Following six historic days of operations aboard the International Space Station, NASA's Robotic Refueling Mission, or RRM, demonstrated remotely controlled robots using current-day technology could refuel satellites not designed to be serviced. RRM tests from January 14-25 culminated in a first-of-its-kind robotic fluid transfer, a demonstration that could be a catalyst to expanded robotic satellite-servicing capabilities and lead to a greener, more sustainable space. NASA also hopes that RRM technologies may help boost the commercial satellite-servicing industry. ...

Now, there's a new way to invest in an online business without having to own or operate your own website. By taking the old concept of a traditional stock market, RankTrader has created a new marketplace for the buying and selling of virtual shares or vShares, of a website. Today we see many online entrepreneurs taking advantage of the ease of creating an online property and making money from advertising, internet marketing, e-commerce or even simply blogging. It's a rising trend and a new area to earn money. It may seem easy on the surface to make money online, but ...

Chagas disease, a deadly tropical infection caused by the protozoan parasite Trypanosoma cruzi and transmitted by biting insects called "kissing bugs," has begun to spread around the world, including the U.S. Yet current treatment is toxic and limited to the acute stage. In The Journal of Infectious Diseases (JID), Galina Lepesheva, Ph.D., and her colleagues at Vanderbilt University and Meharry Medical College report curing both the acute and chronic forms of the infection in mice with a small molecule, VNI. VNI specifically inhibits a T. cruzi enzyme essential for ...

Wednesday, February 13, 2013, Cleveland: Cleveland Clinic researchers have found that colorectal cancer outcomes could be improved with regular genetic screening for Lynch syndrome, the most common hereditary, adult-onset cause of colorectal cancer, as published in the online version of the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Lynch syndrome is the most common genetic cause of colon cancer in adults. The study found that a universal screening program of all colorectal cancers surgically removed at Cleveland Clinic resulted in increased identification of Lynch syndrome patients ...

NEW YORK, Feb. 14, 2013 – Nitric oxide, the versatile gas that helps increase blood flow, transmit nerve signals, and regulate immune function, appears to perform one more biological feat— prolonging the life of an organism and fortifying it against environmental stress, according to a new study. The study reveals that a roundworm called Caenorhabditis elegans, an animal widely used in laboratory studies of aging, lives significantly longer when fed bacteria capable of manufacturing nitric oxide. The tantalizing observation points to one of the mechanisms by which the ...

Restoring vision might sometimes be as simple as turning out the lights. That's according to a study reported on February 14 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, in which researchers examined kittens with a visual impairment known as amblyopia before and after they spent 10 days in complete darkness. Researchers Kevin Duffy and Donald Mitchell of Dalhousie University in Canada believe that exposure to darkness causes some parts of the visual system to revert to an early stage in development, when there is greater flexibility. "There may be ways to increase ...

Urinary-tract infections are the second most common bacterial infection in humans, and many of them are recurrent. A study published by Cell Press on February 14th in the journal Immunity reveals the cellular and molecular basis of recurrent bladder infections and suggests possible treatment strategies, such as vaccines, to prevent this common problem. "Our study shows for the first time that the bladder is unable to mount an effective immune response to bacteria, which could explain the high frequency of recurrent infections," says senior study author Soman Abraham ...

BOSTON, MA -- The genes activated for human speech are similar to the ones used by singing songbirds, new experiments suggest. These results, which are not yet published, show that gene products produced for speech in the cortical and basal ganglia regions of the human brain correspond to similar molecules in the vocal communication areas of the brains of zebra finches and budgerigars. But these molecules aren't found in the brains of doves and quails -- vocal birds that do not learn their sounds. "The results suggest that similar behavior and neural connectivity for ...

VIDEO: A pair of studies published by Cell Press on February 14th in the journal Cell sheds new light on genetic variation that may have played a key role in human... Click here for more information. A pair of studies published by Cell Press on February 14th in the journal Cell sheds new light on genetic variation that may have played a key role in human evolution. The study researchers used an animal model to study a gene variant that could have helped humans adapt to humid ...

Babies as young as seven months can distinguish between, and begin to learn, two languages with vastly different grammatical structures, according to new research from the University of British Columbia and Université Paris Descartes. Published today in the journal Nature Communications and presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston, the study shows that infants in bilingual environments use pitch and duration cues to discriminate between languages – such as English and Japanese – with opposite word ...

The first animal model of recent human evolution reveals that a single mutation produced several traits common in East Asian peoples, from thicker hair to denser sweat glands, an international team of researchers reports. The team, led by researchers from Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, Fudan University and University College London, also modeled the spread of the gene mutation across Asia and North America, concluding that it most likely arose about 30,000 years ago in what is today ...

DURHAM, N.C. – Recurrent bladder infections, which are especially common among women, may result from a defect among the bladder's immune fighters that keeps them from remembering previous bacterial infections. The immune memory lapse can hamper a timely and effective attack, according to researchers at Duke Medicine and Duke-National University of Singapore. Their study, which involved mice, may provide a new route to develop vaccines and treatments for urinary tract infections, which are the second-most common infection and account for more than 8 million health care ...

A research team from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine has discovered an approach that could make gene therapy dramatically more effective for patients. Led by professor Eric Arts, PhD, the scientists discovered that the process of gene therapy is missing essential elements thereby reducing the effectiveness of this treatment. Re-introducing this element into their model system suggests that improvements for gene therapy areon the horizon. The findings are detailed in the article, "A new genomic RNA packaging element in retroviruses and the interplay ...

BOSTON AND CAMBRIDGE, Mass.––Tumors are not factories for the mass production of identical cancer cells, but are, in reality, patchworks of cells with different patterns of gene mutations. In a new study, researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute show, more fully than ever before, how these mutations shift and evolve over time in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) – providing a strobe-like look at the genetic past, present, and future of CLL tumors. Their report, which will be published online today by the journal Cell, suggests that evolution ...

Gene wars rage inside our cells, with invading DNA regularly threatening to subvert our human blueprint. Now, building on Nobel-Prize-winning findings, UC San Francisco researchers have discovered a molecular machine that helps protect a cell's genes against these DNA interlopers. The machine, named SCANR, recognizes and targets foreign DNA. The UCSF team identified it in yeast, but given the similarity of yeast and human cells, comparable mechanisms might also be found in humans, where they might serve to lower the burden of inherited human disease and death, the researchers ...

Teaching children about the environment can affect the knowledge and behaviour of their parents, according to new research. Scientists from Imperial College London surveyed the families of 160 schoolchildren in the Seychelles, some of whom took part in educational activities about the island's valuable wetland resources. They found that the parents of children who took part in the wetland activities were more knowledgeable about wetlands and, were more inclined to undertake 'environmentally friendly' behaviours such as conserving water in their homes. The findings ...

Supposedly 'primitive' reflexes may involve more sophisticated brain function than previously thought, according to researchers at Imperial College London. The Vestibular-Ocular Reflex (or VOR), common to most vertebrates, is what allows us to keep our eyes focused on a fixed point even while our heads are moving. Up until now, scientists had assumed this reflex was controlled by the lower brainstem, which regulates eating, sleeping and other low-level tasks. Researchers at Imperial's Division of Brain Sciences conducted tests to examine this reflex in left- and right-handed ...

AUGUSTA, Ga. – Scientists at the Georgia Regents University Cancer Center have identified an Indian plant, used for centuries to treat inflammation, fever and malaria, that could help kill cancer cells. Cancer cells typically avoid death by hijacking molecular chaperones that guide and protect the proteins that ensure normal cellular function and then tricking them into helping mutated versions of those proteins stay alive, says Dr. Ahmed Chadli, a researcher in the Molecular Chaperone Program at the GRU Cancer Center and senior author of the study named the Journal ...

LOS ANGELES (Feb. 14, 2013) – New research from the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute (LA BioMed) found a progestogen-only treatment halted bleeding in women suffering from extremely heavy periods, according to the study published online by the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. "Excessive uterine bleeding is a common problem we see in gynecological practices and emergency rooms. It can interfere with women's daily activities and put them at risk for anemia and other more serious health consequences caused by blood loss," said Anita L. Nelson, MD, ...

Our love of music and appreciation of musical harmony is learnt and not based on natural ability – a new study by University of Melbourne researchers has found. Associate Professor Neil McLachlan from the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences said previous theories about how we appreciate music were based on the physical properties of sound, the ear itself and an innate ability to hear harmony. "Our study shows that musical harmony can be learnt and it is a matter of training the brain to hear the sounds," Associate Professor McLachlan said. "So if you thought ...

Dogs pick out faces of other dogs, irrespective of breeds, among human and other domestic and wild animal faces and can group them into a category of their own. They do that using visual cues alone, according to new research by Dr. Dominique Autier-Dérian from the LEEC and National Veterinary School in Lyon in France and colleagues. Their work, the first to test dogs' ability to discriminate between species and form a "dog" category in spite of the huge variability within the dog species, is published online in Springer's journal Animal Cognition. Individuals from the ...

Aalto University researchers in Finland have successfully connected a superconducting quantum bit, or qubit, with a micrometer-sized drum head. Thus they transferred information from the qubit to the resonator and back again. - This work represents the first step towards creating exotic mechanical quantum states. For example, the transfer makes it possible to create a state in which the resonator simultaneously vibrates and doesn't vibrate, says professor Mika Sillanpää from Aalto University, who runs the research group. A qubit is the quantum-mechanical equivalent ...

Microbes present in the gut can affect the severity of kidney disease brought on by melamine poisoning, according to an international study led by Professor Wei Jia at the University of North Carolina in collaboration with the research group of Professor Jeremy Nicholson at Imperial College London. In 2008, nearly 300,000 Chinese children were hospitalised with kidney disease brought on by supplies of powdered milk deliberately contaminated with melamine to boost the apparent protein content. Although melamine was known to combine with uric acid in the children's bodies ...

How green algae produce hydrogen in the dark is reported by biologists at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in the "Journal of Biological Chemistry". Hereby, they have uncovered a mechanism for the production of the gas which has hardly been examined before; usually, researchers are interested in light-driven hydrogen synthesis. "Hydrogen could help us out of the energy crisis", says Prof. Dr. Thomas Happe, head of the working group Photobiotechnology. "If you want to make green algae produce more hydrogen, it is important to understand all the production pathways." Green algae ...

Philadelphia, PA, February 14, 2013 – The 18th century natural philosopher Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed that the necks of giraffes lengthened as a consequence of the cumulative effort, across generations, to reach leaves just out of their grasp. This view of evolution was largely abandoned with the advent of modern genetic theories to explain the transmission of most important traits and many medical illnesses across generations. However, there has long been the impression that major life events, like psychological traumas, not only have effects on individuals who directly ...