SCIENTISTS at the University of York have discovered the driving force behind the development of prostate cancer. Their research, published in Nature Communications today (Wednesday)* and funded by the charity Yorkshire Cancer Research, reveals the existence of a cancer inducing DNA re-alignment in stem cells taken from human prostate cancers. This opens the way to the development of drugs that target the stem cells, leading to more effective therapies that work against the root cause of the disease. Professor Norman Maitland, Director of the YCR Cancer Research ...

After eons of wandering in the dark, primates developed highly acute, three-color vision that permitted them to shift to daytime living, a new Dartmouth College study suggests. The findings challenge the prevailing view that trichromatic color vision, a hallmark of primate evolution, evolved only after they started getting up with the sun, a shift that gave rise to anthropoid (higher) primates, which, in turn, gave rise to the human lineage. The results are published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. The authors based their findings ...

Two new studies have highlighted a negative impact on bees' ability to learn following exposure to a combination of pesticides commonly used in agriculture. The researchers found that the pesticides, used in the research at levels shown to occur in the wild, could interfere with the learning circuits in the bee's brain. They also found that bees exposed to combined pesticides were slower to learn or completely forgot important associations between floral scent and food rewards. In the study published today (27th March 2013) in Nature Communications, the University of ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Women in India are more likely to get prenatal care when pregnant with boys, according to groundbreaking research that has implications for girls' health and survival. The study by Leah Lakdawala of Michigan State University and Prashant Bharadwaj of the University of California, San Diego, suggests sex discrimination begins in the womb in male-dominated societies. "It paints a pretty dire picture of what's happening," said Lakdawala, MSU assistant professor of economics. In studying the national health-survey data of more than 30,000 Indians, ...

Almost all foodstuffs contain the genetic material of those animal and plant species that were used in their preparation. Scientists at the Institute of Molecular Genetics, Genetic Security Research and Consulting at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have developed a novel screening procedure that provides for highly sensitive, quantifiable analysis of animal, plant, and microbial substances present in foodstuffs. For this, the researchers have adapted the latest techniques of DNA sequencing, which are otherwise currently employed in human genetics to unravel the ...

Working with an international consortium conducting research on breast, ovarian and prostate cancer among 200,000 people, Professor Jacques Simard, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Oncogenetics at Laval University, was actively involved in the discovery of DNA "spelling mistakes" linked to breast cancer. These mistakes – known as genetic variations – are directly involved in the risk of developing breast cancer. The research was part of an international study on an unprecedented scale performed by the largest international consortia, the Collaborative Oncological ...

Bonn, Germany 27 March 2013 – In diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's endogenous proteins accumulate in the brain, eventually leading to the death of nerve cells. These deposits, which consist of abnormally formed proteins, are supposed to migrate between interconnected areas of the brain, thereby contributing to the development of the illness. Now, a new laboratory study by scientists from Germany and the US shows that certain protein particles are indeed capable of multiplying and spreading from one cell to the next. The investigation was conducted by researchers ...

For around 50 million years, placodonts populated the flat coastal regions of the Tethys Ocean, in modern day Europe and China. The most distinctive feature of these dinosaurs was their teeth: The upper jaw had two rows of flattened teeth – one on the palate and one on the jawbone – while the lower jaw only had one set of teeth ideal for crushing shellfish and crustaceans. The evolutionary origins of these placodonts remained unclear. However, a new find in a 246-million-year-old sediment layer now sheds light on the origin and phylogenetic development of the placodonts. ...

Researchers from Lund University, Yale University and the University of Oxford have been able to give an answer to why cuckolded males in many species still provide paternal care. When the conditions are right, this strategy is actually the most successful. In many species males put a lot of effort into caring for offspring that are not their own. At first glance this makes no sense at all because natural selection should design males to only care for offspring that carry their genes. However, males are much more astute than we might think and maximise their care according ...

New research into ageing processes, based on modern genetic techniques, confirms theoretical expectations about the correlation between reproduction and lifespan. Studies of birds reveal that those that have offspring later in life and have fewer broods live longer. And the decisive factor is telomeres, shows research from The University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Telomeres are the protective caps at the end of chromosomes. The length of telomeres influences how long an individual lives. Telomeres start off at a certain length, become shorter each time a cell divides, ...

This press release is available in German. Zooplankton, small fish and squid spend hardly any time at the surface when there's a full moon. To protect themselves from their natural enemies, they hide deeper down in the water on bright nights, coming up to the surface under cover of darkness when there's a new moon instead. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell discovered that this also influences the behaviour of swallow-tailed gulls (Creagrus furcatus), a unique nocturnal species of gull from the Galapagos Islands. They fitted the ...

Philadelphia, PA, March 26, 2013 – Like it or not and despite the surrounding debate of its merits, 3-D is the technology du jour for movie-making in Hollywood. It now turns out that even our brains use 3 dimensions to communicate emotions. According to a new study published in Biological Psychiatry, the human report of emotion relies on three distinct systems: one system that directs attention to affective states ("I feel"), a second system that categorizes these states into words ("good", "bad", etc.); and a third system that relates the intensity of affective responses ...

Since its introduction fifty or so years ago, thermography has been increasingly used by vets to pinpoint the cause of lameness in horses. The method is fast and safe and is based on a simple idea. The horse's body surface emits infrared radiation that can be detected by an infrared camera, which is both easy and inexpensive to use. The camera produces a coloured image that shows the variation in surface temperature across the area investigated. The temperature is directly related to the presence of blood vessels near the skin, so the method can detect local inflammatory ...

PHILADELPHIA (March 27, 2013) -- In 370 million-year-old red sandstone deposits in a highway roadcut, scientists have discovered a new species of armored fish in north central Pennsylvania. Fossils of armored fishes like this one, a phyllolepid placoderm, are known for the distinctive ornamentation of ridges on their exterior plates. As with many such fossils, scientists often find the remains of these species as impressions in stone, not as three-dimensional versions of their skeletons. Therefore, in the process of studying and describing this fish's anatomy, scientists ...

Working with the International Tennis Federation and colleagues at the University of Exeter, the team from the University of Sheffield's Faculty of Engineering developed a test machine which applies large forces to a surface to mimic the impact of elite tennis players on tennis courts. This impact can be up to four times the bodyweight of a player. They used the machine to measure the friction on an acrylic (hard) court in dry conditions and two artificial clay court surfaces in both wet and dry conditions. The team found that on clay surfaces the size of the sand particles ...

In theory, silicon-based solar cells are capable of converting up to 30 percent of sunlight to electricity - although, in reality, the different kinds of loss mechanisms ensure that even under ideal lab conditions it does not exceed 25 %. Advanced heterojunction cells shall affront this problem: On top of the wafer's surface, at temperatures below 200 °C, a layer of 10 nanometer disordered (amorphous) silicon is deposited. This thin film is managing to saturate to a large extent the interface defects and to conduct charge carriers out of the cell. Heterojunction solar cells ...

This press release is available in Spanish. Researchers with the joint program between IRB Barcelona and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) have devised a new strategy to study the shape of proteins. This study has been led by Modesto Orozco, head of the Molecular Modeling and Bioinformatics Group, and Xavier Salvatella, head of the Molecular Biophysics Group, both ICREA scientists at IRB Barcelona. According to Orozco, also senior professor of the University of Barcelona and director of the Life Sciences Department at BSC, "by combining computational modeling ...

A new study by University of Pennsylvania linguists shows that the Philadelphia accent has changed in the last century. The traditional Southern inflections associated with Philadelphia native-born speakers are increasingly being displaced by Northern influences. "A Hundred Years of Sound Change," published in the March issue of the journal Language, documents Philadelphia's changing accent through an analysis of speech patterns of city residents spanning more than a century. The study is co-authored by William Labov, professor of linguistics and director of Penn's ...

The level of education of parents has an influence on the frequency with which their children eat foods linked to obesity. The children of parents with low and medium levels of education eat fewer vegetables and fruit and more processed products and sweet drinks. An international group of experts from eight European countries have analysed the relation between parents' levels of education and the frequency with which their children eat food linked to overweight. The Identification and prevention of dietary- and lifestyle-induced health effects in children and infants ...

New research from the Massachusetts Eye and Ear, Harvard Medical School and Harvard Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology may have discovered a key piece in the puzzle of how hearing works by identifying the role of the olivocochlear efferent system in protecting ears from hearing loss. The findings could eventually lead to screening tests to determine who is most susceptible to hearing loss. Their paper is published today in the Journal of Neuroscience. Until recently, it was common knowledge that exposure to a noisy environment (concert, iPod, mechanical ...

Researchers are arguing about whether or not the Xenoturbella bocki worm is the progenitor of mankind. But new studies indicate that this is actually the case. Swedish researchers from the University of Gothenburg and the Gothenburg Natural History Museum are involved in the international study. The results have been published in Nature Communications. The Xenoturbella bocki worm is a one-centimetre long worm with a simple body plan that is only found regularly by the west coast of Sweden. The worm lacks a brain, sexual organs and other vital organs. Zoologists have ...

Some people may joke about living on caffeine, but scientists now have genetically engineered E. coli bacteria to do that — literally. Their report in the journal ACS Synthetic Biology describes bacteria being "addicted" to caffeine in a way that promises practical uses ranging from decontamination of wastewater to bioproduction of medications for asthma. Jeffrey E. Barrick and colleagues note that caffeine and related chemical compounds have become important water pollutants due to widespread use in coffee, soda pop, tea, energy drinks, chocolate and certain medications. ...

Now, a group of researchers led by two astronomers at the University of Toronto suggests that baby stars may grow to great mass if they happen to be born within a corral of older stars –with these surrounding stars favorably arranged to confine and thus feed gas to the younger ones in their midst. The astronomers have seen hints of this collective feeding, or technically "convergent constructive feedback," in a giant cloud of gas and dust called Westerhout 3 (W3), located 6,500 light years from us. Their results are published in April in The Astrophysical Journal. ### ...

PHILADELPHIA (March 27, 2013)— "We call it a 'fish-eat-fish world,' an ecosystem where you really needed to escape predation," said Dr. Ted Daeschler, describing life in the Devonian period in what is now far-northern Canada. This was the environment where the famous fossil fish species Tiktaalik roseae lived 375 million years ago. This lobe-finned fish, co-discovered by Daeschler, an associate professor at Drexel University in the Department of Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science, and associate curator and vice president of the Academy of Natural Sciences of ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Patients receiving antihistamines to suppress stomach acid are at greater risk of infection from Clostridium difficile, or C. diff, a common cause of diarrhea, particularly in health care settings, Mayo Clinic researchers have found. The study focused on histamine 2 receptor antagonists. The researchers found no significant risk for people taking over-the-counter antihistamine drugs, however. The findings appear in the online journal PLOS ONE. Researchers reviewed 35 observations based on 33 separate studies involving C. diff and antihistamines used ...