LA JOLLA, CA – Changes in the epigenome, including chemical modifications of DNA, can act as an extra layer of information in the genome, and are thought to play a role in learning and memory, as well as in age-related cognitive decline. The results of a new study by scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies show that the landscape of DNA methylation, a particular type of epigenomic modification, is highly dynamic in brain cells during the transition from birth to adulthood, helping to understand how information in the genomes of cells in the brain is controlled ...

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — An international group of astronomers that includes UC Santa Barbara astrophysicist Crystal Martin and former UCSB postdoctoral researcher Nicolas Bouché has spotted a distant galaxy hungrily snacking on nearby gas. The gas is seen to fall inward toward the galaxy, creating a flow that both fuels star formation and drives the galaxy's rotation. This is the best direct observational evidence so far supporting the theory that galaxies pull in and devour nearby material in order to grow and form stars. The results will appear in the July 5 issue of ...

Researchers of MESA+, the research institute for nanotechnology of the University of Twente, in cooperation with researchers of the University of Strasbourg and Eindhoven University of Technology, are the first to successfully create perfect one-dimensional molecular wires of which the electrical conductivity can almost entirely be suppressed by a weak magnetic field at room temperature. The underlying mechanism is possibly closely related to the biological compass used by some migratory birds to find their bearings in the geomagnetic field. This spectacular discovery may ...

Flapping insects build up an electrical charge that may make them more easily snared by spider webs, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, biologists. The positive charge on an insect such as a bee or fly attracts the web, which is normally negatively or neutrally charged, increasing the chances that an insect flying by will contact and stick to the web, said UC Berkeley post-doctoral fellow Victor Manuel Ortega-Jimenez. He also suspects that light flexible spider silk, the kind used for make the spirals on top of the stiffer silk that forms ...

MINNEAPOLIS – New research suggests that reading books, writing and participating in brain-stimulating activities at any age may preserve memory. The study is published in the July 3, 2013, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. "Our study suggests that exercising your brain by taking part in activities such as these across a person's lifetime, from childhood through old age, is important for brain health in old age," said study author Robert S. Wilson, PhD, with Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. For the study, ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Researchers report that they have found a direct genetic link between the remains of Native Americans who lived thousands of years ago and their living descendants. The team used mitochondrial DNA, which children inherit only from their mothers, to track three maternal lineages from ancient times to the present. The findings are reported in the journal PLOS ONE. The researchers compared the complete mitochondrial genomes of four ancient and three living individuals from the north coast of British Columbia, Canada. This region is home to the indigenous ...

Analysis of three biomarkers in the urine of kidney transplant recipients can diagnose -- and even predict -- transplant rejection, according to results from a clinical trial sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. This test for biomarkers -- molecules that indicate the effect or progress of a disease -- offers an accurate, noninvasive alternative to the standard kidney biopsy, in which doctors remove a small piece of kidney tissue to look for rejection-associated damage. The findings appear ...

Violent or antisocial video games like Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto do not reliably reduce helpful behaviors in players shortly after playing, according to research published July 3 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Morgan Tear and Mark Nielsen from the University of Queensland, Australia. Participants in the research played one of four video games for 20 minutes. At the end of the test, a researcher pretended to drop some pens and assessed how many players helped pick them up. Regardless of the game played, only about 40-60% of participants helped pick up pens ...

Tweet timing can differentiate individual, corporate and bot-controlled Twitter accounts independent of the language or content of a tweet, according to research published July 3 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Aldo Faisal and Gabriela Tavares from Imperial College London, UK. The researchers studied over 160,000 tweets from personal accounts held by individuals, 'managed' accounts belonging to large, well-known corporations and 'bot-controlled' accounts chosen from online lists of Twitter bots. Periods of high or low Twitter activity and the time between successive ...

Salamanders' capacity to regrow lost limbs may seem infinite when compared with that of humans, but even amongst salamanders, some species regenerate body parts very slowly, while others lose this capacity as they age. Now, researchers have found that salamanders' capacity to regrow a cut tail depends on several small regions of DNA in their genome that impact how wide the tail grows. The results are published July 3 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Randal Voss and colleagues from the University of Kentucky. In the study, approximately 66-68% of the differences ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Aspirin has been widely used for more than 50 years as a common, inexpensive blood thinner for patients with heart disease and stroke, but doctors have little understanding of how it works and why some people benefit and others don't. Now researchers at Duke Medicine have solved some of the mysteries related to the use of this century-old drug, and developed a blood-based test of gene activity that has been shown to accurately identify who will respond to the therapy. The new gene expression profile not only measures the effectiveness of aspirin, but ...

An 1,800-year-old carved stone head of what is believed to be a Roman god has been unearthed in an ancient rubbish dump. Archaeologists made the discovery at Binchester Roman Fort, near Bishop Auckland in County Durham, England. First year Durham University archaeology student Alex Kirton found the artefact, which measures about 20cm by 10cm, in buried late Roman rubbish within what was probably a bath house. The sandstone head, which dates from the 2nd or 3rd century AD, has been likened to the Celtic deity Antenociticus, thought to have been worshipped as a source ...

Bacterial flora inhabiting the human gut have become one of the hottest topics in biological research. Implicated in a range of important activities including digestion, fine-tuning body weight, regulating immune response, and producing neurotransmitters affect that brain and behavior, these tiny workers form diverse communities. Hundreds of species inhabit the gut, and although most are beneficial, some can be very dangerous. In new research appearing in the journal PLOS ONE, a team led by Rosa Krajmalnik-Brown, a researcher at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute, ...

The number of people killed by mental health patients has fallen to its lowest level in a decade -- figures released today show. Experts suggest the fall in homicide reflects safer patient care and point to the possible effect of better treatment of drug and alcohol problems as well as new legal powers in the community. But suicides among mental health patients increased with the current economic difficulties a likely factor. The findings, reported in the National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Homicide by People with Mental Illness (NCI) produced by The ...

The idea of fighting infections and even cancers by inducing protective immune responses may now be a step closer to clinical practice. Researchers have removed a major obstacle to widespread use of so-called adoptive transfer therapy, in which a patient receives "killer" immune cells targeting a disease agent. Existing technologies can easily provide T cells that will recognize a specific antigen, but it has been challenging to identify individual cells most likely to succeed in fighting the disease – until now. Scientists at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) ...

An international research team has used a novel approach to identify genetic factors that appear to influence susceptibility to cholera. The findings by investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), the Broad Institute and the International Center for Diarrhœal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B) indicate the importance of pathways involved in regulating water loss in intestinal cells and of the innate immune system in the body's response to the bacteria that causes cholera, which affects from 3 to 5 million people each year and causes more than 100,000 deaths. ...

Despite decades of research on the bacterium that causes tuberculosis (TB), scientists have not had a comprehensive understanding of how the bacterium is wired to adapt to changing conditions in the host. Now, researchers at Stanford University, Seattle BioMed, Boston University and the Broad Institute, Max Planck Institute of Biology in Berlin, Germany, Caprion Proteomics Inc. in Montreal, Canada, Brigham and Woman's Hospital (Harvard University), and Colorado State University have taken the first steps toward a complete representation of the regulatory network for Mycobacterium ...

A new study has cast doubt on the claim that crabs may have disappeared from Antarctica only to return due to warming seas. The theory surfaced two years ago following the discovery of a major colony of King crabs (Lithodidae) in the Palmer Deep, a basin in the continental shelf off the Antarctic Peninsula. It was thought the species may have left the continent between 40 and 15 million years ago and was returning as seawater temperatures rose. Fears were expressed that its reintroduction would decimate other fauna in the region. But an extensive study of all known ...

A species of Indonesian parrot can solve complex mechanical problems that involve undoing a series of locks one after another, revealing new depths to physical intelligence in birds. A team of scientists from Oxford University, the University of Vienna, and the Max Planck Institute, report in PLOS ONE a study in which ten untrained Goffin's cockatoos [Cacatua goffini] faced a puzzle box showing food (a nut) behind a transparent door secured by a series of five different interlocking devices, each one jamming the next along in the series. To retrieve the nut the birds ...

Solving one problem in order to gain access to another, which will enable you to address a third problem (and so on) in order to finally reach a goal – so-called sequential problem solving – is considered to be cognitively highly challenging as it requires the ability to spatially and mentally distance oneself from a desired goal. In the study, ten untrained cockatoos faced a puzzle box showing a nut behind a transparent door closed by five different interlocking devices, each one jamming the next along the series and each required different motor actions in order to ...

New research from Western University unravels a novel means of communication that allows bacteria such as Burkholderia cenocepacia (B. cenocepacia) to resist antibiotic treatment. B. cenocepacia is an environmental bacterium that causes devastating infections in patients with cystic fibrosis (CF) or with compromised immune systems. Dr. Miguel Valvano and first author Omar El-Halfawy, PhD candidate, show that the more antibiotic resistant cells within a bacterial population produce and share small molecules with less resistant cells, making them more resistant to antibiotic ...

Fossil fuel companies have been funding smear campaigns that raise doubts about climate change, writes John Sauven in the latest issue of Index on Censorship magazine. Environmental campaigner Sauven argues: "Some of the characters involved have previously worked to deny the reality of the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain and the link between tobacco and lung cancer. And the tactics they are applying are largely the same as those they used in the tobacco wars. Doubt is still their product." Governments around the world have also attempted to silence scientists who ...

(Boston) – In a study from Boston University's National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL), researchers have generated a map of the cellular circuitry of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative agent of human tuberculosis (TB). This information, which is being published online as an Advanced Online Publication in the journal Nature, sheds new light on the bacterium's ability to survive inactive in the human body for decades, resist treatment and cause disease. M. tuberculosis can cause devastating infections of the lungs and other body sites. In 2011 ...

New research, published today in The Lancet, highlights important information for health professionals and parents about the factors which may increase the likelihood of a baby being born with a birth defect. The findings, from researchers at the Universities of Bradford and Leeds, funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), confirm that the two main factors associated with an increased risk of babies being born with a birth defect are being born to an older mother or to parents who are blood relations. In addition, the research team was also able to ...

A model of great ape history over the past 15 million years has been fashioned through the study of genetic variation in a large panel of humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. The catalog of great ape genetic diversity, the most comprehensive ever, elucidates the evolution and population histories of great apes from Africa and Indonesia. The resource will likely also aid in current and future conservation efforts which strive to preserve natural genetic diversity in populations. More than 75 scientists and wildlife conservationists from around the world assisted ...