MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (04/15/2013) -- Disease-resistant wheat developed over the past half century helped ensure steady world food supplies, but a global team led by researchers from the University of Minnesota warns in a new paper that without increased financial support for disease resistance research, new strains of a deadly fungal disease could leave millions without affordable access to food. The study, published in the current edition of the journal Science, examines how Ug99 – new virulent forms of stem rust first found in Uganda in 1999—could continue its movement ...

Montréal, April 15, 2013 – A team of researchers at the IRCM, led by Dr. Jean-François Côté, made an important discovery in breast cancer, which will published online this week by the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The Montréal scientists identified the DOCK1 protein as a potential target to reduce the progression of metastases in patients suffering from breast cancer, the most common type of cancer in women. Dr. Côté's laboratory is interested in metastasis, which is the spread of cancer from an organ (or part of an organ) ...

Recently, doctors have begun to categorize breast cancers into four main groups according to the genetic makeup of the cancer cells. Which category a cancer falls into generally determines the best method of treatment. But cancers in one of the four groups — called "basal-like" or "triple-negative" breast cancer (TNBC) — have been particularly tricky to treat because they usually don't respond to the "receptor-targeted" treatments that are often effective in treating other types of breast cancer. TNBC tends to be more aggressive than the other types and more likely ...

ANN ARBOR—The larger the group, the smaller the chance of forming interracial friendships, a new University of Michigan study shows. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study examines how the size of a community affects the realization of people's preferences for friends. U-M researchers Siwei Cheng and Yu Xie tested their theoretical model using both simulated and real data on actual friendships among 4,745 U.S. high school students. "We found that total school size had a major effect on the likelihood that students would form interracial ...

Writers: Emil Venere, (765) 494-4709, venere@purdue.edu Sources: Ji Soo Yi, 765-496-7213, yij@purdue.edu Bum chul Kwon, kwonb@purdue.edu Related Web site: Ji Soo Yi: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~yij/ PHOTO CAPTION: Purdue industrial engineering doctoral candidate Bum chul Kwon demonstrates a new system that allows treadmill users to read while they run. The system, called ReadingMate, adjusts text on a monitor to counteract the bobbing motion of a runner's head so that the text appears still. (Purdue University photo/Mark Simons) A publication-quality ...

Researchers from Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok and the Natural History Museum, London (Thanit Siriboon, Chirasak Sutcharit, Fred Naggs and Somsak Panha) discovered many new taxa of the brightly coloured carnivorous terrestrial snails family Streptaxidae. Terrestrial snails are primarily herbivores and only a rare few groups like this one are carnivorous. The animals come from several limestone areas across the world, including some threatened by human exploitation, especially by quarrying. Three new species from the genus Perrottetia were described from north and ...

INDIANAPOLIS and WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- Information collected from individual patients at doctor's office and hospital visits could be used to improve health care and reduce costs on a national scale, according to a discussion paper released by the Institute of Medicine. As health care records move to electronic systems, there is an opportunity to compile information taken from individuals and use it to conduct large studies that advance the entire health care system, said Michael D. Murray, PharmD, MPH, the Regenstrief Institute investigator and Purdue University professor ...

How do nerve cells -- which can each be up to three feet long in humans -- keep from rupturing or falling apart? Axons, the long, cable-like projections on neurons, are made stronger by a unique modification of the common molecular building block of the cell skeleton. The finding, which may help guide the search for treatments for neurodegenerative diseases, was reported in the April 10 issue of Neuron by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine. Microtubules are long, hollow cylinders that are a component of the cytoskeleton in all cells ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. – People with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often have trouble communicating and interacting with others because they process language, facial expressions and social cues differently. Previously, researchers found that propranolol, a drug commonly used to treat high blood pressure, anxiety and panic, could improve the language abilities and social functioning of people with an ASD. Now, University of Missouri investigators say the prescription drug also could help improve the working memory abilities of individuals with autism. Working memory represents ...

April 15, 2013 – San Francisco - A brain-training task that increases the number of items an individual can remember over a short period of time may boost performance in other problem-solving tasks by enhancing communication between different brain areas. The new study being presented this week in San Francisco is one of a growing number of experiments on how working-memory training can measurably improve a range of skills – from multiplying in your head to reading a complex paragraph. "Working memory is believed to be a core cognitive function on which many types of ...

AURORA, Colo. (April 15, 2013) – A newly published study of patients with pulmonary fibrosis has discovered multiple genetic variations that should help with future efforts to treat the disease. Pulmonary fibrosis is a condition where lung tissue becomes thickened, stiff and scarred. Currently in the United States, there are no drugs approved for use in cases of the condition's most common and severe form, which is known as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) because the cause of the disease is not known. In those cases, the median survival time after diagnosis is two ...

As small and active flying mammals, bats have very high mass-specific energy requirements and as such continually adjust their rates of activity and metabolism in response to ambient temperature and other seasonal variation. In particular, during the autumn mating season, male bats must carefully balance time spent foraging (to gain enough fat to last the winter hibernation) with time spent finding a mate. Because both activities require significant effort, how do male bats do it? In an upcoming issue of Physiological and Biochemical Zoology, Nina Becker and colleagues ...

Specific DNA once dismissed as junk plays an important role in brain development and might be involved in several devastating neurological diseases, UC San Francisco scientists have found. Their discovery in mice is likely to further fuel a recent scramble by researchers to identify roles for long-neglected bits of DNA within the genomes of mice and humans alike. While researchers have been busy exploring the roles of proteins encoded by the genes identified in various genome projects, most DNA is not in genes. This so-called junk DNA has largely been pushed aside ...

AUDIO: Learn about research on decision-making in this podcast with Carlos Brody, an associate professor of molecular biology affiliated with the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.... Click here for more information. Making decisions involves a gradual accumulation of facts that support one choice or another. A person choosing a college might weigh factors such as course selection, institutional reputation and the quality of ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University believe they have solved a puzzle that has vexed science since plants first appeared on Earth. In a groundbreaking paper published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers provide the first three-dimensional model of an enzyme that links a simple sugar, glucose, into long-chain cellulose, the basic building block within plant cell walls that gives plants structure. Cellulose is nature's most abundant renewable biomaterial and an important resource for production of biofuels that ...

AURORA, Colo. (April 15, 2013) – Researchers at the Linda Crnic Institute for Down Syndrome and the University of Colorado School of Medicine have found that a single mechanism may underlie the damaging effect of cholesterol on the brain and on blood vessels. High levels of blood cholesterol increase the risk of both Alzheimer's disease and heart disease, but it has been unclear exactly how cholesterol damages the brain to promote Alzheimer's disease and blood vessels to promote atherosclerosis. Using insights gained from studying two much rarer disorders, Down Syndrome ...

Projections of rainfall changes from global warming have been very uncertain because scientists could not determine how two different mechanisms will impact rainfall. The two mechanisms turn out to complement each other and together shape the spatial distribution of seasonal rainfall in the tropics, according to the study of a group of Chinese and Hawaii scientists that is published in the April 14, 2013, online issue of Nature Geoscience. The one mechanism, called "wet-gets-wetter," predicts that rainfall should increase in regions that already have much rain, with a ...

Raising tobacco prices is one of the most effective means of reducing tobacco use, particularly among price-sensitive smokers such as young people and people with low incomes. But when the UK government has been raising cigarette taxes to increase prices and deter smoking, tobacco companies have been absorbing the tax increases on their ultra-low-price (ULP) brands to keep their prices low. As a result, real ULP cigarette prices have remained virtually unchanged since 2006 and their market share has doubled, suggesting that as cigarette taxes rise, many smokers downtrade ...

A new study published in the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) journal, Arthritis Care & Research, reveals that women with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) who were on methotrexate (MTX), a drug commonly used to reduce inflammation caused by RA, had lower rates of induced abortions compared to women with RA who were not exposed to the medication. Findings indicate that women with RA exposed to anti-tumor necrosis factor (anti-TNF) drugs may have increased abortion rates compared to unexposed women. Experts estimate that 1.3 million U.S. adults have RA—an inflammatory disease ...

Circumcision drastically alters the microbiome of the penis, changes that could explain why circumcision offers protection against HIV and other viral infections. In a study to be published on April 16 in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, researchers studied the effects of adult male circumcision on the types of bacteria that live under the foreskin before and after circumcision. By one year post-procedure, the total bacterial load in that area had dropped significantly and the prevalence of anaerobic bacteria, which thrive ...

The use of social media by older people can offer valuable additional support in cases of sickness and diseases, new research from the University of Luxembourg has shown. In a new publication, Dr Anja Leist from the University's Research Unit INSIDE, concludes that possibilities for a systematic application in clinical practice seem promising. With the rise of user-friendly devices such as tablets and other web-enabled devices, older adults now engage in social media, such as online social networks, discussion boards, and online forums, more frequently. The evidence ...

Philadelphia, PA, April 16, 2013 – Studies have shown that about 10 percent of men infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) have an elevated resting energy expenditure (REE). Their bodies use more kilocalories for basic functions including circulation, body temperature, and breathing. Most studies have been conducted in men and those with solely women have had small sample sizes. A team of researchers has sought to rectify this with a matched, prospective, cross-sectional study. The results are featured in a new report published by the Journal of the Academy of ...

CHICAGO --- The cholera strain that transferred to Haiti in 2010 has multiple toxin gene mutations that may account for the severity of disease and is evolving to be more like an 1800s version of cholera, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study. The strain, "altered El Tor," which emerged around 2000, is known to be more virulent and to cause more severe diarrhea and dehydration than earlier strains that had been circulating since the 1960s. This study reports the altered El Tor strain has acquired two additional signature mutations during the past decade that may ...

Missouri study links drunk driving to "urgency" personality trait Article provided by Deputy & Mizell, L.L.C. Visit us at http://www.deputyandmizell.com/ Researchers at the University of Missouri have found a correlation between drunk driving and certain personality traits, which they believe may help explain why certain individuals drink and drive even though they disapprove of the idea while sober. The research could aid in the development of programs aimed at preventing drunk driving accidents in Missouri. Drinking triggers "urgency" ...

Supreme Court to determine constitutionality of DNA samples for arrestees Article provided by Tritico Rainey, PLLC Visit us at http://www.etlawfirm.com Is it a violation of your constitutional rights for law enforcement to take a sample of your DNA if you are arrested--but not convicted--for a serious offense? The United States Supreme Court recently heard arguments in a case, Maryland v. King that will decide this issue, possibly significantly changing the state of criminal defense law. The decision may also affect the law as it stands in Texas. More than half ...