PHILADELPHIA - The motor neuron disease Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease, progresses in a stepwise, sequential pattern which can be classified into four distinct stages, report pathologists with the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in the Annals of Neurology. This post-mortem staging of ALS brain and spinal cord tissues shows, for the first time, how the fatal degenerative disease may progress from one starting point in the central nervous system to other regions of brain and spinal cord. As evidence mounts ...

This news release is available in German. Our internal circadian clock regulates daily life processes and is synchronized by external cues, the so-called Zeitgebers. The main cue is the light-dark cycle, whose strength is largely reduced in extreme habitats such as in the Arctic during the polar summer. Using a radiotelemetry system a team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology have now found, in four bird species in Alaska, different daily activity patterns ranging from strictly rhythmic to completely arrhythmic. These differences are attributed ...

ANN ARBOR—Spring floods across the Midwest are expected to contribute to a very large and potentially record-setting 2013 Gulf of Mexico "dead zone," according to a University of Michigan ecologist and colleagues who released their annual forecast today, along with one for the Chesapeake Bay. The Gulf forecast, one of two announced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, calls for an oxygen-depleted, or hypoxic, region of between 7,286 and 8,561 square miles, which would place it among the 10 largest on record. The low end of the forecast range is well ...

Crawley, UK-- New data, published today in Menopause International, suggests that post-menopausal women in Britain are experiencing less sex, and less satisfying sex compared to their European and North American counterparts1, because they are considerably less likely to access appropriate treatment for a common, taboo condition called vaginal atrophy1. The first-of-its-kind study, called the CLarifying vaginal atrophy's impact On SEx and Relationships (CLOSER) study, showed that British post-menopausal women with vaginal atrophy are more likely to experience less sex1, ...

In fall 2012, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) approved the modified adeno-associated virus AAV-LPL S447X as the first ever gene therapy for clinical use in the Western world. uniQure, a Dutch biotech company, had developed AAV-LPL S447X for the treatment of a rare inherited metabolic disease called lipoprotein lipase deficiency (LPLD) which affects approximately one or two out of one million people. The disease causes severe, life-threatening inflammations of the pancreas. Afflicted individuals carry a defect in the gene coding for the lipoprotein lipase enzyme which ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – The ongoing global growth in the human population will inevitably crowd out mammals and birds and has the potential to threaten hundreds of species with extinction within 40 years, new research shows. Scientists at The Ohio State University have determined that the average growing nation should expect at least 3.3 percent more threatened species in the next decade and an increase of 10.8 percent species threatened with extinction by 2050. The United States ranks sixth in the world in the number of new species expected to be threatened by 2050, the research ...

It is likely some of the most widespread and oldest art in the United States. Pieces of rock art dot the Appalachian Mountains, and research by University of Tennessee, Knoxville, anthropology professor Jan Simek finds each engraving or drawing is strategically placed to reveal a cosmological puzzle. Recently, the discoveries of prehistoric rock art have become more common. With these discoveries comes a single giant one—all these drawing and engravings map the prehistoric peoples' cosmological world. The research led by Simek, president emeritus of the UT system and ...

New York, NY, June 19, 2013 – A decade-long JDRF-funded study led by the Institute of Diabetes Research in Helmholtz Zentrum München, Germany, is providing a deeper understanding of the link between autoantibodies and the risk of developing type 1 diabetes (T1D), highlighting the importance of pre-diabetes research into possible preventions for the disease. The study, "Seroconversion to Multiple Islet Autoantibodies and Risk of Progression to Diabetes in Children," was published today in The Journal of the American Medical Association. Researchers in Colorado (DAISY study), ...

DETROIT – Insulin is the most potent physiological anabolic agent for tissue-building and energy storage, promoting the storage and synthesis of lipids, protein and carbohydrates, and inhibiting their breakdown and release into the circulatory system. It also plays a major role in stimulating glucose entry into muscle tissue, where the glucose is metabolized and removed from the blood following meals. But gaps exist in understanding the precise molecular mechanisms by which insulin regulates glucose uptake in fat and muscle cells. A research team led by Assia Shisheva, ...

Researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center and colleagues at Louisiana State University have developed a method for identifying aggressive prostate cancers that require immediate therapy. It relies on understanding the genetic interaction between single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). The goal is to better predict a prostate cancer's aggressiveness to avoid unnecessary radical treatment. Their study was published in the online journal PLOS ONE in April. According to the authors, prostate cancer accounts for 20 percent of all cancers and 9 percent of cancer deaths. It is ...

Taking inspiration from trees, scientists have developed a battery made from a sliver of wood coated with tin that shows promise for becoming a tiny, long-lasting, efficient and environmentally friendly energy source. Their report on the device — 1,000 times thinner than a sheet of paper — appears in the journal Nano Letters. Liangbing Hu, Teng Li and colleagues point out that today's batteries often use stiff, non-flexible substrates, which are too rigid to release the stress that occurs as ions flow through the battery. They knew that wood fibers from trees are supple ...

A new variety of canary seeds bred specifically for human consumption qualifies as a gluten-free cereal that would be ideal for people with celiac disease (CD), scientists have confirmed in a study published in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Joyce Irene Boye and colleagues point out that at least 3 million people in the United States alone have CD. They develop gastrointestinal and other symptoms from eating wheat, barley, rye and other grains that contain gluten-related proteins. Boye's team sought to expand dietary options for CD — which now include ...

The mystery of how pearls form into the most perfectly spherical large objects in nature may have an unlikely explanation, scientists are proposing in a new study. It appears in ACS' journal Langmuir, named for 1932 Nobel Laureate Irving Langmuir. Julyan Cartwright, Antonio G. Checa and Marthe Rousseau point out that the most flawless and highly prized pearls have perhaps the most perfectly spherical, or ball-like, shape among all the objects in nature that are visible without a microscope. Pearls develop as nacre (mother of pearl) and other liquids accumulate around ...

Species of mammals and birds are threatened with extinction as a result of rising human population density, according to Jeffrey McKee and colleagues from The Ohio State University in the US. Their work is also the first to show that the exponential growth of the human population will continue to pose a threat to other species. In other words, there does not appear to be a threshold above which population growth would cease to have an incremental negative effect. The study is published online in Springer's journal, Human Ecology. It has long been suspected that the number ...

Could drugs that block the body's system for repairing damage to the genetic material DNA become a boon to health? As unlikely as it may seem, those compounds are sparking optimism as potential treatments for ovarian and breast cancers driven by a mutation in BRCA, a gene that made headlines when actress Angelina Jolie revealed she carries the mutation. The compounds, termed PARP inhibitors, are the topic of the cover story in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News. C&EN is the weekly news magazine of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific ...

Ann Arbor, Mich. — Children had half as many emergency department visits if their primary care office had evening office hours on five or more days a week, according to new research from child health experts at C.S. Mott Children's Hospital and Johns Hopkins University. The new study was published online this month in The Journal of Pediatrics and will be presented at the AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting. "These findings are an important step in understanding where primary care practices and medical home programs can be most effective in making changes to enhance ...

In a scientific paper published in the journal Polar Biology, researchers report using DNA from tissues samples collected in 1955 to study what may be a new type of killer whale (Orcinus orca). In 1955, a pod of unusual-looking killer whales stranded on a New Zealand beach and a skeleton was saved in a museum in Wellington. Photographs were also taken but it was almost 50 years before this unique form of killer whale, characterized by a very small white eye-patch and bulbous forehead, was documented alive in the wild. Scientists have suspected for some time that ...

A team of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh has developed antibacterial compounds, derived from the outer coating of HIV, that could be potential treatments for drug-resistant bacterial infections and appear to avoid generating resistance. These new agents are quite small, making them inexpensive and easy to manufacture. The research was published in the June 2013 issue of the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. The first of many probable applications will likely be the chronic bacterial infections in the lungs of cystic fibrosis patients "that frequently ...

A University of Iowa study reveals significant disparities between minority and white clients in success rates for completing substance abuse treatment programs. Moreover, these disparities vary widely from state to state. "Our findings suggest that for most states there's something amiss," says Stephan Arndt, Ph.D., UI professor of psychiatry and biostatistics. "There are strong racial and ethnic disparities for people in being able to complete substance abuse treatment programs successfully, and those disparities are something we need to set as targets to remove. "On ...

A research team led by UCSF scientists has found that exposure in infancy to nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a component of motor vehicle air pollution, is strongly linked with later development of childhood asthma among African Americans and Latinos. The researchers said their findings indicate that air pollution might, in fact, be a cause of the disease, and they called for a tightening of U.S government standards for annual exposure to NO2. The study is reported online currently in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine ahead of print publication. ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Anyone who has ever owned a pet will tell you that it has a unique personality. Yet only in the last 10 years has the study of animal personality started to gain ground with behavioral ecologists, said Jennifer Verdolin of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, in Durham, NC. She and a colleague have now found distinct personalities in the grey mouse lemur (Microcebus murinus), the tiny, saucer-eyed primate native to the African island of Madagascar. In a study published in the journal Primates, Verdolin gave fourteen gray mouse lemurs living ...

Boston, Mass., June 18, 2013 – 3D printing can now be used to print lithium-ion microbatteries the size of a grain of sand. The printed microbatteries could supply electricity to tiny devices in fields from medicine to communications, including many that have lingered on lab benches for lack of a battery small enough to fit the device, yet provide enough stored energy to power them. To make the microbatteries, a team based at Harvard University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign printed precisely interlaced stacks of tiny battery electrodes, each less ...

There is no cure for age-related macular degeneration, an eye disease that is the leading cause of vision loss and blindness in older Americans. Last year, the National Institutes of Health reported that two drugs injected into the eyes, Avastin and Lucentis, eased symptoms for sufferers, especially those in the advanced, "wet" stage of the disease, when blood vessels in the eye become swollen and leak fluids in the eye. Yet for some AMD patients, the two drugs either don't work for long or fail to work at all. It's a dead end for treatment, or so it seemed. Now, a ...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- TED Talks, the most popular conference and events website in the world with over 1 billion informational videos viewed, provides academics with increased popular exposure but does nothing to boost citations of their work by peers, new research led by Indiana University has found. In the comprehensive study of over 1,200 TED Talks videos and their presenters, lead author Cassidy R. Sugimoto, an assistant professor in IU Bloomington's Department of Information and Library Science, and a team of researchers from Great Britain and Canada, also looked ...

TORONTO, June 18, 2013 /CNW/ - The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) has released a summary report outlining policy strategies to reduce the harms related to alcohol, with a focus on the province of Ontario, Canada. In the report titled 'Reducing Alcohol-Related Harms and Costs in Ontario: A Provincial Summary Report,' CAMH Senior Scientist Norman Giesbrecht outlines Ontario's policy strengths and provides recommendations to help decrease the $2.9 billion attributed annually to the direct and indirect costs of alcohol use in Ontario. "While there are policy ...