The skin colour of humans ranges from pale pinkish-white to very dark brown and relates largely to the amount of melanin produced by specialized cells in the body. The synthesis of melanin is under the influence of a bewildering array of genes, each of which naturally occurs in a variety of different forms or alleles, thus accounting for the wide variety of skin colours found in our species. But how precisely the variation is brought about is still unknown. Nine genes account for pigmentation in the fruit fly Colour also differs, albeit sometimes more subtly, in many ...

When did modern humans settle in Asia and what route did they take from mankind's African homeland? A University of Huddersfield professor has helped to provide answers to both questions. But he has also had to settle a controversy. Professor Martin Richards, who heads the University's Archaeogenetics Research Group, co-authors a new article in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. It refutes a recent theory, that there is archaeological evidence for the presence of modern humans in southern Asia before the super-eruption ...

Philadelphia, PA, June 11, 2013 – There is growing evidence that a gene variant that reduces the plasticity of the nervous system also modulates responses to treatments for mood and anxiety disorders. In this case, patients with posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, with a less functional variant of the gene coding for brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), responded less well to exposure therapy. This gene has been implicated previously in treatment response. Basic science studies have convincingly shown that BDNF levels are an important modifier of the therapeutic ...

One of the most remarkable anatomical differences among vertebrate bodies is the relative size of their neck, trunk and tail. This can be illustrated by comparing the bodies of a typical snake and of a long tailed lizard. They are both very long and superficially similar. However, most of the snake's body is a trunk full with organs of the digestive, excretory and reproductive systems, whereas the largest part of the lizard's body is a muscular tail. These different body plans are genetically determined during embryonic development. In the latest issue of the journal Developmental ...

Daejeon, Republic of Korea, June 11, 2013 -- Today's technological innovation enables smartphone users to diagnose serious diseases such as diabetes or lung cancer quickly and effectively by simply breathing into a small gadget, a nanofiber breathing sensor, mounted on the phones. Il-Doo Kim, Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Department at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), and his research team have recently published a cover paper entitled "Thin-Wall Assembled SnO2 Fibers Functionalized by Catalytic Pt Nanoparticles ...

Scientists at The University of Nottingham have discovered a previously undetected layer in the cornea, the clear window at the front of the human eye. The breakthrough, announced in a study published in the academic journal Ophthalmology, could help surgeons to dramatically improve outcomes for patients undergoing corneal grafts and transplants. The new layer has been dubbed the Dua's Layer after the academic Professor Harminder Dua who discovered it. Professor Dua, Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, said: "This is a major discovery that will mean that ...

A University of Adelaide expert says that while the war against smoking in Hollywood movies has been largely won, Asian cinema represents the next major battleground for anti-smoking and anti-cancer groups. Dr Peter Pugsley, Senior Lecturer in Media at the University of Adelaide, says that as smoking rates have been rising in Asia, so too has the depiction of smoking in Asian cinema. Dr Pugsley is the author of a new book on contemporary Asian cinema being published this month. He is also the author of a paper published recently in Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural ...

Infants as young as two months old already exhibit growth patterns that can predict the child's weight by age 5, according to researchers at Case Western Reserve University's Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing and Tennessee State University. "Almost from birth, we quickly saw this growth pattern emerge in our curves and growth charts for weight over height," said Susan Ludington, the study's lead investigator and the Carl W. and Margaret David Walter Professor of Pediatric Nursing at Case Western Reserve. Analyzing well-child records, normal-weight babies with a ...

Spanish and US scientists have successfully identified animal species that can transmit more diseases to humans by using mathematical tools similar to those applied to the study of social networks like Facebook or Twitter. Their research—recently published in the prestigious journal PNAS—describes how parasite-primate interactions transmit diseases like malaria, yellow fever or AIDS to humans. Their findings could make an important contribution to predicting the animal species most likely to cause future pandemics. Professor José María Gómez of the University of Granada ...

Drug development for a range of conditions could be improved with stem cell technology that helps doctors predict the safety and the effectiveness of potential treatments. Medical Research Council scientists at the University of Edinburgh have been able to generate cells in the laboratory that reach the gold standard required by the pharmaceutical industry to test drug safety. The researchers used stem cell technology to generate liver cells – which help our bodies to process drugs. They found that the cells were equally effective, reaching the same standard, as ...

The latest episode in the American Chemical Society's (ACS') award-winning Global Challenges/Chemistry Solutions podcast series describes bacteria that are "addicted" to caffeine in a way that promises practical uses ranging from decontamination of wastewater to bioproduction of medications for asthma. Based on a report by Jeffrey Barrick, Ph.D., and colleagues in the journal ACS Synthetic Biology, the new podcast is available without charge at iTunes and from http://www.acs.org/globalchallenges. Some people may joke about living on caffeine, but scientists now have ...

San Diego, CA, June 11, 2013 – In a study using the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), investigators analyzed four years of data and determined that background mortality rates (rates of death irrespective of cause) are crucial in interpreting the numbers of deaths following vaccination. The VSD mortality rate following immunization is lower than the general US population mortality rate, and the causes of death are similar. These background rates can be used in communications to the public about vaccine safety risks, reports the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Public ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Mothers in low-income countries may not understand why their babies are hospitalized after delivery, putting sick newborns at higher risk of health problems and death after being released from the hospital, a new study shows. Forty percent of participating mothers in Ghana with sick infants had no understanding of why their child was in the hospital and another 28 percent had only partial understanding, according to the University of Michigan Health System study that appears in Paediatrics and International Child Health Journal. One-third of the women ...

Using wood for energy is considered cleaner than fossil fuels, but a Dartmouth College-led study finds that logging may release large amounts of carbon stored in deep forest soils. The results appear in the journal Global Change Biology-Bioenergy: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcbb.12044/abstract Global atmospheric studies often don't consider carbon in deep (or mineral) soil because it is thought to be stable and unaffected by timber harvesting. But the Dartmouth findings show deep soil can play an important role in carbon emissions in clear-cutting and ...

The heart's regular rhythm is crucial to the delivery of oxygenated blood and nutrients to all the organs of the body. It is regulated by a bundle of cells called "the pacemaker," which use electrical signals to set the pace of the heart. Dysfunction in this mechanism can lead to an irregular heartbeat, known as arrhythmia, and often necessitates the implantation of an artificial pacemaker. Previously, scientists found that many cases of inherited arrhythmias originating in the pacemaker could be attributed to functional defects in the channels responsible for the flow ...

A study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has for the first time found that a mother's higher exposure to some common environmental contaminants was associated with more frequent and vigorous fetal motor activity. Some chemicals were also associated with fewer changes in fetal heart rate, which normally parallel fetal movements. The study of 50 pregnant women found detectable levels of organochlorines in all of the women participating in the study—including DDT, PCBs and other pesticides that have been banned from use for more than ...

It is more important to patients suffering from depression that they show a noticeable response to treatment in the first place than being completely cured. It is exactly the opposite in physicians treating people with this disease: they consider remission to have higher priority than response. This is the result of a pilot project carried out by the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) together with external experts. Using the example of depression, IQWiG tested whether the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method is in principle suitable ...

ANN ARBOR—Facebook is a mirror and Twitter is a megaphone, according to a new University of Michigan study exploring how social media reflect and amplify the culture's growing levels of narcissism. The study, published online in Computers in Human Behavior, was conducted by U-M researchers Elliot Panek, Yioryos Nardis and Sara Konrath. "Among young adult college students, we found that those who scored higher in certain types of narcissism posted more often on Twitter," said Panek, who recently received his doctorate in communication studies from U-M and will join ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. --- At least among mice, females have innate protection from certain digestive conditions, according to a new Michigan State University study. While it's tricky to draw conclusions for human health, the findings could eventually help scientists better understand and treat the 1.4 million Americans suffering from inflammatory bowel diseases, or IBD. Crohn's disease and colitis, the two most common forms of IBD, involve abnormal functioning of the immune system that can damage the digestive tract, causing inflammation, diarrhea, constipation, abdominal ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Telephone-based counseling, when combined with physician advice, can help breast cancer survivors become more physically active, which can improve quality of life and lessen the side effects of cancer treatment, according to new research from The Miriam Hospital. Researchers say women who received exercise advice from their surgeon or oncologist, followed by three months of telephone support, reported 30 more minutes of physical activity per week than patients who received exercise advice and follow-up calls about their general health. The findings, ...

This news release is available in French. Physicians and researchers from Sherbrooke, Montreal and Quebec City have conducted a study that has led to the discovery of a gene that causes multiple intestinal atresia (MIA), a rare and life-threatening hereditary disorder that affects newborns. In addition to exploring novel therapeutic treatments for children with the disease, the discovery of the gene TTC7A will make it possible to develop a prenatal diagnostic test and a screening test for parents who are carriers. The Centre hospitalier universitaire de Sherbrooke (CHUS) ...

Health organisations need to give careful consideration to schemes which encourage people with chronic diseases to seek support from peers, to avoid the potential negative effects, new research shows. The study was led by the University of Exeter Medical School will be published in the July edition of the journal Patient Education and Counseling, and is now available online. The research, supported by the National Institute for Health Research Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care in the South West Peninsula (PenCLAHRC), has highlighted both ...

No-till management practices can reduce soil erosion, but evidence suggests they can also lead to increased runoff of dissolved phosphorus from soil surfaces. Meanwhile, farmers looking to avoid herbicides often have to combat weeds with tillage, which causes erosion. With all of the tradeoffs of different management systems, which one should growers use? To answer that question, researchers from the USDA Agricultural Research Service compared nutrient and sediment loss from no-till, conventional tillage, and reduced-input rotation watersheds in a study published online ...

Tropical Storm Yagi is not expected to make landfall in Japan, but NASA satellite imagery showed that the storm was just south of the big island. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Storm Yagi on Tuesday, June 11 at 04:10 UTC (12:10 a.m. EDT/1:10 p.m. Japan local time) and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument captured a visible image of the storm. The image showed that clouds associated with the northern fringes of the storm were draped over southeastern coastal Japan. The MODIS image also revealed that Yagi has a long "tail" ...

Advanced metastatic melanoma is a disease that has proven difficult to eradicate. Despite the success of melanoma-targeting drugs, tumors inevitably become drug resistant and return, more aggressive than before. In the current issue of the journal Cancer Cell, however, researchers at The Wistar Institute describe how they increase the effectiveness of anti-melanoma drugs by combining anticancer therapies with diabetes drugs. Their studies, conducted in cell and animal models of melanoma, demonstrate that the combined therapy could destroy a subset of drug-resistant ...