Hydrogen sulfide, the pungent stuff often referred to as sewer gas, is a deadly substance implicated in several mass extinctions, including one at the end of the Permian period 251 million years ago that wiped out more than three-quarters of all species on Earth. But in low doses, hydrogen sulfide could greatly enhance plant growth, leading to a sharp increase in global food supplies and plentiful stock for biofuel production, new University of Washington research shows. "We found some very interesting things, including that at the very lowest levels plant health ...

Popular media perspectives on traumatic brain injuries (TBI) in sports like ice hockey has changed over time and may influence people's attitudes towards these injuries, according to research published April 17 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Michael Cusimano and colleagues from St. Michael's Hospital, Toronto, Canada. The authors compared articles published in the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Toronto Star and Vancouver Sun from 1998-2000 and 2009-2011. They found the Canadian newspapers discussed aggression in ice hockey equally during both these time periods, ...

Adults who resolve and recover from conflict are known to be happier in their romantic relationships but the same does not hold true for teen romances, according to research published April 17 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Thao Ha and colleagues from the Behavioural Science Institute of Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands. The authors observed 14-16-year olds in romantic relationships dealing with conflicts over issues such as cheating, experiencing jealousy and parental rules about dating three times over a period of several years. Statistical analysis ...

A new text-mining algorithm can help identify the most relevant scientific research for a public database that reveals the effects of environmental chemicals on human health, according to research published April 17 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Allan Peter Davis, Thomas Wiegers and colleagues from North Carolina State University. The Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD), managed in part by the lead authors, is a manually curated, public database that correlates environmental chemicals with their effects on genes and human health. Thousands of new research ...

New York, NY—April 17, 2013—Columbia Engineering researchers, led by Dimitris Anastassiou, Charles Batchelor Professor in Electrical Engineering and member of the Columbia Initiative in Systems Biology, have developed a new computational model that is highly predictive of breast cancer survival. The team, who won the Sage Bionetworks / DREAM Breast Cancer Prognosis Challenge for this work, published their results -- "Development of a Prognostic Model for Breast Cancer Survival in an Open Challenge Environment" -- in the April 17 issue of Science Translational Medicine. In ...

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - A team of Australian engineers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) has demonstrated a quantum bit based on the nucleus of a single atom in silicon, promising dramatic improvements for data processing in ultra-powerful quantum computers of the future. Quantum bits, or qubits, are the building blocks of quantum computers, which will offer enormous advantages for searching expansive databases, cracking modern encryption, and modelling atomic-scale systems such as biological molecules and drugs. The world-first result, to be published in Nature ...

Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences in Japan report today that they have identified a compound that could be used as a new treatment to prevent relapse in acute myeloid leukemia patients. In a study published in Science Translational Medicine, they show that this compound reduces the risk of relapse in a mouse model of the human disease. They report that this compound could be most active in patients that carry a mutation lowering their chances of recovery. Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is an acute type of blood cancer that starts in the ...

A key building block in the Schmallenberg virus could be targeted by anti-viral drugs, according to a new study led from the University of Leeds. The disease, which causes birth defects and stillbirths in sheep, goats and cattle, was first discovered in Germany in late 2011 and has already spread to more than 5,000 farms across Europe, and 1,500 farms in the UK alone. There is currently no way of treating infected animals, but a study published in Nucleic Acids Research reports that the Schmallenberg virus nucleocapsid protein, which protects its genetic material, could ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Close family members of people with Alzheimer's disease are more than twice as likely as those without a family history to develop silent buildup of brain plaques associated with Alzheimer's disease, according to researchers at Duke Medicine. The study, published online in the journal PLOS ONE on April 17, 2013, confirms earlier findings on a known genetic variation that increases one's risk for Alzheimer's, and raises new questions about other genetic factors involved in the disease that have yet to be identified. An estimated 25 million people worldwide ...

An international team of researchers has decoded the genome of a creature whose evolutionary history is both enigmatic and illuminating: the African coelacanth. A sea-cave dwelling, five-foot long fish with limb-like fins, the coelacanth was once thought to be extinct. A living coelacanth was discovered off the African coast in 1938, and since then, questions about these ancient-looking fish – popularly known as "living fossils" – have loomed large. Coelacanths today closely resemble the fossilized skeletons of their more than 300-million-year-old ancestors. Its genome ...

The European Commission needs to make some key innovations in its science funding programme if Europe is to enjoy the full benefits of the €70 billion to be spent on science research as part of the Horizon 2020 programme kicking off in 2014, according to an academic paper published by SAGE in the Journal of Health Services Research & Policy today. The Commission has already taken important steps to reduce administration costs and stimulate the participation of small business in research, but there are still significant gaps, say the authors of Europe's 'Horizon 2020' ...

While studying rats' ability to navigate familiar territory, Johns Hopkins scientists found that one particular brain structure uses remembered spatial information to imagine routes the rats then follow. Their discovery has implications for understanding why damage to that structure, called the hippocampus, disrupts specific types of memory and learning in people with Alzheimer's disease and age-related cognitive decline. And because these mental trajectories guide the rats' behavior, the research model the scientists developed may be useful in future studies on higher-level ...

Chevy Chase, MD—Reminding primary care doctors to test at-risk patients for osteoporosis can prevent fractures and reduce health care costs, according to a recent study accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM). Osteoporosis is a condition that is common, costly and undertreated. Low trauma fractures in older individuals are a "red flag" for osteoporosis, but those at risk often are not treated for the condition. Rates of osteoporosis testing and treatment are typically less than 20 percent in the first ...

Chevy Chase, MD––Although the drug zoledronic acid slows bone loss in osteoporosis patients, it also boosts levels of a biomarker that stops bone formation, according to a recent study accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM). Osteoporosis weakens bones and increases the risk patients will suffer fractures. The findings suggest combination therapy may be a more effective approach to battling this common condition. "The key to effectively treating osteoporosis lies in increasing bone mass," said the study's ...

Chevy Chase, MD––Hair strands contain valuable information about senior citizens' stress levels that can be used to determine an individual's cardiovascular disease risk, according to a recent study accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM). Unlike a blood test that captures a snapshot of stress hormone levels at a single point in time, a scalp hair analysis can be used to view trends in levels of the stress hormone cortisol over the course of several months. This approach allows researchers to have a better ...

Astronomers using a world-wide collection of telescopes have discovered the most prolific star factory in the Universe, surprisingly in a galaxy so distant that they see as it was when the Universe was only six percent of its current age. The galaxy, dubbed HFLS3, 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, is producing the equivalent of nearly 3,000 Suns per year, a rate more than 2,000 times that of our own Milky Way. The galaxy is massive, with a huge reservoir of gas from which to form new stars. "This is the most detailed look into the physical properties of such a distant ...

DALLAS – April 17, 2013 – Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have identified a specific gene that regulates the heart's ability to regenerate after injuries. The function of the gene, called Meis1, in the heart was not known previously. The findings of the UTSW investigation are available online in Nature. "We found that the activity of the Meis1 gene increases significantly in heart cells soon after birth, right around the time heart muscle cells stop dividing. Based on this observation we asked a simple question: If the Meis1 gene is deleted from the heart, ...

Patient satisfaction is an important indicator of a hospital's service quality, but new Johns Hopkins research suggests that it doesn't necessarily reflect the quality of the surgical care patients receive. "We found that the quality of what goes on in the operating room doesn't closely correlate with the patient's perception of the quality of his or her medical care," says Martin A. Makary, M.D., M.P.H., an associate professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and leader of the study described online in JAMA Surgery. "It is important for ...

HIV-infected women in sub-Saharan Africa who fed their babies exclusively with breast milk for more than the first four months of life had the lowest risk of transmitting the virus to their babies through breast milk, according to researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Women who stopped breast feeding earlier than four months had the highest concentrations of HIV in their breast milk, and those who continued to breastfeed, but not exclusively, had concentration levels in-between the two practices. The findings are online in the journal Science ...

To maneuver a car into a parking spot parallel to the road can be quite a challenge. It would be an easy task, of course, if only the vehicle could move sideways. As this is not possible, the sideways motion must be pieced together – sometimes elegantly, sometimes less so – in a series of forward and backward movements and turns on the steering wheel. Such a finely tuned sequence of movements also enables cats to almost always land on their feet after a free fall. Researchers at ETH Zurich have now used a similar principle for steering a quantum system into a desired state. ...

Fame and achievement in performance-related careers may be earned at the cost of a shorter life, according to a study published online today in QJM: An International Journal of Medicine. Based on the premise that an obituary in the New York Times (NYT) usually implies success in one's career, Professor Richard Epstein and Catherine Epstein analysed 1000 consecutive obituaries published in the NYT during 2009-2011 in terms of gender, age, occupation, and cause of death. They separated subjects into four broad occupational categories: performance/sport (including actors, ...

Monitoring pain and providing analgesics to patients in intensive care units (ICUs) during non-surgical procedures, such as turning and washing, can not only reduce the amount of pain but also reduce the number of serious adverse events including cardiac arrest, finds new research in BioMed Central's open access journal Critical Care. Although pain at rest is routinely noted, pain during procedures is less regularly reported and its effect on patients unknown. To assess this missing information and to implement techniques to help better control pain where necessary, ...

Equipped with the zebrafish genome, researchers have designed a method to assay the function of each and every gene and to explore the effects genetic variation has on zebrafish. So far the team has generated one or more mutations in almost 40% of all zebrafish genes. The resource will be a comprehensive catalogue of how changes to our genes can have physical and biochemical consequences, giving other researchers the tools to understand human disease. Many genes are similar between the human genome and those of less complex animals. As a vertebrate, the zebrafish (Danio ...

Researchers demonstrate today that 70 per cent of protein-coding human genes are related to genes found in the zebrafish and that 84 per cent of genes known to be associated with human disease have a zebrafish counterpart. Their study highlights the importance of zebrafish as a model organism for human disease research. The team developed a high-quality annotated zebrafish genome sequence to compare with the human reference genome. Only two other large genomes have been sequenced to this high standard: the human genome and the mouse genome. The completed zebrafish genome ...

ABOUT THE DREAM PROJECT The Dialogue on Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods Project (DREAM Project), founded in 2006 by Andrea Califano (Columbia University) and Gustavo Stolovitzky (IBM), was originally conceived as an initiative to advance thenascent field of network biology through the organization of Challenges on network reconstruction and pathway inference. Since the first set of network inference challenges of 2007 (DREAM2) the concept of using collaborative-competitions as a vehicle to carry on a meaningful dialogue in the computational biology community ...