This news release is available in German. Following the death of the polar bear Knut at Berlin Zoo, examinations carried out at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin showed that Knut was suffering from virus-induced encephalitis (acute inflammation of the brain). Researchers at Saarland University and IZW have now analysed his genetic material and discovered and characterised new sequences of endogenous retroviruses. The retroviruses were also found in another former resident of Berlin Zoo: the giant panda Bao Bao. The work of the research team ...

PHILADELPHIA—The trajectory of amyloid plaque buildup—clumps of abnormal proteins in the brain linked to Alzheimer's disease—may serve as a more powerful biomarker for early detection of cognitive decline rather than using the total amount to gauge risk, researchers from Penn Medicine's Department of Radiology suggest in a new study published online July 15 in Neurobiology of Aging. Amyloid plaque that starts to accumulate relatively early in the temporal lobe, compared to other areas and in particular to the frontal lobe, was associated with cognitively declining participants, ...

VIDEO: When choosing a potential mate, female túngara frogs listen to the sounds of the male calls, which are based on a pattern of "whines " and "chucks. " If visible, the sight... Click here for more information. With the help of a robotic frog, biologists at The University of Texas at Austin and Salisbury University have discovered that two wrong mating calls can make a right for female túngara frogs. The "rather bizarre" result may be evidence ...

The Internet, motorways and other transport systems, and many social and biological systems are composed of nodes connected by edges. They can therefore be represented as networks. Scientists studying diffusion over such networks over time have now identified the temporal characteristics that affect their diffusion pathways. In a paper about to be published in EPJ B, Renaud Lambiotte and Lionel Tabourier from the University of Namur, Belgium, together with Jean-Charles Delvenne from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, show that one key factor that can dramatically ...

DETROIT — A new study from neuroscientists at the Wayne State University School of Medicine provides the first novel insights into the neural origins of hot flashes in menopausal women in years. The study may inform and eventually lead to new treatments for those who experience the sudden but temporary episodes of body warmth, flushing and sweating. The paper, "Temporal Sequencing of Brain Activations During Naturally Occurring Thermoregulatory Events," by Robert Freedman, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences, founder of the Behavioral Medicine ...

This news release is available in German. Female social dominance over males is rare among mammal species. Bonobos, one of our closest living relatives, are known for females holding relatively high social statuses when compared to males; though this is puzzling as the males are often bigger and stronger than the females. Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have now analyzed the dominance relations between male and female wild bonobos and took particular interest in the high social status ranking of some females. ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (July 15, 2013) - Among patients undergoing spinal surgery, Medicaid beneficiaries are at higher risk of experiencing any type of complication, compared to privately insured patients, reports a study in the July 15 issue of of Spine. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. "Medicaid insurance status is a risk factor for perioperative complications," according to the research by Dr Jacques Henri Hacquebord of University of Washington, Seattle, and colleagues. They believe their study draws attention ...

Imagine millions of jigsaw puzzle pieces scattered across a football field, with too few people and too little time available to assemble the picture. Scientists in the new but fast-growing field of computational genomics are facing a similar dilemma. In recent decades, these researchers have begun to assemble the chemical blueprints of the DNA found in humans, animals, plants and microbes, unlocking a door that will likely lead to better healthcare and greatly expanded life-science knowledge. But a major obstacle now threatens the speedy movement of DNA's secrets into ...

WASHINGTON, DC— By pinpointing locations on Earth from space, GPS systems have long shown drivers the shortest route home and guided airline pilots across oceans. Now, by figuring out how messed up GPS satellite signals get when bouncing around in a storm, researchers have found a way to do something completely different with GPS: measure and map the wind speeds of hurricanes. Improved wind speed measurements could help meteorologists better predict the severity of storms and where they might be headed, said Stephen Katzberg, a Distinguished Research Associate at the ...

Consuming cranberry products has been anecdotally associated with prevention of urinary tract infections (UTIs) for over 100 years. But is this popular belief a myth, or scientific fact? In recent years, some studies have suggested that cranberries prevent UTIs by hindering bacteria from sticking to the walls of the urinary tract, thanks to phytochemicals known as proanthocyanidins (PACs). Yet the mechanisms by which cranberry materials may alter bacterial behaviour have not been fully understood. Now, researchers in McGill University's Department of Chemical Engineering ...

TORONTO, July 15, 2013—Researchers at St. Michael's Hospital are asking questions about the practice of automatically transfusing large amounts of blood and blood products to trauma patients with major bleeding. Trauma patients were resuscitated primarily with blood until the second part of the 20th century when the practice was modified so that blood transfusions were given only after lab tests suggested they were needed. The idea of resuscitating primarily with blood was revived after U.S. military physicians in Iraq and Afghanistan reported in 2007 that this practice ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – If you need cardiac surgery in the future, aortic dissection in particular, reach for the moon. Or at least try to schedule your surgery around its cycle. According to a study at Rhode Island Hospital, acute aortic dissection (AAD) repair performed in the waning full moon appears to reduce the odds of death, and a full moon was associated with shorter length of stay (LOS). The study is published online in advance of print in the journal Interactive Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery. The purpose of the study was to assess the effect of natural time ...

Is space really the final frontier, or are the greatest mysteries closer to home? In cosmology, dark matter is said to account for the majority of mass in the universe, however its presence is inferred by indirect effects rather than detected through telescopes. The biological equivalent is "microbial dark matter," that pervasive yet practically invisible infrastructure of life on the planet, which can have profound influences on the most significant environmental processes from plant growth and health, to nutrient cycles in terrestrial and marine environments, the global ...

JUPITER, FL, July 14, 2013 – An international group of scientists has shown that a drug candidate designed by scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) significantly increases exercise endurance in animal models. These findings could lead to new approaches to helping people with conditions that acutely limit exercise tolerance, such as obesity, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and congestive heart failure, as well as the decline of muscle capacity associated with aging. The study was published July 14, 2013, by the journal ...

A set of proteins involved in the body's natural defenses produces a large number of mutations in human DNA, according to a study led by researchers at the National Institutes of Health. The findings suggest that these naturally produced mutations are just as powerful as known cancer-causing agents in producing tumors. The proteins are part of a group called apolipoprotein B mRNA-editing enzyme catalytic polypeptide-like (APOBEC) cytidine deaminases. The investigators found that APOBEC mutations can outnumber all other mutations in some cancers, accounting for over two-thirds ...

A type of genetic abnormality linked to cancer is more common in people with type 2 diabetes than the rest of the population, a new study has found. People with type 2 diabetes are already known to have a higher risk of cancers, especially blood cancers like lymphoma and leukaemia. The new study, led by scientists at Imperial College London and CNRS in France, suggests that mutations called clonal mosaic events (CMEs) may partly explain why this is. CMEs are defects that result in some cells having extra copies or missing copies of large chunks of DNA. They are very ...

UPTON, NY-In the search for understanding how some magnetic materials can be transformed to carry electric current with no energy loss, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, Cornell University, and collaborators have made an important advance: Using an experimental technique they developed to measure the energy required for electrons to pair up and how that energy varies with direction, they've identified the factors needed for magnetically mediated superconductivity-as well as those that aren't. "Our measurements distinguish energy ...

UPTON, NY-Building on earlier work exploring the complex choreography by which intricate cellular proteins interact with and copy DNA prior to cell division, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators have captured a key step-molecular images showing how the enzyme that unwinds the DNA double helix gets drawn to and wrapped around its target. Details of the research, published in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, enhance understanding of an essential biological process and may suggest ways for stopping ...

The findings, published in Nature Geoscience, underscore the need for continuous satellite monitoring of the ice sheets to better identify and predict melting and the corresponding sea-level rise. The ice sheets covering Antarctica and Greenland contain about 99.5 per cent of the Earth's glacier ice which would raise global sea level by some 63m if it were to melt completely. The ice sheets are the largest potential source of future sea level rise – and they also possess the largest uncertainty over their future behaviour. They present some unique challenges for predicting ...

It is not unusual for swarms of small earthquakes to precede a volcanic eruption. They can reach a point of such rapid succession that they create a signal called harmonic tremor that resembles sound made by various types of musical instruments, though at frequencies much lower than humans can hear. A new analysis of an eruption sequence at Alaska's Redoubt Volcano in March 2009 shows that the harmonic tremor glided to substantially higher frequencies and then stopped abruptly just before six of the eruptions, five of them coming in succession. "The frequency of this ...

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have discovered that a human antiviral enzyme causes DNA mutations that lead to several forms of cancer. The discovery, reported in the July 14 issue of Nature Genetics, follows the team's earlier finding that the enzyme, called APOBEC3B, is responsible for more than half of breast cancer cases. The previous study was published in Nature in February. APOBEC3B is part of a family of antiviral proteins that Harris has studied for more than a decade. His effort to understand how these proteins work has led to these surprising ...

At the end of the last Ice Age, as the world began to warm, a swath of the North Pacific Ocean came to life. During a brief pulse of biological productivity 14,000 years ago, this stretch of the sea teemed with phytoplankton, amoeba-like foraminifera and other tiny creatures, who thrived in large numbers until the productivity ended—as mysteriously as it began—just a few hundred years later. Researchers have hypothesized that iron sparked this surge of ocean life, but a new study led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientists and colleagues at the University ...

Contact: Liz Williams williams@wehi.edu.au 61-428-034-089 Walter and Eliza Hall Institute Kris Van der Beken kris.vanderbeken@vib.be 32-473-783-435 VIB Scientists discover kill-switch controls immune-suppressing cells Scientists have uncovered the mechanism that controls whether cells that are able to suppress immune responses live or die. The discovery of the cell death processes that determine the number of 'regulatory T cells' an individual has could one day lead to better treatments for immune disorders. Regulatory T cells are members of a group ...

Powdery mildew is one of the most dreaded plant diseases: The parasitic fungus afflicts crops such as wheat and barley and is responsible for large harvest shortfalls every year. Beat Keller and Thomas Wicker, both plant biologists from the University of Zurich, and their team have been analyzing the genetic material of wheat mildew varieties from Switzerland, England and Israel while the team headed by Paul Schulze-Lefert at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne studies the genetic material of barley mildew. The results recently published in Nature ...

PITTSBURGH—The interior of a living cell is a crowded place, with proteins and other macromolecules packed tightly together. A team of scientists at Carnegie Mellon University has approximated this molecular crowding in an artificial cellular system and found that tight quarters help the process of gene expression, especially when other conditions are less than ideal. As the researchers report in an advance online publication by the journal Nature Nanotechnology, these findings may help explain how cells have adapted to the phenomenon of molecular crowding, which has ...