An international team led by Sascha Quanz (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) has studied the disc of gas and dust that surrounds the young star HD 100546, a relatively nearby neighbour located 335 light-years from Earth. They were surprised to find what seems to be a planet in the process of being formed, still embedded in the disc of material around the young star. The candidate planet would be a gas giant similar to Jupiter. "So far, planet formation has mostly been a topic tackled by computer simulations," says Sascha Quanz. "If our discovery is indeed a forming planet, then ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (February 28, 2013) – Performed an average of a decade after initial facelift surgery, a "secondary" facelift can achieve similarly lasting results with a low complication rate, according to a paper in the March issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). Dr. Rod J. Rohrich and colleagues of University of Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, report their 20-year experience with secondary facelift surgery, or "rhytidectomy." The researchers conclude that, with attention ...

Philadelphia, Pa. (February 28, 2013) –For women undergoing breast reconstruction using implants, most patient-reported outcomes are similar with two different shapes of silicone gel-filled implants, reports a study in the March issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). Assessment of key areas of quality of life after breast reconstruction shows few significant differences with conventional round implants versus newer "shaped" implants, according to the new research, led by Dr. Sheina ...

Bethesda, MD—Women who are pregnant or using synthetic progesterone birth control injections have a conspicuous vulnerability to certain infections including malaria, Listeria, HIV, and herpes simplex virus. A new research report appearing in the March 2013 issue of the Journal of Leukocyte Biology offers strong evidence for a possible explanation: the progesterone receptor, a pregnancy hormone sensor, targets a part of the immune system responsible for protection against these and other invaders. In addition to helping explain why some women are more vulnerable to certain ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A team of neuroengineers based at Brown University has developed a fully implantable and rechargeable wireless brain sensor capable of relaying real-time broadband signals from up to 100 neurons in freely moving subjects. Several copies of the novel low-power device, described in the Journal of Neural Engineering, have been performing well in animal models for more than year, a first in the brain-computer interface field. Brain-computer interfaces coud help people with severe paralysis control devces with their thoughts. Arto Nurmikko, ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Researchers have electronically linked the brains of pairs of rats for the first time, enabling them to communicate directly to solve simple behavioral puzzles. A further test of this work successfully linked the brains of two animals thousands of miles apart—one in Durham, N.C., and one in Natal, Brazil. The results of these projects suggest the future potential for linking multiple brains to form what the research team is calling an "organic computer," which could allow sharing of motor and sensory information among groups of animals. The study was published ...

Canola, cottonseed, and sunflower products can replace soybean meal in diets fed to pigs, but they contain less protein and energy. To determine if it makes economic sense to use them, producers need to know the concentrations and digestibility of the nutrients they contain. To help them make the decision, University of Illinois researchers examined amino acid digestibility for these products. "Soybean is by far the biggest oilseed crop in the world," said Hans Stein, professor of animal sciences. "But canola, cottonseed, and sunflowers are grown in areas where soybeans ...

Bethesda, MD—Earth Day may be more than a month away, but another, more personal, ecosystem has been shown to also be worth protecting—within our bodies are communities of microbes that affect the behavior of human cells hosting them. These communities, called the "microbiome," are so crucial to our health that some consider it to be a complex "second genome." Understanding the interaction of these microbes among one another and their human hosts has the potential to yield insights into numerous diseases and complex human disorders from obesity to susceptibility to infection. ...

A European study published in the 'Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention' journal has analysed the association between physical activities and in situ or non-invasive breast cancer, or, in other words, cancer that has not yet invaded cells within or outside of the breast. Headed by researchers from ten European countries including Spain, the work carried out under the framework of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) concludes that physical activity has no relation with the risk of developing this type of non-invasive cancer. ...

Bethesda, MD—Here's another reason why a healthy diet during pregnancy is critical to the future health of your children: New research published in the March 2013 issue of The FASEB Journal, suggests that pregnant mothers who consume junk food actually cause changes in the development of the opioid signaling pathway in the brains of their unborn children. This change results in the babies being less sensitive to opioids, which are released upon consumption of foods that are high in fat and sugar. In turn, these children, born with a higher "tolerance" to junk food need ...

A group of international ecological scientists led by the University of Adelaide have rejected a doomsday-like scenario of sudden, irreversible change to the Earth's ecology. In a paper published today in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, the scientists from Australia, US and UK argue that global-scale ecological tipping points are unlikely and that ecological change over large areas seem to follow a more gradual, smooth pattern. This opposes recent efforts to define 'planetary tipping points' ‒ critical levels of biodiversity loss or land-use change ...

Cockroaches (Blattodea) are an insect order remarkable in their biodiversity and distribution, with more than 4500 species known and great geographical reach. Cockroach fossils date back around 400 million years, which testifies to their great adaptability and endurance that puts them among the planet's great survivors. The cockroach genus Pseudophoraspism has has been reported from China for the first time thanks to the discovery of three new species: Pseudophoraspis clavellata, Pseudophoraspis recurvata and Pseudophoraspis incurvata, alongside the first regional record ...

This press release is available in German. Max Planck scientists in Jena, Germany, have discovered an unusual regulation of enzymes that catalyze chain elongation in an important secondary metabolism, the terpenoid pathway. In the horseradish leaf beetle Phaedon cochleariae a single enzyme can trigger the production of two completely different substances depending on whether it is regulated by cobalt, manganese or magnesium ions: iridoids, which are defensive substances the larvae use to repel predators, or juvenile hormones, which control insect's development. Insects ...

A team of researchers led by Associate Professor Yan Jie from the Department of Physics at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Faculty of Science has identified three new distinct overstretched deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) structures caused by mechanical stretching. This discovery provides a clear answer to a long-running debate among scientists over the nature of DNA overstretching. Debate on Possible DNA Structural Transitions Recent single-molecule studies revealed that mechanical stretching could induce transitions to elongated DNA structures. Three possible ...

This press release is available in German. Ice cubes in a cocktail glass melt until an equilibrium state is reached in which the ice cubes are gone. After that, the geometric shape of the ice cubes is completely lost. The liquid does not contain any memory of their shape, the ordered ice crystal has turned into disordered water molecules. Ultra cold Bose-Einstein condensates behave differently; these highly ordered clouds of ultra cold particles also approach a disordered equilibrium state, but they retain some "memory" about their initial state for a remarkably long ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Patients with pneumonia may spend fewer days in the hospital if they are given steroids along with antibiotics and supportive care. That's the finding of a Mayo Clinic analysis of eight randomized-controlled clinical trials involving more than 1,100 patients. The results appear in the March issue of the Journal of Hospital Medicine. "Given that the average hospital stay for community-acquired pneumonia can range from nine to 23 days, the prospect of speeding recovery, even by a day or two, is helpful," says co-author M. Rizwan Sohail, M.D., a Mayo infectious ...

Having more control in the workplace can have negative consequences for individuals but it depends on the form of job control, according to new research out of the University of Toronto. Sociologist Scott Schieman measured a range of work conditions using data from a national survey of 6,004 Canadian workers. To measure levels of job pressure, he asked study participants questions such as: "How often do you feel overwhelmed by how much you had to do at work?" "How often do you have to work on too many tasks at the same time?" and "How often do the demands of your job ...

Using new technology at the telescope and in laboratories, researchers have discovered an important pair of prebiotic molecules in interstellar space. The discoveries indicate that some basic chemicals that are key steps on the way to life may have formed on dusty ice grains floating between the stars. The scientists used the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia to study a giant cloud of gas some 25,000 light-years from Earth, near the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. The chemicals they found in that cloud include a molecule thought ...

This press release is available in Spanish. At the Faculty of Pharmacy of the Basque Public University (UPV/EHU) the Pharmacokinetics, Nanotechnology and Gene Therapy research team is using nanotechnology to develop new formulations that can be applied to drugs and gene therapy.Specifically, they are using nanoparticles todesignsystems for delivering genes and drugs; this helps to get the genes and drugs to the point of action so that they can produce the desired effect. The research team has shown that lipid nanoparticles, which they have been working on for several ...

It could be a grotto. Light is glowing up from below and gives the moving waves a glance of an opal under the sunlight. "This computer graphic was written with our new description language by a schoolboy in not more than two hours after a briefly reading of the instructions", explains Felix Klein, doctoral candidate at the chair of Computer Graphics at Saarland University. As Klein is moving three slide switches with the mouse which are placed under the wave graphic on the display, the water is transforming. Now, the waves are spreading circularly from the center point, ...

A single mutation in the H5N1 avian influenza virus that affects the pH at which the hemagglutinin surface protein is activated simultaneously reduces its capacity to infect ducks and enhances its capacity to grow in mice according to research published ahead of print today in the Journal of Virology. "Knowing the factors and markers that govern the efficient growth of a virus in one host species, tissue, or cell culture versus another is of fundamental importance in viral infectious disease," says Charles J. Russell of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, ...

VIDEO: This shows fibroblast cells using integrins to migrate through tissue. Click here for more information. Scientists at The University of Manchester have identified the method by which cells control the recycling of molecules, a process that is essential for them to move. The discovery provides researchers with a better understanding of how our bodies heal wounds. Working under Professor Martin Humphries, the Dean of the Faculty of Life Sciences, Dr Mark Morgan and ...

Tiny particles filled with a drug could be a new tool for treating cancer in the future. A new study published by Swedish scientists in Particle & Particle Systems Characterization shows how such nanoparticles can be combined to secure the effective delivery of cancer drugs to tumour cells – and how they can be given properties to make them visible in MR scanners and thus rendered trackable. The team, which consisted of scientists from Karolinska Institutet (KI) and the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, and from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, ...

PASADENA, Calif., Feb. 27, 2013 – Patients with diabetes who undergo total knee replacement surgery do not have increased risk of surgical complications compared to those patients without diabetes, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published today in The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery. Researchers studied the electronic health records of more than 40,000 patients who had a first-time knee replacement from January 1, 2001 through December 31, 2009. Of the patients studied, 12.5 percent had controlled diabetes, 6.2 percent had uncontrolled diabetes and 81.3 percent ...

Researchers at IDIBELL and CIBERER Virginia Nunes and Miguel López de Heredia have collected data from 400 patients with Wolfram syndrome published worldwide in the last fifteen years to better understand the natural history of disease. The findings lead them to propose a revision of the diagnostic criteria of the disease because 15% of paediatric patients escape from diagnosis. The results of this review have been published this week in the online edition of the journal Genetics in Medicine to coincide with the World Day of rare diseases, on February 28th. These rare ...