PHILADELPHIA — During embryonic development, animals generate many different types of cells, each with a distinct function and identity. "Although the identities of these cells remain stable under normal conditions, some cells can be persuaded to take on new identities, through reprogramming," says Ben Stanger, MD, PhD, assistant professor of Medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. Researchers have been able to reprogram cells experimentally, but few have shown that cells can change their identities ...

The union of theory and practice makes broadband, low-loss optical devices practical, which is why two groups of Penn State engineers collaborated to design optical metamaterials that have custom applications that are easily manufactured. Metamaterials are manufactured materials that derive their unusual properties from structure rather than only composition, and possess exotic properties not usually found in nature. Nanostructured metamaterials appear different for signals of different frequencies. They are dispersive, so that if researchers manipulate this material ...

Women who abruptly and prematurely lose estrogen from surgical menopause have a two-fold increase in cognitive decline and dementia. "This is what the clinical studies indicate and our animal studies looking at the underlying mechanisms back this up," said Brann, corresponding author of the study in the journal Brain. "We wanted to find out why that is occurring. We suspect it's due to the premature loss of estrogen." In an effort to mimic what occurs in women, Brann and his colleagues looked at rats 10 weeks after removal of their estrogen-producing ovaries that were ...

Swarms of robots acting together to carry out jobs could provide new opportunities for humans to harness the power of machines. Researchers in the Sheffield Centre for Robotics, jointly established by the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, have been working to program a group of 40 robots, and say the ability to control robot swarms could prove hugely beneficial in a range of contexts, from military to medical. The researchers have demonstrated that the swarm can carry out simple fetching and carrying tasks, by grouping around an object and working ...

Considerable opportunity exists to improve interventions and outcomes of traumatic brain injury (TBI) in older adults, according to three studies published in the recent online issue of NeuroRehabilitation by researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. An Exploration of Clinical Dementia Phenotypes Among Individuals With and Without Traumatic Brain Injury Some evidence suggests that a history of TBI is associated with an increased risk of dementia later in life, but the clinical features of dementia associated with TBI have not been well investigated. ...

(Edmonton) Researchers from the University of Alberta are teaming up with child-care providers and day-home operators to ensure they have adequate training and support needed to offer inclusive spaces for children with disabilities. Lesley Wiart was the lead author of a new study that identified challenges in providing inclusive spaces for children with physical disabilities, cognitive impairments and behavioural issues. The research showed that many Alberta child-care centres and day homes support inclusion but sometimes lack training and support. "Even though providers ...

This press release is available in German. Mate choice is a key factor in the evolution of new animal species. The choice of a specific mate can decisively influence the evolutionary development of a species. In mice, the attractiveness of a potential mate is conveyed by scent cues and ultrasonic vocalizations. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön investigated whether house mice (Mus musculus) would mate with each other even if they were from two populations which had been separated from each other for a long time period. To do this, ...

DENVER – Physicians who care for lung cancer patients recognize the importance of tobacco cessation, but often do not provide cessation assistance to their patients according to a recent study published in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology (JTO). An online survey was conducted in 2012 by the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer's (IASLC) Tobacco Control and Smoking Cessation Committee. The survey asked IASLC members about their practices, perceptions and barriers to tobacco assessment and cessation in cancer patients. More than 1,500 IASLC members responded ...

NEW YORK (March 28, 2013) — A new study led by WCS-India scientist Vidya Athreaya finds that certain landscapes of western India completely devoid of wilderness and with high human populations are crawling with a different kind of backyard wildlife: leopards. The study found as many as five adult large carnivores, including leopards and striped hyenas, per 100 square kilometers (38 square miles), a density never before reported in a human-dominated landscape. The study, called "Big Cats in Our Backyards," appeared in the March 6 edition of the journal PLoS One. ...

In 2010, almost 2 million American children had at least one parent in active military duty. A new University of Iowa study suggests that deployment of a parent puts these children at an increased risk for drinking alcohol and using drugs. Using data from a statewide survey of sixth-, eighth-, and 11th-grade students in Iowa, the researchers found an increase in 30-day alcohol use, binge drinking, using marijuana and other illegal drugs, and misusing prescription drugs among children of deployed or recently returned military parents compared to children in non-military ...

For years, scientists have been concerned about chemicals in the environment that mimic the estrogens found in the body. In study after study, researchers have found links between these "xenoestrogens" and such problems as decreased sperm viability, ovarian dysfunction, neurodevelopmental deficits and obesity. But experimental limitations have prevented them from exploring one of the most serious questions posed by exposure to xenoestrogens: what happens when — as in the real world — an individual is exposed to multiple estrogen-mimicking chemicals at the same time? Now ...

A UCLA study shows that heart failure medications recommended by national guidelines are highly cost effective in saving lives and may also provide savings to the health care system. Heart failure, a chronic, progressive disease, affects millions of individuals and results in considerable morbidity, the use of extensive health care resources, and substantial costs. Currently published online, the study will also appear in the April 2 print issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Researchers studied the incremental health and cost benefits of ...

The field of regenerative medicine holds great promise, propelled by greater understanding of how stem cells differentiate themselves into many of the body's different cell types. But clinical applications in the field have been slow to materialize, partially owing to difficulties in replicating the conditions these cells naturally experience. A team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania has generated new insight on how a stem cell's environment influences what type of cell a stem cell will become. They have shown that whether human mesenchymal stem cells ...

Physical activity and its relation to obesity has been studied for decades by researchers; however, almost no one has studied the reverse – obesity's effect on physical activity. So BYU exercise science professor Larry Tucker decided to look at the other side of the equation to determine if obesity leads to less activity. The findings, no surprise, confirmed what everyone has assumed for years. "Most people talk about it as if it's a cycle," Tucker said, senior-author on a study appearing online ahead of print in the journal Obesity. "Half of the cycle has been studied ...

Focusing on the present rather than letting the mind drift may help to lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, suggests new research from the Shamatha Project at the University of California, Davis. The ability to focus mental resources on immediate experience is an aspect of mindfulness, which can be improved by meditation training. "This is the first study to show a direct relation between resting cortisol and scores on any type of mindfulness scale," said Tonya Jacobs, a postdoctoral researcher at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain and first author of a ...

Home hot water heater temperatures are too high, warns a team of researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Despite the adoption of voluntary standards by manufacturers to preset hot water heater temperature settings below the recommended safety standard of 120°F, temperatures remain dangerously high for a significant proportion of homes, presenting a scald hazard for young children and the elderly. The report is published in the March 2013 issue of Journal Of Burn Care Research. In the U.S., tap water burns cause an estimated 1,500 hospital ...

With millions of eggs about to have their annual encounter with red, green, blue and other dyes this holiday weekend, the American Chemical Society (ACS) today released a new video that will egg people on in discovering the chemistry that underpins the process. The video is at http://www.BytesizeScience.com. Produced by the ACS Office of Public Affairs, The Chemistry of Egg Dyeing features Diane Bunce, Ph.D., professor of chemistry at The Catholic University of America. Bunce explains, for instance, why vinegar is so important for eggshells to take up dye. Eggshells ...

Expanding Medicaid in Pennsylvania under the Affordable Care Act would boost federal revenue to the state by more than $2 billion annually and provide 340,000 residents with health insurance, according to a new RAND Corporation study. The increased federal spending on health care in Pennsylvania would provide a $3 billion boost in economic activity and sustain more than 35,000 jobs, according to the analysis. But the expansion of Medicaid would not be without cost. Expanding Medicaid would require an additional $53 million in state spending in 2014, with the cost rising ...

Sea hares are not the favourite food choice of many marine inhabitants, and it's easy to see why when you find out about the chemical weapons they employ when provoked – namely, two unpalatable secretions, ink and opaline, which they squirt at unsuspecting peckish predators. However, while much is known about the consequences of purple ink secretion, how the whitish and viscous opaline outsmarts a potential predator remains unknown. Charles Derby from Georgia State University, USA, wondered whether opaline could decrease the activity of a predator's sensory system. Along ...

Just as the power of the open-source design has driven down the cost of software to the point that it is accessible to most people, open-source hardware makes it possible to drive down the cost of doing experimental science and expand access to everyone. As part of this movement, a Michigan Technological University lab has introduced a library of open-source, 3-D-printable optics components in a paper published in PLOS One from the Public Library of Science. Joshua Pearce, an associate professor of materials science and engineering and electrical and computer engineering ...

About 90 percent of children with two copies of a common genetic variation and who wheezed when they caught a cold early in life went on to develop asthma by age 6, according to a study to be published March 28 by the New England Journal of Medicine. These children, all from families with a history of asthma or allergies, were nearly four times as likely to develop the disease as those who lacked the genetic variation and did not wheeze. The effects of each—the genetic variation and wheezing illness caused by a human rhinovirus infection—are not merely additive but also ...

Changes in the population of microbial organisms in the gastrointestinal tract may underlie some of the benefits of gastric bypass surgery, reports a team of researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard University. In the March 27 issue of Science Translational Medicine, the investigators describe experiments in mice finding that previously observed post-bypass alterations in the microbial population (also called the microbiota) are caused by the surgery itself, not by weight loss, and that transferring samples of the changed microbiota to mice raised ...

VIDEO: Three-dimensional volume renderings of the platinum nanoparticle are reconstructed from 104 experimental projections in which nearly all the atoms of the nanoparticle are visible. Furthermore, 3-D atomic steps at twin... Click here for more information. A team of scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Northwestern University has produced 3-D images and videos of a tiny platinum nanoparticle at atomic resolution that reveal new details ...

Single-celled archaea are invisible to the naked eye, and even when using a microscope, great care must be taken to observe them. An international team of researchers led by the Center for Geomicrobiology, Aarhus University, Denmark, has nevertheless succeeded in retrieving four archaeal cells from seabed mud and mapping the genome of each one. "Until now, nobody knew how these widespread mud-dwelling archaea actually live. Mapping the genome from the four archaeal cells shows they all have genes that enable them to live on protein degradation," says Professor Karen Lloyd, ...

A strain of probiotic bacteria that can fight harmful bacterial infections in poultry has the ability to change its coat, according to new findings from the Institute of Food Research. The probiotic is currently being taken forward through farm-scale trials to evaluate how well it combats Clostridium perfringens – a cause of necrotic enteritis in poultry and the second most common cause of food poisoning in the UK The researchers at IFR, which is strategically funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, had previously found that the probiotic ...