DENVER – Right now, the best known treatment for patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with anaplastic lymphoma kinase gene rearrangements (ALK) or epidermal growth factor receptor mutations (EGFR) is crizotinib or EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs), such as erlotinib, respectively. However, progression inevitably occurs. When it does, having no clear guidelines and/or indications, most patients are treated with chemotherapy. A new study published in the December 2012 issue of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer's (IASLC) ...

BOSTON – Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), are a newly emerging cellular therapy being tested in approximately 250 clinical trials worldwide to help repair damaged tissues, such as injured heart muscle following a heart attack. The problem is that when culture-expanded MSCs are injected into the circulation, they have trouble gaining access to the inflamed tissues—exactly where their help is needed. Now, research led by investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) reveals new insights into how MSCs "traffic" from the ...

It's a popularly held belief that individuals with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) gravitate toward STEM majors in college (science, technology, engineering mathematics). A new study, co-authored by Paul Shattuck, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, confirms that view yet finds that young adults with an ASD also have one of the lowest overall college enrollment rates. The study, "STEM Participation Among College Students with an Autism Spectrum Disorder," was published online Nov. 1 in the Journal of Autism and Developmental ...

Putnam Valley, NY. (Nov. 15, 2012) – Researchers in Taiwan have developed a "safe, feasible and robust co-culture system" supplied by human umbilical cord mensenchymal stem cells (HUCMSCs) to feed the sustained culture used for human embryonic stem cell (hESC) expansion prior to cell transplantation. The co-culture, said the researchers, "appears to eliminate the most feared characteristic of transplanted hESCs," which is their propensity to form tumors. The study, published in the current issue of CELL TRANSPLANTATION, is now freely available on-line at http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cog/ct/. ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — They're soft, biocompatible, about 7 millimeters long – and, incredibly, able to walk by themselves. Miniature "bio-bots" developed at the University of Illinois are making tracks in synthetic biology. Designing non-electronic biological machines has been a riddle that scientists at the interface of biology and engineering have struggled to solve. The walking bio-bots demonstrate the Illinois team's ability to forward-engineer functional machines using only hydrogel, heart cells and a 3-D printer. With an altered design, the bio-bots could be customized ...

The recent storms that have battered settlements on the east coast of America may have been much more frequent in the region 450 million years ago, according to scientists. New research pinpointing the positions of the Equator and the landmasses of the USA, Canada and Greenland, during the Ordovician Period 450 million years ago, indicates that the equator ran down the western side of North America with a hurricane belt to the east. The hurricane belt would have affected an area covering modern day New York State, New Jersey and most of the eastern seaboard of the ...

Putnam Valley, NY. (Nov. 15, 2012) – Two studies published in the current issue of Cell Transplantation (21:7), now freely available on-line at http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cog/ct/, investigate the role of oxygen in cell transplantation. In a study carried out at Baylor University, researchers concerned about the poor efficacy of islet cell transplantation during pancreas preservation and islet isolation have found that low temperatures can prevent hypoxia (low oxygen) that can damage islet cells. In a second study, Brazilian researchers found that neural cells ...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories and the University of New Mexico are comparing supercomputer simulations of blast waves on the brain with clinical studies of veterans suffering from mild traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) to help improve helmet designs. Paul Taylor and John Ludwigsen of Sandia's Terminal Ballistics Technology Department and Corey Ford, a neurologist at UNM's Health Sciences Center, are in the final year of a four-year study of mild TBI funded by the Office of Naval Research. The team hopes to identify threshold levels of ...

Livermore, Calif. -- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have used the Stack Trace Analysis Tool (STAT), a highly scalable, lightweight tool to debug a program running more than one million MPI processes on the IBM Blue Gene/Q (BGQ)-based Sequoia supercomputer. The debugging tool is a significant milestone in LLNL's multi-year collaboration with the University of Wisconsin (UW), Madison and the University of New Mexico (UNM) to ensure supercomputers run more efficiently. Playing a significant role in scaling up the Sequoia supercomputer, STAT, ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Frontline employees will commit to improving their organization if they perceive a high degree of autonomy in their jobs and trust their leaders, says research from University of Illinois business professors. According to a soon-to-be-published study by Gopesh Anand and Dilip Chhajed, professors of business administration at Illinois, a flexible work environment plays a significant role in increasing employee commitment to continuous improvement initiatives. "Continuous improvement initiatives are typically bundled with employee empowerment techniques," ...

Heart failure is a relatively common complication in older women with breast cancer, but the risk is even higher in those patients treated with adjuvant trastuzumab (Herceptin©), Yale School of Medicine researchers report in the current issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The researchers conducted this study because older women who are at higher risk of decreased heart function, were often excluded from randomized clinical trials of trastuzumab, which is used to treat breast tumors that over-express human epidermal growth factor receptor-2 (HER-2). ...

Your emotions can certainly impact your decisions, but you might be surprised by the extent to which your emotions affect your pocketbook. New research from psychological scientist Jennifer Lerner of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and colleagues Yi Le and Elke U. Weber of Columbia University explores how impatience brought on by sadness can in turn produce substantial financial loss. The study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Using data collected at the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory and the ...

Research out of the University of Cincinnati seeks to measure economic and political policy impacts that unions associated with criminal justice systems – such as police, correctional officers and dispatchers unions – have in their respective states. That research, titled "Measuring the Effect of Public-Sector Unionization on Criminal Justice Public Policy" by UC criminal justice doctoral students Derek Cohen and Jay Kennedy, will be presented at the American Society of Criminology conference on Nov. 17. It's a research effort that stems from and seeks to shed light ...

Richmond, Va. (November 13, 2012) – In laboratory experiments, scientists have eliminated metastasis, the spread of cancer from the original tumor to other parts of the body, in melanoma by inhibiting a protein known as melanoma differentiation associated gene-9 (mda-9)/syntenin. More than 1 million cases of skin cancer are diagnosed each year in the U.S., and melanoma is the deadliest form. With further research, the approach used by the scientists could lead to targeted therapies that stop metastasis in melanoma and potentially a broad range of additional cancers. The ...

VIDEO: On Nov. 13, 2012, a narrow corridor in the southern hemisphere experienced a total solar eclipse. The corridor lay mostly over the ocean but also cut across the northern tip... Click here for more information. On Nov. 13, 2012, a narrow corridor in the southern hemisphere experienced a total solar eclipse. The corridor lay mostly over the ocean but also cut across the northern tip of Australia where both professional and amateur astronomers gathered to watch. During ...

The twenty-fifth tropical depression of the western North Pacific Ocean season formed today and is already affecting southern Vietnam. NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Depression 25W and captured a visible image of the storm that showed its northern quadrant raining over the country. When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over newborn Tropical Depression 25W (TD25W) on Nov. 14 at 0638 UTC (1:38 a.m. EDT), the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument captured a visible image of the storm. At the time of the image, the strongest thunderstorms ...

Sometimes simplicity is best. Two Northwestern University researchers have discovered a remarkably easy way to make nanofluidic devices: using paper and scissors. And they can cut a device into any shape and size they want, adding to the method's versatility. Nanofluidic devices are attractive because their thin channels can transport ions -- and with them a higher than normal electric current -- making the devices promising for use in batteries and new systems for water purification, harvesting energy and DNA sorting. The "paper-and-scissors" method one day could ...

An international research team including scientists from the University of Toronto's Faculty of Medicine has discovered a link between a mutation in an immune system gene and Alzheimer's disease. Using data from 25,000 people, researchers from the Faculty of Medicine and University College London's Institute of Neurology discovered that a rare genetic mutation in the TREM2 gene — which helps trigger immune system responses — is also associated with increased risk of Alzheimer's. The discovery supports an emerging theory about the role of the immune system in the disease. ...

Noting that active-duty servicewomen have higher rates of unintended pregnancy than the general population and lower reported contraception use, one researcher at Women & Infants Hospital is suggesting the answer might be a review of the health care offered to females in the military and veterans. Vinita Goyal, MD, MPH, published the study "Unintended pregnancy and contraception among active-duty servicewomen and veterans" in a recent issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology. As part of her research, conducted in cooperation with the Veteran's Administration ...

Georgia Tech, along with partner research organizations on the Keeneland Project, including the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, the National Institute for Computational Sciences and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, announced today that the project has completed installation and acceptance of the Keeneland Full Scale System (KFS). This supercomputing system, which is available to the National Science Foundation (NSF) scientific community, is designed to meet the compute-intensive needs of a wide range of applications through the use of NVIDIA GPU technology. In achieving ...

Not only is Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan the world's most powerful supercomputer, it is also one of the most energy-efficient. Titan came in at number three on the Green500 list. Organized by Virginia Tech's Wu-chun Feng and Kirk Cameron, the list takes the world's 500 most powerful supercomputers—as ranked by the Top500 list—and reorders them according to how many calculations they can get per watt of electricity. The Green500 list was announced Wednesday during the SC12 supercomputing conference in Salt Lake City. Titan's position reflects a significant ...

Compared to the nation, a higher proportion of children in California are uninsured, one in every 10 children or more than 1.1 million in 2011. More of California's children have public health insurance and fewer through their parents' employer. And, over the past three years, a decade of advances in California children's public insurance enrollment has stalled, as coverage in Healthy Families (California's children's health insurance program) declined as a result of reductions in state government funding. These are just a few of the findings in a new report from the ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- The great white shark is one of the largest living predatory animals and a magnet for media sensationalism, yet its evolutionary history is as misunderstood as its role as a menace. Originally classified as a direct relative of megatooth sharks, the white shark's evolutionary history has been debated by paleontologists for the last 150 years. In a study appearing in print and online today in the journal Palaeontology, University of Florida researchers name and describe an ancient intermediate form of the white shark, Carcharodon hubbelli, which shows ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — The human nose has millions of olfactory neurons grouped into hundreds of different neuron types. Each of these neuron types expresses only one odorant receptor, and all neurons expressing the same odorant receptor plug into one region in the brain, an organization that allows for specific odors to be sensed. For example, when you smell a rose, only those neurons that express a specific odor receptor that detects a chemical the rose emits get activated, which in turn activates a specific region in the brain. Rotten eggs on the other hand, activate ...

PHILADELPHIA — A promising new approach to treating solid tumors with radiation was highly efficacious and minimally toxic to healthy tissue in a mouse model of cancer, according to data published in Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. Some patients with solid tumors, including prostate cancer, are treated using a clinical technique called brachytherapy. Brachytherapy involves the surgical implantation of radioactive "seeds" within a patient's tumor to expose the tumor cells to high levels of radiation while minimizing the negative ...