A drug targeting a protein complex containing two different types of opioid receptors may be an effective alternative to morphine and other opioid pain medications, without any of the side effects or risk of dependence, according to research led by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The findings are published in July in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Morphine is still the most widely-used pain reliever, or analgesic, in people with severe pain, but chronic use can lead to addiction and negative side effects such as respiratory issues, ...

Plant-based diets are healthy. Plants are high in flavonoids. So flavonoids are healthy. At least that's the reasoning of many manufacturers of flavonoid-based nutritional supplements. But a University of Colorado Cancer Center study published this week in the journal Hormones & Cancer shows that may not be the case. Flavonoids tested in the study affected the endocrine system in ways that in one case promoted cancer and in another repressed it. "Even outside these specific findings with cancer, what we're saying is that flavonoids are active and not always in good or ...

Parents may not be very savvy with social media, but new research shows they shouldn't shy away from sending their teen a friend request on Facebook or engaging them on Twitter, Instagram and other social platforms. Brigham Young University professors Sarah Coyne and Laura Padilla-Walker found that teenagers who are connected to their parents on social media feel closer to their parents in real life. The study of nearly 500 families also found that teens that interact with their parents on social media have higher rates of "pro-social" behavior – meaning that they are ...

Drought resistance is the key to large-scale production of Jatropha, a potential biofuel plant -- and an international group of scientists has identified the first step toward engineering a hardier variety. Jatropha has seeds with high oil content. But the oil's potential as a biofuel is limited because, for large-scale production, this shrub-like plant needs the same amount of care and resources as crop plants. "It is thought that Jatropha's future lies in further improvement of Jatropha for large-scale production on marginal, non-food croplands through breeding and/or ...

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a new moon orbiting the distant blue-green planet Neptune, the 14th known to be circling the giant planet. The moon, designated S/2004 N 1, is estimated to be no more than 12 miles across, making it the smallest known moon in the Neptunian system. It is so small and dim that it is roughly 100 million times fainter than the faintest star that can be seen with the naked eye. It even escaped detection by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft, which flew past Neptune in 1989 and surveyed the planet's system of moons and rings. Mark Showalter ...

SAN DIEGO (July 15, 2013) — A new study evaluating surgical outcomes at California hospitals enrolled in the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP®) found surgical patients at ACS NSQIP hospitals had significantly reduced mortality rates compared with non-ACS NSQIP hospitals. These findings were presented Sunday, July 14, 2013 at the ACS NSQIP National Conference, taking place July 13-16 in San Diego, Calif. Researchers analyzed data from 1,184,895 patients at 227 hospitals from 1995 to 2009 to identify whether surgical ...

Typhoon Soulik still maintained an eye just before making landfall in southeastern China on July 13, and NASA's Terra satellite captured the eye in an image. Soulik's heavy rainfall in southern China is responsible for hundreds missing or dead. On July 11, when Typhoon Soulik was approaching Taiwan, NASA and the Japanese Space Agency's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite known as TRMM passed overhead in space. TRMM's Precipitation Radar instrument captured data on rainfall rates, and that data was used to create a 3-D view of the typhoon looking from the northwest. ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new study estimates that global sea levels will rise about 2.3 meters, or more than seven feet, over the next several thousand years for every degree (Celsius) the planet warms. This international study is one of the first to combine analyses of four major contributors to potential sea level rise into a collective estimate, and compare it with evidence of past sea-level responses to global temperature changes. Results of the study, funded primarily by the National Science Foundation and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, are being ...

A pair of studies by a team of University of Notre Dame researchers led by Crislyn D'Souza-Schorey, professor of biological sciences, sheds light on a biological process which is activated across a vast range of malignancies. Wnt proteins are a large family of proteins that active signaling pathways (a set of biological reactions in a cell) to control several vital steps in embryonic development. In adults, Wnt-mediated functions are frequently altered in many types of cancers and, specifically, within cell subpopulations that possess stem cell-like properties. In ...

Two NASA spacecraft have provided the most comprehensive movie ever of a mysterious process at the heart of all explosions on the sun: magnetic reconnection. Magnetic reconnection happens when magnetic field lines come together, break apart and then exchange partners, snapping into new positions and releasing a jolt of magnetic energy. This process lies at the heart of giant explosions on the sun, such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections, which can fling radiation and particles across the solar system. Scientists want to better understand this process so they ...

Researchers at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital have found that more than 25 percent of children with cerebral palsy seen by physicians have moderate to severe chronic pain, limiting their activity. Findings indicate that pediatricians should be aware of chronic pain in this group and try to identify and treat its underlying causes. The study, led by Dr. Darcy Fehlings, Physician Director of the Child Development Program at Holland Bloorview and Clinician Senior Scientist at the Bloorview Research Institute, was published today in top health journal Pediatrics. ...

OAK BROOK, Ill. -- Excess fat around the belly has recently been identified as a risk factor for bone loss. Now, a new study has determined that excess liver and muscle fat also may be detrimental to bone. The study, published online in the journal Radiology, found that obese people with higher levels of fat in their liver, muscle tissue and blood also have higher amounts of fat in their bone marrow, putting them at risk for osteoporosis. "Obesity was once thought to be protective against bone loss," said study lead author Miriam A. Bredella, M.D., a radiologist at ...

Some strains of the avian H7N9 influenza that emerged in China this year have developed resistance to the only antiviral drugs available to treat the infection, but testing for antiviral resistance can give misleading results, helping hasten the spread of resistant strains. The authors of a study published in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, characterized viruses taken from the first person known to be stricken with H7N9 influenza and found that 35% of those viruses are resistant to oseltamivir (commercially known as Tamiflu) ...

Standard toxicity testing is inadequate to assess the safety of a new technology with potential for creating pesticides and genetically modifying crops, according to a Forum article published in the August issue of BioScience. The authors of the article, Jonathan G. Lundgren and Jian J. Duan of the USDA Agricultural Research Service, argue that pesticides and insect-resistant crops based on RNA interference, now in exploratory development, may have to be tested under elaborate procedures that assess effects on animals' whole life cycles, rather than by methods that look ...

Whether you're reading the paper or thinking through your schedule for the day, chances are that you're hearing yourself speak even if you're not saying words out loud. This internal speech — the monologue you "hear" inside your head — is a ubiquitous but largely unexamined phenomenon. A new study looks at a possible brain mechanism that could explain how we hear this inner voice in the absence of actual sound. In two experiments, researcher Mark Scott of the University of British Columbia found evidence that a brain signal called corollary discharge — a signal that helps ...

Tropical trees and hanging vines burst into flower, showering the ground below with bright blossoms. Temperature, rather than cloud cover, may be key to the timing of tropical flowering events according to research at two sites in the Smithsonian Institution Global Earth Observatory Network published online in Nature Climate Change. Scientists discovered a significant increase in flower production—about 3 percent more flowers produced on average per year since 1987—on Barro Colorado Island's Forest Dynamics Plot in Panama. "Barro Colorado Island was chosen for this study ...

A UCLA-led study of HIV-positive women who were sexually abused as children has found that the more severe their past trauma, the greater their improvement in an intervention program designed to ease their psychological suffering. The study, conducted by researchers at UCLA's Collaborative Center for Culture, Trauma and Mental Health Disparities, suggests that such interventions should be tailored to individuals' experience and that a "one size fits all" approach may not be enough to successfully reduce women's depression, post-traumatic stress and anxiety symptoms. ...

Vitamin D influences many other physiological processes, including muscle function, cardiovascular homeostasis, nerve function, and immune response. Furthermore, accumulated evidence suggests that vitamin D also mediates the immune system response to infection. Infections are very common in patients from neurosurgical intensive care unit. A recent study published in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 8, No. 16, 2013) detected serum vitamin D level in 15 patients with clinically suspected infection and 10 patients with confirmed infection, who came from neurosurgical ...

Rodents are frequently used as animal models for ischemic stroke studies induced by middle cerebral artery occlusion. However, their anatomic structure is significantly different from humans. Thus, recent studies have focused on developing stroke models in large animals with similar anatomic structure as the human brain. The swine have several properties resembling the human brain, including brain volume and weight, quantity of cortical gyri and the percentage of white matter to gray matter. These properties allow evaluation of conventional cerebral imaging techniques and ...

Recent findings suggest that Toll-like receptor 4 expressed in the central nervous system, especially in glial cells, plays a vital role in neuroinflammation and neurodegenerative conditions. Traditional theory suggests that neurons are injured by inflammatory factors released from glial cells, and that neurons are the victims of neuroinflammation. However, it has recently been suggested that Toll-like receptor 4 is expressed by cerebral cortical neurons. Yae Hu and team from Medical School of Nantong University found that lipopolysaccharide participates in neuroinflammation ...

Studies of patients with immunodeficiencies involving single gene mutations can reveal a great deal about our immune systems, especially when actual symptoms do not accord with clinical expectations. Australian scientists acknowledge such a gap between expectation and reality in a new study, which examines people with 'Autosomal Dominant Hyper IgE Syndrome'. Hyper IgE Syndrome arises from a mutation in the STAT3 gene. This makes patients slightly more susceptible than normal to blood cancers known as 'lymphomas', and exposes them to recurrent skin infections and pneumonia. ...

The time period of satellite observations of the ice sheets of Greenland and the Antarctic is still too short to be able to say whether the accelerated loss of ice measured today will persist in the future. This is the result published today in the online edition of "Nature Geosciences" by a research team led by Bert Wouters from the University of Bristol. The GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences is also involved in the study. The researchers conclude that predictions of the contribution of both ice shields to the sea level up to the year 2100 may be more than 35 ...

An "obesity-risk" allele alters hunger-stimulating hormone production Individuals carrying the "obesity-risk" allele of the fat mass and obesity associated gene, FTO, are prone to obesity and obesity related eating behaviors such as increased food consumption, preference for high fat foods and lack of satiation after eating. How this particular gene regulates obesity prone behaviors is not fully understood. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Rachel Batterham and colleagues at University College London identify a link between FTO and the hunger-stimulating ...

Individuals carrying the "obesity-risk" allele of the fat mass and obesity associated gene, FTO, are prone to obesity and obesity related eating behaviors such as increased food consumption, preference for high fat foods and lack of satiation after eating. How this particular gene regulates obesity prone behaviors is not fully understood. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Rachel Batterham and colleagues at University College London identify a link between FTO and the hunger-stimulating hormone, ghrelin. Subjects homozygous for the "obesity-risk" ...

The use of a 1:1:1 blood transfusion protocol in patients with severe trauma is feasible in hospitals, although it is associated with higher waste of plasma, according to a randomized trial published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). Previous retrospective studies suggested that a 1:1:1 transfusion strategy or fixed-ratio transfusion could reduce the number of deaths from hemorrhage; therefore, the strategy has been widely adopted in trauma centres around the world and for nontrauma patients. It uses an equal ratio of red blood cells, plasma and platelets ...