Highlight While safe and well-tolerated, angiotensin II blockade did not lessen tissue scarring or prevent kidney failure in kidney transplant recipients. Angiotensin II blockade is known to slow kidney disease progression in individuals without transplants. Washington, DC (January 10, 2013) — A drug that protects the kidneys of patients with chronic kidney disease does not seem to provide the same benefit to kidney transplant recipients, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN). Immunosuppressants ...

Thousands of individuals have had kidneys removed unnecessarily because doctors misdiagnosed their disease. A new, international study published in The Lancet indicates that approximately one of every five individuals with kidney tumors common in patients with tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC), a genetic disorder, has had a kidney removed. Moreover, 40 percent had some kind of surgical procedure performed. Proper diagnosis could have led to treatment that would have made surgery or kidney removal unnecessary, according to John Bissler, MD, a nephrologist at Cincinnati ...

Chris Martin has bred more than 3,000 hybrid fish in his time as a graduate student in evolution and ecology at UC Davis, a pursuit that has helped him create one of the most comprehensive snapshots of natural selection in the wild and demonstrated a key prediction in evolutionary biology. "We can see a surprisingly complex snapshot of natural selection driving the evolution of new specialized species," said Martin, who with Professor Peter Wainwright published a paper on the topic in the Jan. 11, 2013, issue of the journal Science. The "adaptive landscape" is very ...

January 10, 2013 Scientists engineer the Schmallenberg virus genome to understand how to reduce disease caused by the virus. Researchers from the MRC Centre for Virus Research at the University of Glasgow in Scotland have developed methods to synthesize and change the genome of Schmallenberg virus (SBV). SBV is a recently discovered pathogen of livestock such as cattle, sheep and goats. The researchers have laid bare important ways by which this virus causes disease. The full report about the study publishes on January 10 in the Open Access journal, PLOS Pathogens. SBV ...

Scientists have identified the chemical 'fingerprints' given off by specific bacteria when present in the lungs, potentially allowing for a quick and simple breath test to diagnose infections such as tuberculosis. Publishing their study today, 11 January, in IOP Publishing's Journal of Breath Research, the researchers have successfully distinguished between different types of bacteria, as well as different strains of the same bacteria, in the lungs of mice by analysing the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) present in exhaled breath. It is hoped that a simple breath ...

VIDEO: Professor Leigh’s molecular machine is based on the ribosome. It features a functionalized nanometre-sized ring that moves along a molecular track, picking up building blocks located on the path and... Click here for more information. An industrial revolution on a minute scale is taking place in laboratories at The University of Manchester with the development of a highly complex machine that mimics how molecules are made in nature. The artificial molecular machine developed ...

VIDEO: Scientists have created the first pure carbon nanotube fibers that combine many of the best features of highly conductive metal wires, strong carbon fibers and pliable textile thread. In a... Click here for more information. Rice University's latest nanotechnology breakthrough was more than 10 years in the making, but it still came with a shock. Scientists from Rice, the Dutch firm Teijin Aramid, the U.S. Air Force and Israel's Technion Institute this week unveiled ...

A new study out today in the journal Science turns two decades of understanding about how brain cells communicate on its head. The study demonstrates that the tripartite synapse – a model long accepted by the scientific community and one in which multiple cells collaborate to move signals in the central nervous system – does not exist in the adult brain. "Our findings demonstrate that the tripartite synaptic model is incorrect," said Maiken Nedergaard, M.D., D.M.Sc., lead author of the study and co-director of the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) Center ...

Women with pre-eclampsia are at a higher risk of complications following delivery and should continue to be monitored for up to 72 hours, suggests a new review published today (11/01/13) in The Obstetrician and Gynaecologist (TOG). The review analyses the health risks associated with postnatal hypertension, elevated blood pressure that occurs after childbirth, and looks at the women at risk of this condition and treatments available. There is extensive literature on hypertension in the antenatal and intrapartum period, but there is little information on postpartum ...

Women should wait at least 12 months before trying for a baby following weight loss surgery and need further advice and information on reproductive issues, suggests a new evidence-based literature review published today (11/01/13) in The Obstetrician & Gynaecologist (TOG). The review looks at the safety, advantages and limitations of bariatric surgery and multidisciplinary management of patients before, during and after pregnancy. With the prevalence of obesity among women of reproductive age expected to rise from 24.2% in 2005 to 28.3% in 2015, the number of women ...

Herbal and complementary medicines could be recommended as an alternative to hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for treating postmenopausal symptoms says a new review published today in The Obstetrician and Gynaecologist (TOG). The review outlines the advantages and limitations of both pharmacological and herbal and complementary treatments for women with postmenopausal symptoms. The menopause is defined as the time after a woman's menstrual periods have ceased (12 months after a woman's final menstrual period). It is associated with an estrogen deficiency and can cause ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- MIT engineers have created a new polymer film that can generate electricity by drawing on a ubiquitous source: water vapor. The new material changes its shape after absorbing tiny amounts of evaporated water, allowing it to repeatedly curl up and down. Harnessing this continuous motion could drive robotic limbs or generate enough electricity to power micro- and nanoelectronic devices, such as environmental sensors. "With a sensor powered by a battery, you have to replace it periodically. If you have this device, you can harvest energy from the environment ...

Ever since he was a kid growing up in Germany, Holger Müller has been asking himself a fundamental question: What is time? That question has now led Müller, today an associate professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, to a fundamentally new way of measuring time. Taking advantage of the fact that, in nature, matter can be both a particle and a wave, he has discovered a way to tell time by counting the oscillations of a matter wave. A matter wave's frequency is 10 billion times higher than that of visible light. "A rock is a clock, so to speak," ...

New research shows China's controversial One Child Policy (OCP) has not only dramatically re-shaped the population, but has produced individuals lacking characteristics important for economic and social attainment. In research published today in Science, Professors Lisa Cameron and Lata Gangadharan from Monash University, Professor Xin Meng from the Australian National University (ANU) and Associate Professor Nisvan Erkal from the University of Melbourne examined cohorts of children born just before and after the OCP was introduced. They assessed social and competitive ...

RAPID deterioration in mangrove health is occurring in the Sundarbans, resulting in as much as 200m of coast disappearing in a single year. A report published today (11th Jan) in Remote Sensing by scientists from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) states that as human development thrives, and global temperature continues to rise, natural protection from tidal waves and cyclones is being degraded at alarming rates. This will inevitably lead to species loss in this richly biodiverse part of the world, if nothing is done to stop it. ZSL's Dr Nathalie Pettorelli, senior ...

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. (January 10, 2013) –With millions of adolescent users, social network sites (SNSs) are a rich data source for academic research studies. But ethical guidelines governing how researchers should obtain and use this data is seriously lacking, says Tufts University's R. Benjamin Shapiro, Ph.D., the McDonnell Family Professor in Engineering Education at Tufts University's School of Engineering, in an article published in the January 11 edition of Science. "The use of social network sites for design research is accelerating but the academic research ...

Of all foods, peanuts are the most frequent cause of life-threatening and fatal allergic reactions. New research at National Jewish Health provides additional support for a strategy to reduce the severity of reactions to peanut— repeatedly consuming small amounts of the very food that causes those reactions in the first place, a practice called immunotherapy. The new research, published in the January 2013 issue of The Journal of Allergy & Clinical Immunology, shows that 70 percent of peanut-allergic patients who consumed daily doses of peanut protein in liquid drops ...

PASADENA, Calif.—It's the mystery of the curiously dense cloud. And astronomers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) are on the case. Near the crowded galactic center, where billowing clouds of gas and dust cloak a supermassive black hole three million times as massive as the sun—a black hole whose gravity is strong enough to grip stars that are whipping around it at thousands of kilometers per second—one particular cloud has baffled astronomers. Indeed, the cloud, dubbed G0.253+0.016, defies the rules of star formation. In infrared images of the galactic ...

Montreal, January 9, 2013 – Employment insurance is a vital safety net for the unemployed across North America, yet some take advantage of the system. Recent headlines have made much of a recent report from the U.S. Department of Labor that 11 per cent of all unemployment benefits were overpaid between 2009-11. But new research from Concordia University proves that uncollected benefits represent a much larger dollar figure than overpayments. In a study commissioned by the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, Concordia economics professor David Fuller examines the U.S. unemployment ...

New Rochelle, NY, January 10, 2013—Stem cells can be grown on biocompatible scaffolds to form complex tissues such as bone, cartilage, and muscle for repair and regeneration of damaged or diseased tissue. However, to function properly, the cells must often grow in a specific pattern or alignment. An innovative method for creating a stretched polymer scaffold that can support complex tissue architectures is described in an article in Tissue Engineering, Part C, Methods, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available on the Tissue ...

NASA's Aqua satellite looked at Cyclone Narelle in visible and infrared light to understand the behavior of the storm. NASA's MODIS and AIRS instruments provided those data, respectively, and they showed that Narelle is gaining strength as it approaches the northern coast of Western Australia. Watches and Warnings are posted for the western coast of Western Australia over the next several days as Narelle continues to move on a southerly track, where it is expected to remain at sea, but parallel the coast. Current Australian warnings include: a Cyclone Warning is in ...

One of the greatest challenges faced by cancer surgeons is to know exactly which tissue to remove, or not, while the patient is under anesthesia. A team of surgeons and scientists at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have developed a new technique that will allow surgeons to identify during surgery which lymph nodes are cancerous so that healthy tissue can be saved. The findings will be published in the January 15 print edition of Cancer Research. "This research is significant because it shows real-time intraoperative detection of cancer metastases ...

JUPITER, FL, January 10, 2013 – Oxidative stress is a primary villain in a host of diseases that range from cancer and heart failure to Alzheimer's disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Parkinson's disease. Now, scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found that blocking the interaction of a critical enzyme may counteract the destruction of neurons associated with these neurodegenerative diseases, suggesting a potential new target for drug development. These findings appear in the January 11, 2013 edition of The Journal of ...

In mid-January, NASA will take the next step in advancing robotic satellite-servicing technologies as it tests the Robotic Refueling Mission, or RRM aboard the International Space Station. The investigation may one day substantially impact the many satellites that deliver products Americans rely upon daily, such as weather reports, cell phones and television news. During five days of operations, controllers from NASA and the Canadian Space Agency will use the space station's remotely operated Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator, or Dextre, robot to simulate robotic ...

Rosemont, Ill. – While obese patients are more likely to have surgical treatment for lumbar disc herniation – a slipped or ruptured disc – than nonobese patients, obesity increases operative time, blood loss and length of hospital stay, according to new research published in the January 2013 Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (JBJS). Overall, obese patients had poorer outcomes with surgical and nonsurgical treatments for lumbar disc herniation than nonobese patients. The study included 854 nonobese patients with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of less than 30 kg/m², and 336 ...