Tampa, FL (June 28, 2013) -- A cardiac hormone signaling receptor abundantly expressed both in inflamed tissues and cancers appears to recruit stem cells that form the blood vessels needed to feed tumor growth, reports a new study by scientists at the University of South Florida Nanomedicine Research Center. The research may lead to the development of new drugs or delivery systems to treat cancer by blocking this receptor, known as natriuretic peptide receptor A (NPRA). The findings appeared online recently in the journal Stem Cells. "Our results show that NRPA signaling ...

Washington, D.C.—To prevent coral reefs around the world from dying off, deep cuts in carbon dioxide emissions are required, says a new study from Carnegie's Katharine Ricke and Ken Caldeira. They find that all existing coral reefs will be engulfed in inhospitable ocean chemistry conditions by the end of the century if civilization continues along its current emissions trajectory. Their work will be published July 3 by Environmental Research Letters. Coral reefs are havens for marine biodiversity and underpin the economies of many coastal communities. But they are very ...

West Nile virus, Lyme disease and hantavirus. All are infectious diseases spreading in animals and in people. Is human interaction with the environment somehow responsible for the increase in these diseases? The ecology and evolution of infectious diseases will be highlighted at two symposia at the Ecological Society of America's annual meeting, held from Aug. 5-9 in Minneapolis, Minn. One symposium will address human influences on viral and bacterial diseases through alteration of landscapes and ecological processes. Another will focus on the emerging field of eco-epidemiology, ...

A technique developed several years ago at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for improving optical microscopes now has been applied to monitoring the next generation of computer chip circuit components, potentially providing the semiconductor industry with a crucial tool for improving chips for the next decade or more. The technique, called Through-Focus Scanning Optical Microscopy (TSOM), has now been shown able to detect tiny differences in the three-dimensional shapes of circuit components, which until very recently have been essentially two-dimensional ...

A team of scientists at USC has verified that quantum effects are indeed at play in the first commercial quantum optimization processor. The team demonstrated that the D-Wave processor housed at the USC-Lockheed Martin Quantum Computing Center behaves in a manner that indicates that quantum mechanics plays a functional role in the way it works. The demonstration involved a small subset of the chip's 128 qubits. This means that the device appears to be operating as a quantum processor – something that scientists had hoped for but have needed extensive testing to verify. The ...

WASHINGTON — A young, healthy man injured himself so severely while weight lifting that he required surgery and nearly a full week in the hospital to recover. The unusual case report of compartment syndrome to the shoulder will be reported online today in Annals of Emergency Medicine ("An Unusual Complication of Weightlifting: A Case Report"). "Typically, compartment syndrome is associated with the lower extremities, not the shoulder, and with trauma, not exercise," said lead study author Leonard Bunting, MD, FACEP, of Wayne State University in Detroit, Mich. "Our patient ...

Washington, DC (June 27, 2013) — Elderly patients with kidney failure may not gain the same benefits from what's considered the gold standard for accessing the blood for dialysis compared with younger patients, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN). The findings suggest that vascular access procedures should be tailored to individual dialysis patients in the elderly population. The elderly represent the most rapidly growing group of patients on dialysis for kidney failure. Research clearly shows ...

Scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have trapped the ribosome, a protein-building molecular machine essential to all life, in a key transitional state that has long eluded researchers. Now, for the first time, scientists can see how the ribosome performs the precise mechanical movements needed to translate genetic code into proteins without making mistakes. "This is something that the whole field has been pursuing for the past decade," said Harry Noller, Sinsheimer Professor of Molecular Biology at UC Santa Cruz. "We've trapped the ribosome in the ...

In a perspective piece appearing today in the journal Science, researchers at University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) point to a newly discovered system by which the brain removes waste as a potentially powerful new tool to treat neurological disorders like Alzheimer's disease. In fact, scientists believe that some of these conditions may arise when the system is not doing its job properly. "Essentially all neurodegenerative diseases are associated with the accumulation of cellular waste products," said Maiken Nedergaard, M.D., D.M.Sc., co-director of the URMC ...

The discovery confirms the model proposed by the team in 2008 to account for observations that could not be explained by the established model of mitochondrial function. Mitochondria are the organelles in the interior of cells that, among other functions, extract energy from nutrients and convert it into a form that can be used by the cell for its vital processes. The consumption, digestion and assimilation of nutrients serves the ultimate purpose of fueling each and every cell in the body. The breakdown of nutrients in the digestive tract requires energy to release simple ...

Non-invasive brain stimulation may help stroke survivors recover speech and language function, according to new research in the American Heart Association journal Stroke. Between 20 percent to 30 percent of stroke survivors have aphasia, a disorder that affects the ability to grasp language, read, write or speak. It's most often caused by strokes that occur in areas of the brain that control speech and language. "For decades, skilled speech and language therapy has been the only therapeutic option for stroke survivors with aphasia," said Alexander Thiel, M.D., study ...

South Asians (from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh) may have to exercise more than white Europeans to achieve the same levels of fitness and reduce their risk of diabetes. Researchers at the University of Glasgow have found that lower fitness levels in middle-aged men of South Asian origin are contributing to higher blood sugar levels and increased diabetes risk compared with white men. The research, published in Diabetologia, the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD), suggests that physical activity guidelines may need to be changed to take ...

VIDEO: Researchers were able increase data flow through fiber optic cables by moving light through them in a spiral motion, rather than a straight line. Click here for more information. As rapidly increasing demand for bandwidth strains the Internet's capacity, a team of engineers has devised a new fiber optic technology that promises to increase bandwidth dramatically. The new technology could enable Internet providers to offer much greater connectivity – from decreased network ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Children with more genetic risks for asthma are not only more likely to develop the condition at a young age, but they are also more likely to continue to suffer with asthma into adulthood. The finding reported by Duke University researchers is one of the latest to come from a 40-year longitudinal study of New Zealanders. "We've been able to look at how newly discovered genetic risks relate to the life course of asthma at an unprecedented level of resolution," said Daniel Belsky, a postdoctoral fellow at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy ...

The findings are featured as the cover story of the June 28 edition of the journal Science. An international research team led by Ferran Garcia-Pichel, microbiologist and professor with ASU's School of Life Sciences, conducted continental-scale surveys of the microbial communities that live in soil crusts. The scientists collected crust samples from Oregon to New Mexico, and Utah to California and studied them by sequencing their microbial DNA. While there are thousands of microbe species in just one pinch of crust, two cyanobacteria —bacteria capable of photosynthesis ...

The authors say the drug "seems to reduce the risk of death and suicide by more than 60% compared with placebo" and suggest this review "reinforces lithium as an effective agent to reduce the risk of suicide in people with mood disorders." Mood disorders are a leading cause of global disability. The two main types are unipolar disorder (often called clinical depression) and bipolar disorder (often called manic depression). Both are serious, long term conditions involving extreme mood swings, but people with bipolar depression also experience episodes of mania or hypomania. ...

The results show that each 0.1 g per day or 0.1% energy per day increment of intake of n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid (n-3 PUFA) derived from fish was associated with a 5% reduction in risk. To achieve this risk reduction, intake of oily fish such as salmon, tuna or sardines should be 1-2 portions per person per week. Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers, accounting for 23% of total cancer cases and 14% of cancer deaths in 2008. Studies suggest that a healthy diet and lifestyle is crucial for the prevention of breast cancer, and dietary fat is one of the most ...

The development of an easy to use, low cost method of detecting dengue virus in mosquitoes based on gold nanoparticles is reported in BioMed Central's open access journal Virology Journal. The assay is able to detect lower levels of the virus than current tests, and is easy to transport and use in remote regions. Half the world's population is at risk of Dengue virus infection – it infects 50-100 million people per year, approximately half a million of these require hospitalization and 2.5% (most of which are children) will die. It is one of the most dangerous viruses ...

Frontiers in Microbiology The genome of the endophytic bacterium H. frisingense GSF30T identifies diverse strategies in the Herbaspirillum genus to interact with plants Microbes whose habitat is inside other organisms, such as so-called "endophytic" bacteria that live inside plants, have evolved genes that enable them to overcome their host's defensive mechanisms. But once they have entered the host tissue, such microbes may actually benefit their host, for example, by activating genes that capture atmospheric nitrogen and turn it into natural fertilizer to promote ...

NEW YORK, NY (June 27, 2013) — A series of studies conducted by Randy Bruno, PhD, and Christine Constantinople, PhD, of Columbia University's Department of Neuroscience, topples convention by showing that sensory information travels to two places at once: not only to the brain's mid-layer (where most axons lead), but also directly to its deeper layers. The study appears in the June 28, 2013, edition of the journal Science. For decades, scientists have thought that sensory information is relayed from the skin, eyes, and ears to the thalamus and then processed in the ...

Human influences through global warming are likely to have played a role in Australia's recent "angry" hot summer, the hottest in Australia's observational record, new research has found. The research led by the University of Melbourne, has shown that global warming increased the chances of Australians experiencing record hot summers such as the summer of 2013, by more than five times. Lead author, Dr Sophie Lewis from the University of Melbourne and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Systems Science said the study showed it was possible to say with more than ...

MANHATTAN, Kan. -- The world's food supply got a little more plentiful thanks to a scientific breakthrough. Eduard Akhunov, associate professor of plant pathology at Kansas State University, and his colleague, Jorge Dubcovsky from the University of California-Davis, led a research project that identified a gene that gives wheat plants resistance to one of the most deadly races of the wheat stem rust pathogen -- called Ug99 -- that was first discovered in Uganda in 1999. The discovery may help scientists develop new wheat varieties and strategies that protect the world's ...

WASHINGTON D.C., June 27, 2013 -- Indium tin oxide (ITO) has become a standard material in light-emitting diodes, flat panel plasma displays, electronic ink and other applications because of its high performance, moisture resistance, and capacity for being finely etched. But indium is also rare and expensive, and it requires a costly deposition process to make opto-electronic devices and makes for a brittle electrode. Replacing indium as the default material in transparent electrodes is a high priority for the electronics industry. Now, in a paper appearing in APL Materials, ...

Michael Graner, PhD, is a CU Cancer Center investigator and associate professor of neurosurgery at the CU School of Medicine. So when his 12-year-old Great Dane got sick, he knew what to do. "We got Star from the Mid-Atlantic Great Dane Rescue," Graner says. "She got her name because she was always smiling, like a movie star waiting for photos. She'd already been to so many shelters, we didn't want to change her name again and so we kept it." At 12, after many years with the Graners, Star had already reached about double the average lifespan for the breed. When she ...

WASHINGTON D.C., June 28, 2013 -- The search for thermoelectrics, exotic materials that convert heat directly into electricity, has received a boost from researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Tokyo, who have found the best way to identify them. In the new open-access journal APL Materials, the team shows that a relatively simple technique called the "rigid band approximation" can predict a material's properties more accurately than a competing, more complicated method. "The rigid band approach still supplies the simple, predictive ...