Slow oscillations in brain activity, which occur during so-called slow-wave sleep, are critical for retaining memories. Researchers reporting online April 11 in the Cell Press journal Neuron have found that playing sounds synchronized to the rhythm of the slow brain oscillations of people who are sleeping enhances these oscillations and boosts their memory. This demonstrates an easy and noninvasive way to influence human brain activity to improve sleep and enhance memory. "The beauty lies in the simplicity to apply auditory stimulation at low intensities—an approach that ...

Mutations found in individuals with autism block the action of molecules made by the brain that act on the same receptors that marijuana's active chemical acts on, according to new research reported online April 11 in the Cell Press journal Neuron. The findings implicate specific molecules, called endocannabinoids, in the development of some autism cases and point to potential treatment strategies. "Endocannabinoids are molecules that are critical regulators of normal neuronal activity and are important for many brain functions," says first author Dr. Csaba Földy, of ...

An annual report from the American Cancer Society finds continuing challenges in changing behaviors and risk factors in order to reduce suffering and death from cancer. The report, Cancer Prevention & Early Detection Facts & Figures (CPED) 2013, outlines the current prevalence of tobacco use, obesity, physical inactivity, and the use of established screening tests, and emphasizes that social, economic, and legislative factors profoundly influence the individual health behaviors that contribute to cancer risk. Since 1992, the American Cancer Society has published CPED ...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have identified a previously unknown biological mechanism involved in the regulation of pancreatic islet beta cells, whose role is to produce and release insulin. The discovery suggests a new therapeutic target for treating dysfunctional beta cells and type 2 diabetes, a disease affecting more than 25 million Americans. Writing in the April 11, 2013 issue of Cell, Jerrold M. Olefsky, MD, associate dean for scientific affairs and distinguished professor of medicine, and colleagues say a transmembrane ...

VIDEO: Ph.D. Student Arvid Guterstam explains how he and his colleagues at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden can evoke the illusion of having a phantom hand in non-amputated individuals. Click here for more information. The sensation of having a physical body is not as self-evident as one might think. Almost everyone who has had an arm or leg amputated experiences a phantom limb: a vivid sensation that the missing limb is still present. A new study by neuroscientists at the Karolinska ...

Regulating alcohol outlet density, or the number of physical locations in which alcoholic beverages are available for purchase in a geographic area, is an effective strategy for reducing excessive alcohol consumption and associated harms. A new report from the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health documents how localities can address alcohol outlet density, and outlines the critical role of health departments and community coalitions in these efforts. The report, published in the journal Preventing Chronic Disease, ...

VIDEO: The video as it appears in the JoVE article. Click here for more information. On April 11th JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments) will publish a new video article by Dr. Aydogan Ozcan demonstrating how a cell phone camera can capture images from a fluorescent microscope and flow cytometer, which will make it possible for areas with limited resources to easily run tests such as checking for contaminated water and monitoring HIV positive patients. In the new video ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (April 11, 2013) – In a surprising finding that helps explain fundamental behaviors of normal and diseased cells, Whitehead Institute scientists have discovered a set of powerful gene regulators dubbed "super-enhancers" that control cell state and identity. Healthy cells employ these super-enhancers to control genes responsible for cellular functions and developmental transitions—such as that from embryonic stem cell to nerve cell—but cancer cells are able to assemble their own insidious super-enhancers to overproduce harmful oncogenes that lead to aggressive ...

A team of researchers at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center has found that a protein long believed to have a minor role in type 2 diabetes is, in fact, a central player in the development of the condition that affects nearly 26 million people in the United States alone and counts as one of the leading causes of heart disease, stroke and kidney, eye and nerve damage. Working with mice, the scientists discovered that a protein called EPAC2 — deemed a second-fiddle player up until now — is actually an important regulator of insulin that appears to work by nudging insulin-secreting ...

Tumor necrosis factor – normally an infection-fighting substance produced by the body– can actually heighten susceptibility to tuberculosis if its levels are too high. University of Washington TB researchers unravel this conundrum in a report this week in Cell. Their study shows how excess production of this disease-cell destroyer at first acts as a TB germ killer. But later the opposite occurs: too much tumor necrosis factor encourages TB pathogens to multiply in the body. In addition to figuring out some reasons behind this back-pedaling, the scientists learned ...

A "garden variety" leaf is a broad, flat structure, but if the garden happens to be somewhere arid, it probably includes succulent plants with plump leaves full of precious water. Fat leaves did not emerge in the plant world easily. A new Brown University study published in Current Biology reports that to sustain efficient photosynthesis, they required the evolution of a fundamental remodeling of leaf vein structure: the addition of a third dimension. Leaves, after all, are food factories complete with plumbing to transport water and sugar. The farther those veins are ...

In order to improve a simulation designed to study the evolution of the solar system through time, numerical mathematical methods have been developed at the Computing Faculty of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). Specifically, the methods proposed enable the simulation calculations to be done faster and more accurately. The methodology developed at the UPV/EHU's Computing Faculty is a clear example of interdisciplinarity and collaboration. Indeed, mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists and astronomers have been working together on this task, and ...

Circadian rhythms keep time for all living things, from regulating when plants open their flowers to foiling people when they try to beat jet lag. Day-night cycles are controlled through ancient biological mechanisms, evolutionarily speaking, so in essence, a human has the same internal clock as a fly does. These circadian clocks govern daily rhythms through genes that synchronize molecular pathways that promote or repress protein production, influencing a multitude of body functions. Even before waking, for example, our clock-driven metabolism turns on enzymes and transporters ...

Twelve years after a breakthrough discovery in his University of California, Berkeley, laboratory, professor of chemical engineering Jay Keasling is seeing his dream come true. On April 11, the pharmaceutical company Sanofi will launch the large-scale production of a partially synthetic version of artemisinin, a chemical critical to making today's front-line antimalaria drug, based on Keasling's discovery. The drug is the first triumph of the nascent field of synthetic biology and will be, Keasling hopes, a lifesaver for the hundreds of millions of people in developing ...

Traditional opinion polls may severely underestimate the openness for political change among voters, according to research published on 10 April in the open access journal PLOS ONE. Polarisation and partisanship in politics are a constant topic of discussion, and political candidates often believe they must focus their campaign efforts on a small number of swing voters open to ideological change. Based on the wisdom of opinion polls, this might seem like a good idea. But do most voters really hold their political attitudes so firmly that they are unreceptive to persuasion? ...

This press release is available in German. The application of light for information processing opens up a multitude of possibilities. However, to be able to adequately use photons in circuits and sensors, materials need to have particular optical and mechanical properties. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have now for the first time used polycrystalline diamond to manufacture optical circuits and have published their results online in Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2710). "Diamond has several properties that allow us to manufacture ...

Philadelphia, PA, April 11, 2013 – A potential new treatment for alcoholism called nalmefene is effective and safe for reducing alcohol consumption in alcohol dependent individuals, says a new study published this week in Biological Psychiatry. Traditionally, abstinence has been regarded as the primary treatment goal for alcohol dependence, and current pharmacological treatments for alcoholism are approved only for relapse prevention. However, relapse rates remain high and a goal of abstinence is unacceptable to many patients. To address these concerns and provide opportunities ...

New Orleans, LA – Research led by Dr. Suresh Alahari, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans, is the first to report that two specific tumor suppressor genes work in concert to inhibit the growth and spread of breast tumor cells to the lungs. The research is published this week online in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Working in a mouse model, the LSUHSC research team studied LKB1, an enzyme that functions as a tumor suppressor in the small intestine, and Nischarin, a novel protein that regulates breast cancer cell ...

Web tools and social media are our key sources of information when we make decisions as citizens and consumers. But these information technologies can mislead us by magnifying social processes that distort facts and make us act contrary to our own interests – such as buying property at wildly inflated prices because we are led to believe that everybody else is. New research from the University of Copenhagen, which has just been published in the journal Metaphilosophy, combines formal philosophy, social psychology, and decision theory to understand and tackle these phenomena. "Group ...

The plaque deposits in the brain of Alzheimer's patients are surrounded by the brain's own immune cells, the microglia. This was already recognized by Alois Alzheimer more than one hundred years ago. But until today it still remains unclear what role microglia play in Alzheimer's disease. Do they help to break down the plaque deposit? A study by researchers of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin has now shed light on these mysterious microglia during the progression of Alzheimer's disease. (PLOS One, ...

Clinical pharmacologists at Heidelberg University Hospital have achieved major progress for improving the reliability of drugs. In a pharmacological study, they showed for the first time that interactions between drugs can be detected with minute doses in the range of nanograms. However, at these low doses, the drugs are neither effective nor do they have side effects. This means that studies on interactions occurring in drug combinations can be conducted practically without posing risks or negative impacts on the participants. This is true not only for healthy volunteers, ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Every day, millions of people with bipolar disorder take medicines that help keep them from swinging into manic or depressed moods. But just how these drugs produce their effects is still a mystery. Now, a new University of Michigan Medical School study of brain tissue helps reveal what might actually be happening. And further research using stem cells programmed to act like brain cells is already underway. Using genetic analysis, the new study suggests that certain medications may help "normalize" the activity of a number of genes involved in communication ...

An international team of researchers, including a paleontologist from the University of Bonn, have proven dinosaur embryos to be the oldest ever found. The specimens of Lufengosaurus discovered in China lived during the lower Jurassic about 200 to 190 million years ago. Based on the bone tissue, Dr. Koen Stein was able to show that the fossils must have been in a very early stage of development. The rapid growth and high reproductive rate of these Chinese dinosaurs is astounding. The results are now being presented in the renowned scientific journal "Nature". Rice fields ...

This press release is available in German. Sany acquired German mid-sized company Putzmeister, a leading manufacturer of concrete pumps, to become a world leader in heavy machinery. Lenovo took over the electronics company Medion. Weichai Power bought a stake in Kion, one of the world's biggest forklift truck manufacturers. The list of Chinese companies that have recently bought German firms outright or acquired a stake in them is long. By realizing an opportunity in the midst of the economic and financial crisis, they have been have made a change towards medium-sized ...

WASHINGTON — Even with health insurance, ready access to preventive, specialty and behavioral health care and comprehensive electronic medical records, nearly 8 percent of patients in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) visit the emergency department two or more times per year, according to a study published online Tuesday in Annals of Emergency Medicine ("What Drives Frequent Emergency Department Use in an Integrated Health System: National Data from the Veterans Health Administration"). The study, along with an accompanying editorial ("How Frequent Emergency Department ...