Scientists have discovered a new enzyme that could prove an important step in the quest to turn waste (such as paper, scrap wood and straw) into liquid fuel. To do this they turned to the destructive power of tiny marine wood-borers called 'gribble', which have been known to destroy seaside piers. Using advanced biochemical analysis and X-ray imaging techniques, researchers from the University of York, University of Portsmouth and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the USA have determined the structure and function of a key enzyme used by gribble to break down ...

4th June 2013, Zaragoza, Spain – Alzheimer researchers in Spain have taken a step closer to finding a blood test to help in the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. With approximately 75% of the estimated 36 million Alzheimer's sufferers worldwide yet to receive a reliable diagnosis, the potential impact on the lives of possible sufferers, present and future, could be huge. Alzheimer's disease is a neurodegenerative disease most frequently affecting the elderly. The most commonly associated symptom is a progressive loss of memory to the stage in which the patient is ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A new study suggests that U.S. businesses pay almost $6,000 per year extra for each employee who smokes compared to the cost to employ a person who has never smoked cigarettes. Researchers say the study is the first to take a comprehensive look at the financial burden for companies that employ smokers. By drawing on previous research on the costs of absenteeism, lost productivity, smoke breaks and health care costs, the researchers developed an estimate that each employee who smokes costs an employer an average of $5,816 annually above the cost of ...

Our Solar System's Milky Way neighborhood just went upscale. We reside between two major spiral arms of our home galaxy, in a structure called the Local Arm. New research using the ultra-sharp radio vision of the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) indicates that the Local Arm, previously thought to be only a small spur, instead is much more like the adjacent major arms, and is likely a significant branch of one of them. "Our new evidence suggests that the Local Arm should appear as a prominent feature of the Milky Way," said Alberto Sanna, of ...

Even if Australians with newly diagnosed bowel cancer were routinely tested for a genetic predisposition to further cancers, one in three people would still not take the necessary steps to use that information to prevent further disease. Researchers from UNSW Medicine took the extra step of screening for the hereditary Lynch syndrome in the 2,100 people with colorectal cancer who presented at a number of NSW hospitals* over a three-year period. Researchers found that a significant number of these people (245) had a bowel cancer with features that suggested Lynch syndrome, ...

There is an increasing need for safe emergency anaesthesia as cases of emergency Caesarean section (CS) continue to rise, say experts speaking at Euroanaesthesia, the annual congress of the European Society of Anaesthesiology (ESA). Dr Geraldine O'Sullivan (Lead clinician for obstetric anaesthesia, Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK) discusses how in the UK between 25-30% of deliveries are by CS, well above the WHO recommended rate of 15% (England 25%, Scotland/Wales 26%, Northern Ireland 30%, UK overall 25%). The 25% overall rate in the UK is made ...

U.S. workfare programs have been praised by some for cutting welfare rolls and improving the economic well-being of families. But little is known about how these policies affected participants' health and mortality. Researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health studied enrollees in Florida's Family Transition Program who were given a time limit for welfare benefits and exposed to job training. They were compared to a control group who received traditional welfare benefits. In this randomized controlled trial, the researchers found that participants ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Go ye and sin no more -- or pay for it, when it comes to junk food, smoking and consuming alcohol. That's the message from two Mayo Clinic physicians who say raising "sin" taxes on tobacco and alcoholic beverages and imposing them on sugary drinks and fatty foods would lead many people to cut back, improving public health. The article by Michael Joyner, M.D., and David Warner, M.D., appears in the June issue of the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings. The physicians contend that much of overall health depends on behavior and is relatively independent of ...

The long-standing mystery behind dormant disseminated breast tumor cells and what activates them after years and even decades of latency may have been solved. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have identified the microenvironment surrounding microvasculature – the small blood vessels that transport blood within tissues – as a niche where dormant cancer cells reside. When these blood vessels begin to sprout, the new tips produce molecules that transform dormant cancer cells into metastatic tumors. In ...

In a bid to save £10 million a year the British Treasury is replacing copper–nickel five and ten pence coins with new nickel-plated steel versions. However, while no UK health assessment has taken place, scientists in Sweden have analyzed the allergy risk after the Swedish state bank announced it will reduce traces of nickel in Swedish coinage. The assessment, published in Contact Dermatitis reveals that the UK public's exposure to nickel allergic reactions will increase four fold. The team analyzes skin exposure and metal release in artificial sweat to find that the ...

(PHILADELPHIA) – Research from Thomas Jefferson University is laying the foundation for a genetic test to accurately identify hip dysplasia in newborns so that early intervention can be initiated to promote normal development. This research from Jefferson Orthopedics physician-scientists is currently available in the Journal of Bone and Mineralizing Research (JBMR) online at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jbmr.1999/abstract. The researchers studied four generations of a Utah family affected by developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH) in most generations. ...

In a report to be released this month, the Promoting Malaria Prevention and Treatment (ProMPT) Project will describe an innovative model for distributing over 12 million mosquito nets to prevent the transmission of malaria in Ghana. In collaboration with the Ghana Health Service (GHS), and funding from the US Agency for international Development (USAID), the four year long project ensured that millions of households learned how to use nets treated with insecticide to kill mosquitoes, which can transmit malaria. The $20 million project, funded through the United States ...

ITHACA, N.Y. – Preschoolers universally recognize that one's choices are not always free – that our decisions may be constrained by social obligations to be nice to others or follow rules set by parents or elders, even when wanting to do otherwise. As they age, however, American kids are more prone to acknowledge one's freedom to act against such obligations compared to Nepalese children, who are less willing to say that people can and will violate social codes, finds a cross-cultural study by Cornell University development psychologists published in the current issue ...

Fish can hide in the open ocean by manipulating how light reflects off their skin, according to researchers at The University of Texas at Austin. The discovery could someday lead to the development of new camouflage materials for use in the ocean, and it overturns 40 years of conventional wisdom about fish camouflage. The researchers found that lookdown fish camouflage themselves through a complex manipulation of polarized light after it strikes the fishes' skin. In laboratory studies, they showed that this kind of camouflage outperforms by up to 80 percent the "mirror" ...

(WINSTON-SALEM, NC, June 3, 2013) – When it comes to saving its own hide, the tiger moth can predict the future. A new study by researchers at Wake Forest University shows Bertholdia trigona, a species of tiger moth found in the Arizona desert, can tell if an echo-locating bat is going to attack it well before the predator swoops in for the kill – making the intuitive, tiny-winged insect a master of self-preservation. Predators in the night A bat uses sonar to hunt at night. The small mammal emits a series of ultrasonic cries and listens carefully to the echoes ...

This news release is available in German. The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) is to establish 12 new Collaborative Research Centres (CRCs). This was decided by the responsible Grants Committee during its spring session in Bonn. The new CRCs will receive a total of 94 million euros for an initial period of three years and nine months. There will also be a 20% programme allowance for indirect project costs. The new CRCs cover a wide range of topics, including the sociocultural importance of oil, metals, food and other natural resources ...

New Zealand's geologic hazards agency reported this week an ongoing, "silent" earthquake that began in January is still going strong. Though it is releasing the energy equivalent of a 7.0 earthquake, New Zealanders can't feel it because its energy is being released over a long period of time, therefore slow, rather than a few short seconds. These so-called "slow slip events" are common at subduction zone faults – where an oceanic plate meets a continental plate and dives beneath it. They also occur on continents along strike-slip faults like California's San Andreas, ...

Researchers from the University of Valencia and the Natural History Museum of Berlin have studied the fossilised remains of scales and bones found in Teruel and the south of Zaragoza, ascertaining that they belong to a new fish species called Machaeracanthus goujeti that lived in that area of the peninsula during the Devonian period. The fossils are part of the collection housed in the Palaeontology Museum of Zaragoza. In the journal 'Geodiversitas', a research team led by the University of Valencia describes a new species of spiny shark (Acanthodii), a primitive type ...

BEER-SHEVA, Israel, June 3, 2013 -- A group of oncologists have revealed in a new study by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers that communicating about death and dying with their patients is one of the most difficult and stressful parts of their work. In the United States, 577,190 deaths from cancer occurred in 2012, according to the American Cancer Society. The online paper published ahead of print in the Journal of Oncology Practice reported that despite this important element of their work, oncologists receive little training in this area, and ...

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite detected dozens of fires burning in central Africa on June 03, 2013. The fires are outlined in red. Most of the fires burn in grass or cropland, which is brownish in this image. The location, widespread nature, and number of fires suggest that these fires were deliberately set to manage land. Farmers often use fire to return nutrients to the soil and to clear the ground of unwanted plants especially in places where open land for farming is not readily available because of dense vegetation ...

Boulder, Colorado, USA – In the June issue of GSA Today, Kieran O'Hara of the University of Kentucky and E.K. Esawi of Elizabethtown Community & Technical College propose a new model for the eruption of Yellowstone Park's Old Faithful geyser. The model, which replicates the geyser's eruption interval for 2000-2011, is based on three stages of convective boiling in the conduit. The preplay phase, which triggers the main eruption, plays a key role in determining the eruption interval, the duration of which is the sum of the preplay time and the time to uppermost (stage ...

SINGAPORE – A research team led by the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School (Duke-NUS) in Singapore has identified ways to inhibit the function of a key protein linked to stem cell-like behavior in terminal-stage chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), making it possible to develop drugs that may extend the survival of these patients. The study, published in the prestigious international journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the result of a long-standing collaboration between Duke-NUS, the Experimental Therapeutics Centre at the Agency for Science, Technology ...

NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of a large light-brown colored plumes of smoke from two large fires burning in New Mexico: the Thompson Ridge Fire (left) and the Tres Lagunas Fire (right). Inciweb reported that the Thompson Ridge Fire is located in the Valles Caldera National Preserve, located about two miles northeast of La Cueva, New Mexico. The fire is reported to be human-caused, and started on May 31, 2013. So far, 1,906 acres have burned in the Preserve. The Tres Leguans Fire was started by a downed power line on May 30. The fire started about 10 miles ...

Here are highlights from the online issue of Discovery's Edge, Mayo Clinic's research magazine. You may cite and link to this publication as often as you wish. Republication is allowed with proper attribution. Please include the following subscription information as your editorial policies permit: Visit Discovery's Edge for subscription information. Regenerating Heart Tissue Through Stem Cell Therapy Read the details of how Mayo Clinic's unique stem cell technique restored strength and endurance to heart attack patients in three European countries. This groundbreaking ...

In the brain, cell-to-cell communication is dependent on neurotransmitters, chemicals that aid the transfer of information between neurons. Several proteins have the ability to modify the production of these chemicals by either increasing or decreasing their amount, or promoting or preventing their secretion. One example is tomosyn, which hinders the secretion of neurotransmitters in abnormal amounts. Dr. Boaz Barak of Tel Aviv University's Sagol School of Neuroscience, in collaboration with Prof. Uri Ashery, used a method for modifying the levels of this protein in the ...