Oscar Wilde called memory "the diary that we all carry about with us." Now a team of scientists has developed a way to see where and how that diary is written. The team, led by Don Arnold and Richard Roberts of USC, engineered microscopic probes that light up synapses in a living neuron in real time by attaching fluorescent markers onto synaptic proteins – all without affecting the neuron's ability to function. The fluorescent markers allow scientists to see live excitatory and inhibitory synapses for the first time – and, importantly, how they change as new memories ...

August, 2011, saw the dazzling appearance of the closest and brightest Type Ia supernova since Type Ia's were established as "standard candles" for measuring the expansion of the universe. The brilliant visitor, labeled SN 2011fe, was caught by the Palomar Transient Factory less than 12 hours after it exploded in the Pinwheel Galaxy in the Big Dipper. Easy to see through binoculars, 2011fe was soon dubbed the Backyard Supernova. Major astronomical studies from the ground and from space followed close on its heels, recording its luminosity and colors as it rapidly brightened ...

The smaller components become, the more difficult it is to create patterns in an economical and reproducible way, according to an interdisciplinary team of Penn State researchers who, using sound waves, can place nanowires in repeatable patterns for potential use in a variety of sensors, optoelectronics and nanoscale circuits. "There are ways to create these devices with lithography, but it is very hard to create patterns below 50 nanometers using lithography," said Tony Jun Huang, associate professor of engineering science and mechanics, Penn State. "It is rather simple ...

Air pollution is related to forest decline and also appears to attack the protecting wax on tree leaves and needles. Bonn University scientists have now discovered a responsible mechanism: particulate matter salt compounds that become deliquescent because of humidity and form a wick-like structure that removes water from leaves and promotes dehydration. These results are published in "Environmental Pollution". Nature conservationists call it "lingering illness", and the latest report on the North-Rhine Westphalian forest conditions confirms ongoing damage. Bonn University ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – More than 1,500 pedestrians were estimated to be treated in emergency rooms in 2010 for injuries related to using a cell phone while walking, according to a new nationwide study. The number of such injuries has more than doubled since 2005, even though the total number of pedestrian injuries dropped during that time. And researchers believe that the actual number of injured pedestrians is actually much higher than these results suggest. "If current trends continue, I wouldn't be surprised if the number of injuries to pedestrians caused by cell phones ...

EAST LANSING, Mich.-— People who are considered unattractive are more likely to be belittled and bullied in the workplace, according to a first-of-its-kind study led by a Michigan State University business scholar. "Frankly, it's an ugly finding," said Brent Scott, associate professor of management and lead investigator on the study. "Although we like to think we're professional and mature in the workplace, it can be just like high school in many ways." While plenty of research has found that attractive students tend to be more popular in school, the study is the ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – A Cornell University study offers further proof that the divergence of humans from chimpanzees some 4 million to 6 million years ago was profoundly influenced by mutations to DNA sequences that play roles in turning genes on and off. The study, published June 9 in Nature Genetics, provides evidence for a 40-year-old hypothesis that regulation of genes must play an important role in evolution since there is little difference between humans and chimps in the proteins produced by genes. Indeed, human and chimpanzee proteins are more than 99 percent identical. The ...

Amsterdam, June 19, 2013 – Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, announced today the publication of the National Osteoporosis Guideline Group (NOGG) Update 2013 on diagnosis and management of osteoporosis in postmenopausal women and older men in the journal Maturitas. Published in 2009 in Maturitas, the original guidelines have been highly cited and this update is timely with an additional focus on the management of glucocorticoid-induced osteoporosis, the role of calcium and vitamin D therapy and the ...

Diapocynin, a synthetic molecule derived from a naturally occurring compound (apocynin), has been found to protect neurobehavioral function in mice with Parkinson's Disease symptoms by preventing deficits in motor coordination. The findings are published in the May 28, 2013 edition of Neuroscience Letters. Brian Dranka, Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW), is the first author of the paper. Balaraman Kalyanaraman, Ph.D., Harry R. & Angeline E. Quadracci Professor in Parkinson's Research, chairman and professor of biophysics, and director ...

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 ...