Researchers have developed a drug delivery technique for diabetes treatment in which a sponge-like material surrounds an insulin core. The sponge expands and contracts in response to blood sugar levels to release insulin as needed. The technique could also be used for targeted drug delivery to cancer cells. "We wanted to mimic the function of health beta-cells, which produce insulin and control its release in a healthy body," says Dr. Zhen Gu, lead author of a paper describing the work and an assistant professor in the joint biomedical engineering program at North Carolina ...

The information carried by the electrical activity of neurons is a mixture of stored memories, environmental circumstances, and current state of mind, scientists have found in a study of laboratory rats. The findings, which appear in the journal PLoS Biology, offer new insights into the neurobiological processes that give rise to knowledge and memory recall. The study was conducted by Eduard Kelemen, a former graduate student and post-doctoral associate at the State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate Medical Center, and André Fenton, a professor at New York University's ...

Research from the University of Southampton has shown that young adults, who are more outgoing or more emotionally stable, are happier in later life than their more introverted or less emotionally stable peers. In the study, published in the Journal of Research in Personality, Dr Catharine Gale from the Medical Research Council's Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit, University of Southampton and a team from the University of Edinburgh and University College London, examined the effects of neuroticism and extraversion at ages 16 and 26 years on mental wellbeing and life satisfaction ...

A researcher from Imperial College London and his colleagues have developed for the first time a map of a typical bird brain, showing how different regions are connected together to process information. By comparing it to brain diagrams for different mammals such as humans, the team discovered that areas important for high-level cognition such as long-term memory and problem solving are wired up to other regions of the brain in a similar way. This is despite the fact that both mammal and bird brains have been evolving down separate paths over hundreds of millions of years. The ...

The National Food Institute, Technical University of Denmark has evaluated the content of chemical contaminants in food in the period 2004-2011 at the request of the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration. The content of chemical contaminants is evaluated in relation to which specific foods Danes eat, and how much. The latest monitoring report includes even more compounds than the one from 2003. "Monitoring of unwanted compounds is performed to ensure that the food eaten by the Danish people does not contain too many harmful compounds. In general, Danes should not ...

WASHINGTON, July 17—Butterfly wings can do remarkable things with light, and humans are still trying to learn from them. Physicists have now uncovered how subtle differences in the tiny crystals of butterfly wings create stunningly varied patterns of color even among closely related species. The discovery, reported today in the Optical Society's (OSA) open-access journal Optical Materials Express, could lead to new coatings for manufactured materials that could change color by design, if researchers can figure out how to replicate the wings' light-manipulating properties. "It ...

Polarisability determines the force with which an inhomogeneous external electric field acts on the ions of an ion beam. However, it can be quite tricky to obtain accurate values for this force. Now, two German theoretical chemists, Volker Koch from Bielefeld University and Dirk Andrae from the Free University Berlin, have devised formulas providing the polarisability of atomic ions as a function of their total charge number. Their findings, about to be published in EPJ D, have implications for many applications, ranging from the use of ion beams for research purposes or ...

NEW YORK (July 17, 2013) — A five-year study by the Wildlife Conservation Society gives new hope to some of the world's most endangered primates by establishing a roadmap to protect all 27 species in Tanzania – the most primate-diverse country in mainland Africa. The study combines Tanzania's first-ever inventory of all primate species and their habitats with IUCN Red List criteria and other factors such as threats and rarity, ranking all 27 species from most vulnerable to least vulnerable. The authors then identify a network of "Priority Primate Areas" for conservation. ...

Researchers described a new species of Noctuidae moth from Iran which is the fifth described species of the genus Anagnorisma. The new species A. chamrani has its name in honour of Dr. Mostafa Chamran (1932–1981), an Iranian scientist and defence minister. The study was published in the open access journal Zookeys. During an expedition at high altitude of above 2500 m of north-eastern Iran on a cold night in late summer 2012, a couple of undescribed specimens of Anagnorisma moths were collected. The specimens had been attracted to an ultraviolet light trap on the Binaloud ...

Tropical Depression 08W strengthened into a tropical storm and was renamed Cimaron by the morning of July 17. NASA's Aqua satellite captured the storm is it passed between the northern Philippines and Taiwan. On July 17 at 0900 UTC, Tropical Storm Cimaron was located about 294 nautical miles (338.3 miles/544.5 km) north of Manila, Philippines, near 19.9 north latitude and 120.8 east longitude. Cimaron's maximum sustained winds increased to 35 knots (40 mph/64 kph) and the tropical storm is moving to the northwest at 18 knots (20.7 mph/33.3 kph). Cimaron is generating ...

Inciweb.org reports, "The Mountain Fire started at 1:43 PM on July 15, 2013 near the junction of Highway 243 and Highway 74. It is currently burning east of the Mountain Center and Apple Canyon Areas. It is burning in very steep and rugged terrain in the southern portion of the San Jacinto Wilderness along the Desert Divide and in the Apple Canyon and Bonita Vista Areas. Some residences and commercial buildings have been destroyed by the fire, though firefighters were able to defend and save a larger number of homes. Mandatory evacuation orders are in place for Andreas ...

A new Johns Hopkins research report says emergency room visits for severe dizziness have grown exponentially in recent years, with costs topping $3.9 billion in 2011 and projected to reach $4.4 billion by 2015. The investigators say roughly half a billion a year could be saved immediately if emergency room physicians stopped the routine and excessive use of head CT scans to search for stroke in dizzy patients, and instead used simple bedside physical exams to identify the small group of patients that truly needs imaging. After analyzing records from two large, national ...

MANHATTAN -- Kansas State University researchers are defeating persistent bacteria known for causing infections in hospitals. The bacteria, Enterococcus faecalis, are the second-leading cause of hospital-associated infections in the U.S., said Lynn Hancock, associate professor of biology and leader of the research. His team has discovered how a regulatory system helps this bacteria resist a host's innate immune defense -- a finding that may help develop novel drug compounds to fight the bacteria. "Right now, we have very limited therapeutic interventions because the ...

Heart tissue sustains irreparable damage in the wake of a heart attack. Because cells in the heart cannot multiply and the cardiac muscle contains few stem cells, the tissue is unable to repair itself — it becomes fibrotic and cannot contract properly. In their search for innovative methods to restore heart function, scientists have been exploring cardiac "patches" that could be transplanted into the body to replace damaged heart tissue. Now, in his Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Laboratory, Dr. Tal Dvir and his PhD student Michal Shevach of Tel Aviv University's ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Disruptions to U.S. exports of maize (corn) could pose food security risks for many U.S. trade partners due to the lack of trade among other producing and importing nations, says a Michigan State University study. The study, featured in the journal Risk Analysis, didn't primarily focus on plant disease, population growth, climate change or the diversion of corn to nonfood uses such as ethanol. It suggests, however, that significant stresses in these areas could jeopardize food security. This is particularly true in nations like Mexico, Japan and ...

The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once asked whether the living world would be different "if the tape were played twice." If there were a duplicate Earth evolving quietly beside ours, would we observe the emergence of creatures like ourselves and of plants and anaimals familiar to us, or would the cast of characters be entirely different? It's an intriguing question. So far replicate Earths are in short supply, but cases of parallel evolution (the same trait evolving independently in related lineages) allow scientists to ask some of the same questsions. One ...

For years, scientists have been worried about bisphenol A. The chemical is known as an "endocrine disruptor," a substance that interferes with the body's hormone signaling system, and it's found in everything from plastic drink bottles to the linings of food and drink cans to the thermal paper used for cash register receipts — not to mention the urine of 92.6 percent of Americans over the age of six. BPA has been associated with the development of chronic diseases such as diabetes, asthma and ovarian dysfunction. In 2012, the FDA banned BPA from use in the production of ...

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience Drinking water can boost cognitive performance There is evidence that mild dehydration has a negative effect on the brain's performance. Caroline Edmonds and colleagues from the University of East London and the University of Westminster here report that drinking water can improve performance on tasks that require a rapid response, particularly when thirsty. They tested 34 adults, who had not eaten or drunk anything overnight, for memory, attention, learning, and reaction time. Subjects were tested on two mornings: once after they had ...

The global burden of sickle cell anemia (SCA), a hereditary blood disorder, is increasing, with almost half a million babies estimated to be born with the condition in 2050, according to a study published in this week's PLOS Medicine. The study, conducted by Frédéric Piel and colleagues from the University of Oxford and Imperial College in the United Kingdom, and the KEMRI/Wellcome Trust Research Programme, Kenya, suggests that implementing basic health interventions could significantly reduce death rates in children aged less than 5 years with the condition. These findings ...

Many new developments and initiatives have been introduced to improve the quality and translational value of animal research, and must continue with support from the wider scientific community. These are the conclusions of a new article in PLOS Medicine this week by Carlijn Hooijmans and colleagues from the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, Netherlands, who summarize these new developments. Focusing on the quality of study conduct, reporting, and replication; systematic reviews and meta-analyses; and study registration, publication bias, and data sharing, the ...

STANFORD, Calif. - Clinical trials of drug treatments for neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's often fail because the animal studies that preceded them were poorly designed or biased in their interpretation, according to a new study from an international team of researchers. More stringent requirements are needed to assess the significance of animal studies before testing the treatments in human patients, the researchers say. The team - led by John Ioannidis, MD, DSc, a professor of medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and an expert ...

A new study published in the open access journal PLOS Biology suggests that the scientific literature could be compromised by substantial bias in the reporting of animal studies, and may be giving a misleading picture of the chances that potential treatments could work in humans. Testing a new therapeutic intervention (such as a drug or surgical procedure) on human subjects is expensive, risky and ethically complex, so the vast majority are first tested on animals. Unfortunately, cost and ethical issues constrain the size of animal studies, giving them limited statistical ...

There are six procedural things hospital teams can do to help heart failure patients avoid another hospital stay in the 30 days after they're discharged — and if all six are followed, patients are even more likely to avoid readmission, according to new research in the American Heart Association's journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes. Each step alone had some impact, but researchers discovered that if all six recommendations are followed, readmissions could drop as much as 2 percent. The study's lead author said that may seem like a small number, but ...

In a study of adults recruited and followed up over the past 3 decades in the United States, longer duration of overall and abdominal obesity beginning in young adulthood was associated with higher rates of coronary artery calcification, a subclinical predictor of coronary heart disease, according to a study in the July 17 issue of JAMA. "Subclinical atherosclerosis, identified by the presence of coronary artery calcification (CAC), progresses over time, and predicts the development of coronary heart disease events," according to background information in the article. ...

An analysis of West Nile virus epidemics in Dallas County in 2012 and previous years finds that the epidemics begin early, after unusually warm winters; are often in similar geographical locations; and are predicted by the mosquito vector index (an estimate of the average number of West Nile virus-infected mosquitoes collected per trap-night), information that may help prevent future outbreaks of West Nile virus-associated illness, according to a study in the July 17 issue of JAMA. "After declining over the prior 5 years, mosquito-borne West Nile virus infection resurged ...