In 2005, President George W. Bush and American corn farmers saw corn ethanol as a promising fossil fuel substitute that would reduce both American dependence on foreign oil and greenhouse gas emissions. Accordingly, the 2005 energy bill mandated that 4 billion gallons of renewable fuel be added to the gasoline supply in 2006. That rose to 4.7 billion gallons in 2007 and 7.5 billion in 2012. Since then, life cycle assessments (LCAs) have shown that corn ethanol has modest if any effect on reducing CO2 emissions and may actually increase them, while posing a threat to natural ...

Palaeontologists who examined a new fossil found in southern California have thrown doubt on earlier claims that a "killer walrus" once existed. Geology PhD student Robert Boessenecker from New Zealand's University of Otago and co-author Morgan Churchill from the University of Wyoming have today published their paper about the fossil in the online scientific journal PLOS ONE. The paper reports that the new fossil-find, of the extinct walrus Pelagiarctos from southern California, prompts a different hypothesis to an earlier one that a "killer walrus" existed, preying ...

"Arrests of and Forced Interventions on Pregnant Women in the United States, 1973-2005: Implications for Women's Legal Status and Public Health," an article by Lynn M. Paltrow and Jeanne Flavin in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law (volume 38, issue 2), offers a groundbreaking, in-depth look at criminal and civil cases in which a woman's pregnancy was a deciding factor leading to attempted and actual deprivations of her physical liberty. As "personhood" measures are promoted and the fortieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade approaches, this article broadens the ...

When it comes to camouflage, ground-nesting Japanese quail are experts. That's based on new evidence published online on January 17 in Current Biology that mother quail "know" the patterning of their own eggs and choose laying spots to hide them best. "Not only are the eggs camouflaged, but the birds choose to lay their eggs on a substrate that maximizes camouflage," said P. George Lovell of Abertay University and the University of St Andrews. "Furthermore, the maximization seems specific to individual birds." Karen Spencer, also of University of St Andrews and a co-author, ...

Leprosy is a bacterial disease that spreads to muscles and other tissues in the body, causing neurodegeneration and muscle weakness. A new study, published by Cell Press January 17th in the journal Cell, reveals that the bacteria responsible for leprosy spread infection by hijacking specialized cells in the adult nervous system, reprogramming them into a stem cell-like state, and converting them to muscle-like cells. These findings could lead to the development of new therapeutic strategies for combating bacterial infections and degenerative diseases as well as new tools ...

Scientists at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have made a large step towards the understanding of how human genes are regulated. In a new study, published in the journal Cell, they identified the DNA sequences that bind to over four hundred proteins that control expression of genes. This knowledge is required for understanding of how differences in genomes of individuals affect their risk to develop disease. After the human genome was sequenced in 2000, it was hoped that the knowledge of the entire sequence of human DNA could rapidly be translated to medical benefits ...

Atlanta– Jan. 17, 2013–As of 2009, the overall death rate for cancer in the United States had declined 20 percent from its peak in 1991, translating to the avoidance of approximately 1.2 million deaths from cancer, 152,900 of these in 2009 alone. These figures come from the American Cancer Society's annual Cancer Statistics report, one of the most widely-cited medical publications in the world. Each year, the American Cancer Society estimates the numbers of new cancer cases and deaths expected in the United States in the current year and compiles the most recent data ...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have identified a molecular mechanism regulating autophagy, a fundamental stress response used by cells to help ensure their survival in adverse conditions. The findings are published online in the January 17 issue of Cell. Senior author Kun-Liang Guan, PhD, a professor of pharmacology at UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center, and colleagues report that an enzyme called AMPK, typically involved in sensing and modulating energy use in cells, also regulates autophagic enzymes. Autophagy, which derives ...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have discovered that hard-to-reach, drug-resistant leukemia stem cells (LSCs) that overexpress multiple pro-survival protein forms are sensitive – and thus vulnerable – to a novel cancer stem cell-targeting drug currently under development. The findings, published in the January 17 online issue of Cell Stem Cell, open the possibility that diseases like chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) and some solid tumor cancers might – in combination with other therapies – be more effectively treated with this ...

Scientists have discovered that that the flu virus can essentially tell time, thereby giving scientists the ability to reset the virus' clock and combat it in more effective ways. According to researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the flu knows how much time it has to multiply, infect other cells, and spread to another human being. If it leaves a cell too soon, the virus is too weak. If it leaves too late, the immune system has time to kill the virus. The finding provides a novel design platform for the flu vaccine and could lead to new antiviral ...

New research shows that more than 75 per cent of people with a particular version of a gene don't produce under-arm odour but use deodorant anyway. The study was based on a sample of 6,495 women who are part of the wider Children of the 90s study at the University of Bristol. The researchers found that about two per cent (117 out of 6,495) of mothers carry a rare version of a particular gene (ABCC11), which means they don't produce any under-arm odour. While about 5 per cent of people who produce an odour do not use deodorant, more than a fifth (26 out of 117) of ...

Laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding – lap banding – is a safe and effective long-term strategy for managing obesity, according to the findings of a landmark 15-year follow-up study of patients treated in Australia. The follow-up study, the longest and most comprehensive yet reported, was published in the Annals of Surgery, and found a significant number of lap band patients maintained an average weight loss of 26 kilograms for more than a decade after their procedure. Professor Paul O'Brien and colleagues from the Centre for Obesity Research and Education (CORE) ...

New research led by a team at Queen Mary, University of London, has found evidence of how daily changes in temperature affect the fruit fly's internal clock. "A wide range of organisms, including insects and humans, have evolved an internal clock to regulate daily patterns of behaviour, such as sleep, appetite, and attention," explains Professor Ralf Stanewsky, senior study author from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences. "Research on animal and human clocks shows that they are fine tuned by natural and man-made time cues, for example the daily ...

This press release is available in German. An international team of researchers from the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the CNRS in Lyon have investigated the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA of 500 individuals from southern Africa speaking different Khoisan and Bantu languages. Their results demonstrate that Khoisan foragers were genetically more diverse than previously known. Divergent mtDNA lineages from indigenous Khoisan groups were incorporated into the genepool of the immigrating Bantu-speaking agriculturalists through admixture, and have ...

University of Rochester Medical Center scientists have proposed a new reason why acute myeloid leukemia, one of the most aggressive cancers, is so difficult to cure: a subset of cells that drive the disease appear to have a much slower metabolism than most other tumors cells. The slower metabolism protects leukemia cells in many important ways and allows them to survive better – but the team also found an experimental drug tailored to this unique metabolic status and has begun testing its ability to attack the disease, URMC researchers report in the Jan. 17, 2013, online ...

A discovery about the way in which bugs spread throughout the body could help to develop stem cell treatments. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have found that bacteria are able to change the make-up of supporting cells within the nerve system, called Schwann cells, so that they take on the properties of stem cells. Because stem cells can develop into any of the different cell types in the body – including liver and brain cells – mimicking this process could aid research into a range of degenerative conditions. Scientists made the discovery studying ...

A certain enzyme, the CaM kinase II, keeps the cardiac muscle flexible. By transferring phosphate groups to the giant protein titin, it relaxes the muscle cells. This is reported by researchers led by Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Linke of the Institute of Physiology at the Ruhr Universität in the journal Circulation Research. In failing hearts, which don't pump enough blood around the body, the scientists found an overly active CaM kinase II. "The phosphorylation of titin could be a new starting point for the treatment of heart failure" Prof. Linke speculates. Titin phosphorylation ...

In developing these novel self-assembling materials, postdoc Barbara Capone has focused on the design of organic and inorganic building blocks, which are robust and can be produced at large scale. Capone has put forward, together with her colleagues at the Universities of Vienna and Mainz, a completely new pathway for the construction of building blocks at the nanoscale. "Soft Lego" orders in crystal structures The team of researchers has shown that so-called block copolymer stars – that means polymers that consist of two different blocks and they are chemically ...

Caesarean section increases the risk of persistent pelvic girdle pain after delivery compared with vaginal delivery, according to a new study from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. Caesarean section rates are increasing worldwide, and this trend has partly been explained by women's requests for planned caesarean section without a medical reason. Pregnancy-related pelvic girdle pain has been associated with increased preference for caesarean section and with increased planned caesarean section rates. "Some women with severe pelvic girdle pain might fear that ...

To live is to move. You strike to swat that irritable mosquito, which skilfully evades the hand of death. How did that happen? Who moved your hand, and what saved the mosquito? Enter the Molecular Motors, nanoscale protein-machines in the muscles of your hand and wings of the mosquito. You need these motors to swat mosquitoes, blink your eyes, walk, eat, drink... just name it. Millions of motors tug as a team within your muscles, and you swat the mosquito. This is teamwork at its exquisite best. Paradoxically, a weak and inefficient motor (called dynein) is the one that ...

Nearly 200 000 light-years from Earth, the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, floats in space, in a long and slow dance around our galaxy. Vast clouds of gas within it slowly collapse to form new stars. In turn, these light up the gas clouds in a riot of colours, visible in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is ablaze with star-forming regions. From the Tarantula Nebula, the brightest stellar nursery in our cosmic neighbourhood, to LHA 120-N 11, part of which is featured in this Hubble image, ...

Researchers have identified a complex of proteins that promotes the growth of some types of colon and gastric cancers, and shown that medications that block the function of this complex have the potential to be developed into a new treatment for these diseases. The complex of proteins, known as mTorc1 (mammalian target of rapamycin complex 1), has previously been implicated in the development of some other cancers but this is the first time it has been shown to promote the growth of colon and gastric cancers that are associated with inflammation. Dr Stefan Thiem and ...

Every 30 seconds somebody in the world is amputated as a consequence of foot complication due to diabetes. A new study at Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, confirmes that shoe inserts, podiatry, regular checkups and other simple interventions can reduce the number of amputations by more than 50%. Orthotic researchers at Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, have studied diabetic foot complications ever since 2008. They have focused on protecting the foot from overloading the foot sole in order to minimize the risk of ulcers, which may eventually ...

This press release is available in German. Researchers in the group of Ralf Sommer at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tuebingen, Germany, have for the first time been able to identify neuronal correlates of behaviour by comparing maps of synaptic connectivity, or "connectomes", between two species with different behaviour. They compared the pharyngeal nervous systems of two nematodes, the bacterial feeding Caenorhabditis elegans and the predator/omnivore Pristionchus pacificus and found large differences in how the neurons are "wired" together. A ...

A study in The Journal of General Physiology examines the consequences of muscle activity with surprising results, indicating that the extracellular accumulation of potassium that occurs in working muscles is considerably higher than previously thought. Muscle excitation involves the influx of sodium ions and efflux of potassium ions. Although the fraction of ions that cross the muscle membrane with each contraction is minute, repeated activity can lead to substantial changes in the intracellular and extracellular concentrations of sodium and potassium ions. The extent ...