involving up to five generations of the iconic insects had eluded scientists. Now for the first time, researchers have mapped that migration pattern across the continent over an entire breeding season. That information might ...

Penile cancer is rare, with an average of 1,200 new cases per year in the United States, but it can be debilitating and lethal. Without evidenced-based treatment approaches, outcomes have varied widely. Philippe E. Spiess, M.D., an associate member in the Department of Genitourinary Oncology at Moffitt Cancer Center, presented new National Comprehensive Cancer Network Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology to standardize care for penile cancer in an article that appeared in the July issue of the Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. "We wanted to clarify ...

DURHAM, N.H., Aug. 5, 2013 – As sensor networks revolutionize ecological data collection by making it possible to collect high frequency information from remote areas in real time, scientists with the U.S. Forest Service are advocating for automated quality control and quality assurance standards that will make that data reliable. In an article published recently in the journal Bioscience, research ecologists John Campbell and Lindsey Rustad of the U.S. Forest Service's Northern Research Station and colleagues make a case for incorporating automated quality control and ...

Researchers at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center have successfully combined cellular therapy and gene therapy in a mouse-model system to develop a viable treatment strategy for breast cancer that has spread to a patient's brain. The research, led by Carol Kruse, a professor of neurosurgery and member of the Jonsson Cancer Center and the UCLA Brain Research Institute, was published Aug. 1 in the journal Clinical Cancer Research. Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in women, and metastasis is a major cause of health deterioration and death from ...

ST. LOUIS -- In research recently published in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, Alessandro Vindigni, Ph.D., associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Saint Louis University, discovered how cancer cells respond to the damage caused by an important class of anti-cancer drugs, topoisomerase I inhibitors. The discovery points to opportunities to improve chemotherapeutic regimens based on topoisomerase I inhibitor treatment and limit their toxic side effects. "Most cancer chemotherapeutics act by inhibiting DNA replication," Vindigni said. "The drugs ...

A collaborative team of researchers including scientists from UCLA has uncovered evidence that a specific genetic alteration appears to contribute to disorders of brain development, including schizophrenia. They also found that schizophrenia shares a common biological pathway with Fragile X mental retardation syndrome, a disorder associated with both intellectual impairment and autism. A disruption of the gene known as TOP3B was associated with an increased risk of schizophrenia as well as impairment in intellectual function, the researchers said, and TOP3B's interaction ...

Commercial casinos throughout the country are often exempt from smoke-free workplace laws. Now a new study led by UC San Francisco has found that when smoking is banned in casinos, it results in considerably fewer emergency calls for ambulances. The study is the first to examine the health impact of smoking bans in casinos. The authors conclude that if smoke-free laws were to apply to casinos as well as other businesses, it would prevent many medical emergencies and reduce public health costs. "Our study suggests that exempting casinos from smoke-free laws means ...

Hypoxia-inducible factor-1 and its specific target gene heme oxygenase-1 are involved in acute cerebral ischemia. However, very few studies have examined in detail the changes in the hypoxia-inducible factor-1/heme oxygenase-1 signaling pathway in chronic cerebral ischemia. Prof. Zhongxin Xu and team from China-Japan Friendship Hospital, Jilin University clarified that the hypoxia-inducible factor-1/heme oxygenase-1 signaling pathway is activated following chronic cerebral ischemia and involved in the development of cognitive impairment induced by chronic cerebral ischemia. ...

The automatic detection and identification of electroencephalogram waves play an important role in the prediction, diagnosis and treatment of epileptic seizures. Unfortunately, in previous experiments, training data and test data from electroencephalogram signals are often derived from the same cases, which may affect the clinical applicability of the classifiers. Zhen Zhang and colleagues from Zhongshan School of Medicine, Sun Yat-sen University combined a nonlinear dynamics index–approximate entropy with a support vector machine that has strong generalization ability ...

Drug treatment, electric stimulation and decimeter wave therapy have been shown to promote the repair and regeneration of the peripheral nerves at the injured site. Feng Zhao and colleagues from Hebei Medical University investigated the effects of intraoperative electric stimulation and decimeter waves on sciatic nerve regeneration in a Mackinnon's model of rat sciatic nerve compression. These results, published in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 8, No. 21, 2013) verified that intraoperative electric stimulation and decimeter wave therapy contributed to the regeneration ...

Research has shown that weight loss surgery can benefit obese individuals in ways that go beyond shedding pounds, for example by causing early remission of type 2 diabetes. Now scientists have found that the surgery can also reverse the symptoms of fatty liver disease. The findings, which are to be published online on August 6 in the Cell Press journal Cell Metabolism, are derived from research on liver samples in normal and obese patients—some with fatty liver disease and some without fatty liver disease. The results provide another example of the DNA-altering effects ...

Women living in large urban centres in Canada with more than 500 000 inhabitants were at higher risk of postpartum depression than women in other areas, according to a study in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). Postpartum depression is a serious health concern for women and their children around the world. Major risk factors include lack of social support and a history of depression. In Canada, about 20% of people live in rural or remote regions, 35% live in the large urban areas of Montréal, Toronto and Vancouver, with the remaining 45% in semirural or semiurban ...

A new pitfall trap designed to capture bed bugs is more effective than those currently on the market, according to the authors of an article appearing in the next issue of the Journal of Economic Entomology. The authors also found that traps baited with an experimental chemical lure mixture caught 2.2 times as many bed bugs as traps without the lure. Their findings suggest that an effective and affordable bed bug monitor can be made incorporating the new pitfall trap design, a chemical lure, and a sugar-and-yeast mixture to produce carbon dioxide, which is also known to ...

Charlottesville, VA (August 6, 2013). The D-dimer test is often used to rule out the presence of venous thromboembolism; however, the test has been considered unreliable in postoperative patients because D-dimer levels may rise after surgery. Researchers from the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Halle in Germany hypothesized that this rise might be systematic and predictable, in which case a feasible postoperative threshold of D-dimer indicating venous thromboembolism could be determined. The results of this study show that the researchers were able to determine ...

Adults could be at greater risk of becoming anxious and vulnerable to poor mental health if they were deprived of certain hormones while developing in the womb according to new research by scientists at Cardiff and Cambridge universities. New research in mice has revealed the role of the placenta in long-term programming of emotional behaviour and the first time scientists have linked changes in adult behaviour to alterations in placental function. Insulin-like growth factor-2 has been shown to play a major role in foetal and placental development in mammals, and changes ...

"Pressing the button of the lift at your work place, or apartment building is an automatic action – a habit. You don't even really look at the different buttons; your hand is almost reaching out and pressing on its own. But what happens when you use the lift in a new place? In this case, your hand doesn't know the way, you have to locate the buttons, find the right one, and only then your hand can press a button. Here, pushing the button is a goal-directed action." It is with this example that Rui Costa, principal investigator at the Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme ...

VIDEO: Neurosurgeons at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center are among the first in the United States to successfully implant an MRI-safe spinal cord stimulator to help patients suffering from... Click here for more information. COLUMBUS, Ohio – Neurosurgeons at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center are among the first in the United States to successfully implant an MRI-safe spinal cord stimulator to help patients suffering from chronic back or limb ...

Warming oceans are impacting the breeding patterns and habitat of marine life, effectively re-arranging the broader marine landscape as species adjust to a changing climate, according to a three-year international study published today in Nature Climate Change. The international team led by CSIRO's Climate Adaptation Flagship and University of Queensland marine ecologists Elvira Poloczanska and Anthony Richardson, based their findings on a review of peer-reviewed literature from around the world, identifying more than 1700 changes, including 222 in Australia. CSIRO's ...

The bacterial pathogen Salmonella has a notorious capacity for infection. Last year alone, according to the Center for Disease Control, various species of Salmonella caused multistate disease outbreaks linked with contaminated peanut butter, mangoes, ground beef, cantaloupe, poultry, tuna fish, small turtles and dry dog food. The troublesome invader, however, can be turned to human advantage. Through genetic manipulation, the species S. Typhi can be rendered harmless and used in vaccines in order to prevent, rather than cause illness. In new research, reported in the ...

A team of scientists led by Associate Professor Zeng Qi [1] from A*STAR's Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) have discovered a new biomarker which will help physicians predict how well cancer patients respond to cancer drugs. Having the means to identify patients who are most likely to benefit from currently available cancer drugs not only reduces substantially the healthcare cost for the patient, it could mean saving precious lives by getting the right drugs to the right patient at the onset of the treatment. This study published and featured on August cover ...

Australian soils are losing about 1.6 million tonnes of carbon per year from wind erosion and dust storms affecting agricultural productivity, our economy and carbon accounts, according to new research. Top soil is rich in nutrients and carbon but is increasingly being blown away by events such as the 'Red Dawn' in Sydney in 2009. When wind lifts carbon dust into the atmosphere it changes the amount and location of soil carbon. Some carbon falls back to the ground while some leaves Australia or ends up in the ocean. CSIRO research scientist Dr Adrian Chappell ...

A team of researchers led by North Carolina State University has developed a technique that provides real-time images of how magnesium changes at the atomic scale when exposed to radiation. The technique may give researchers new insights into how radiation weakens the integrity of radiation-tolerant materials, such as those used in space exploration and in nuclear energy technologies. "We used high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) to simultaneously irradiate the magnesium and collect images of the material at the atomic scale," says Weizong Xu, a Ph.D. ...