ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Researchers at Mayo Clinic Cancer Center have identified a novel gene that can contribute to a woman's susceptibility for developing ovarian cancer. Researchers identified the gene, called HNF1B, through large-scale analysis of more than 16,000 women with ovarian cancer and more than 26,000 healthy women. Results of the study are published in the current issue of the journal Nature Communications. The study is one of 13 papers to be published simultaneously in five journals by the Collaborative Oncological Gene-environment Study (COGS), an international ...

An international team of scientists led by the University of Leicester has found new evidence that links faster 'biological' ageing to the risk of developing several age-related diseases - including heart disease, multiple sclerosis and various cancers. The study involved scientists in 14 centres across 8 countries, working as part of the ENGAGE Consortium (list of research teams is give below). The research is published online today (27th March) in the journal Nature Genetics. The project studied a feature of chromosomes called telomeres. Telomeres sit on the end ...

VIDEO: This video is Dr. Merabet's article as it appears in JoVE. Click here for more information. On March 27th JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments) will publish a new video article by Dr. Lotfi Merabet showing how researchers in the Department of Ophthalmology at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and Harvard Medical School have developed a virtual gaming environment to help blind individuals improve navigation skills and develop a cognitive spatial map of unfamiliar ...

Tropical rainforests are known for their high biodiversity of countless species, many of them unknown and not named by scientists yet. A large proportion of this undiscovered life on earth is formed by insects, especially beetles. German researchers Alexander Riedel (Natural History Museum Karlsruhe) and Michael Balke (Zoological State Collection Munich), know this well, being experts for faunas of remote tropical countries such as the wilderness of New Guinea. Now they came across a special case, the weevil genus Trigonopterus which is truly "hyperdiverse". Hundreds ...

The Universe is an old neighbourhood -- roughly 13.8 billion years old. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is also ancient -- some of its stars are more than 13 billion years old (eso0425). Nevertheless, there is still a lot of action: new objects form and others are destroyed. In this image, you can see some of the newcomers, the young stars forming the cluster NGC 2547. But, how young are these cosmic youngsters really? Although their exact ages remain uncertain, astronomers estimate that NGC 2547's stars range from 20 to 35 million years old. That doesn't sound all that young, ...

In collaboration with an international research team, University of Copenhagen researchers have for the first time mapped telomerase, an enzyme which has a kind of rejuvenating effect on normal cell ageing. The findings have just been published in Nature Genetics and are a step forward in the fight against cancer. Mapping the cellular fountain of youth – telomerase. This is one of the results of a major research project involving more than 1,000 researchers worldwide, four years of hard work, DKK 55 million from the EU and blood samples from more than 200,000 people. ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- An international research collaboration has found five new regions of the human genome that are linked to increased risks for developing ovarian cancer. Duke Medicine researchers played a leading role analyzing genetic information from more than 40,000 women. The findings are published in four studies, two appearing in the journal Nature Communications and two in Nature Genetics on March 27, 2013. The research is being published as part of a coordinated release of new data from the Collaborative Oncological Gene-environment Study (COGS), an international ...

SCIENTISTS at the University of York have discovered the driving force behind the development of prostate cancer. Their research, published in Nature Communications today (Wednesday)* and funded by the charity Yorkshire Cancer Research, reveals the existence of a cancer inducing DNA re-alignment in stem cells taken from human prostate cancers. This opens the way to the development of drugs that target the stem cells, leading to more effective therapies that work against the root cause of the disease. Professor Norman Maitland, Director of the YCR Cancer Research ...

After eons of wandering in the dark, primates developed highly acute, three-color vision that permitted them to shift to daytime living, a new Dartmouth College study suggests. The findings challenge the prevailing view that trichromatic color vision, a hallmark of primate evolution, evolved only after they started getting up with the sun, a shift that gave rise to anthropoid (higher) primates, which, in turn, gave rise to the human lineage. The results are published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. The authors based their findings ...

Two new studies have highlighted a negative impact on bees' ability to learn following exposure to a combination of pesticides commonly used in agriculture. The researchers found that the pesticides, used in the research at levels shown to occur in the wild, could interfere with the learning circuits in the bee's brain. They also found that bees exposed to combined pesticides were slower to learn or completely forgot important associations between floral scent and food rewards. In the study published today (27th March 2013) in Nature Communications, the University of ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Women in India are more likely to get prenatal care when pregnant with boys, according to groundbreaking research that has implications for girls' health and survival. The study by Leah Lakdawala of Michigan State University and Prashant Bharadwaj of the University of California, San Diego, suggests sex discrimination begins in the womb in male-dominated societies. "It paints a pretty dire picture of what's happening," said Lakdawala, MSU assistant professor of economics. In studying the national health-survey data of more than 30,000 Indians, ...

Almost all foodstuffs contain the genetic material of those animal and plant species that were used in their preparation. Scientists at the Institute of Molecular Genetics, Genetic Security Research and Consulting at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have developed a novel screening procedure that provides for highly sensitive, quantifiable analysis of animal, plant, and microbial substances present in foodstuffs. For this, the researchers have adapted the latest techniques of DNA sequencing, which are otherwise currently employed in human genetics to unravel the ...

Working with an international consortium conducting research on breast, ovarian and prostate cancer among 200,000 people, Professor Jacques Simard, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Oncogenetics at Laval University, was actively involved in the discovery of DNA "spelling mistakes" linked to breast cancer. These mistakes – known as genetic variations – are directly involved in the risk of developing breast cancer. The research was part of an international study on an unprecedented scale performed by the largest international consortia, the Collaborative Oncological ...

Bonn, Germany 27 March 2013 – In diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's endogenous proteins accumulate in the brain, eventually leading to the death of nerve cells. These deposits, which consist of abnormally formed proteins, are supposed to migrate between interconnected areas of the brain, thereby contributing to the development of the illness. Now, a new laboratory study by scientists from Germany and the US shows that certain protein particles are indeed capable of multiplying and spreading from one cell to the next. The investigation was conducted by researchers ...

For around 50 million years, placodonts populated the flat coastal regions of the Tethys Ocean, in modern day Europe and China. The most distinctive feature of these dinosaurs was their teeth: The upper jaw had two rows of flattened teeth – one on the palate and one on the jawbone – while the lower jaw only had one set of teeth ideal for crushing shellfish and crustaceans. The evolutionary origins of these placodonts remained unclear. However, a new find in a 246-million-year-old sediment layer now sheds light on the origin and phylogenetic development of the placodonts. ...

Researchers from Lund University, Yale University and the University of Oxford have been able to give an answer to why cuckolded males in many species still provide paternal care. When the conditions are right, this strategy is actually the most successful. In many species males put a lot of effort into caring for offspring that are not their own. At first glance this makes no sense at all because natural selection should design males to only care for offspring that carry their genes. However, males are much more astute than we might think and maximise their care according ...

New research into ageing processes, based on modern genetic techniques, confirms theoretical expectations about the correlation between reproduction and lifespan. Studies of birds reveal that those that have offspring later in life and have fewer broods live longer. And the decisive factor is telomeres, shows research from The University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Telomeres are the protective caps at the end of chromosomes. The length of telomeres influences how long an individual lives. Telomeres start off at a certain length, become shorter each time a cell divides, ...

This press release is available in German. Zooplankton, small fish and squid spend hardly any time at the surface when there's a full moon. To protect themselves from their natural enemies, they hide deeper down in the water on bright nights, coming up to the surface under cover of darkness when there's a new moon instead. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell discovered that this also influences the behaviour of swallow-tailed gulls (Creagrus furcatus), a unique nocturnal species of gull from the Galapagos Islands. They fitted the ...

Philadelphia, PA, March 26, 2013 – Like it or not and despite the surrounding debate of its merits, 3-D is the technology du jour for movie-making in Hollywood. It now turns out that even our brains use 3 dimensions to communicate emotions. According to a new study published in Biological Psychiatry, the human report of emotion relies on three distinct systems: one system that directs attention to affective states ("I feel"), a second system that categorizes these states into words ("good", "bad", etc.); and a third system that relates the intensity of affective responses ...

Since its introduction fifty or so years ago, thermography has been increasingly used by vets to pinpoint the cause of lameness in horses. The method is fast and safe and is based on a simple idea. The horse's body surface emits infrared radiation that can be detected by an infrared camera, which is both easy and inexpensive to use. The camera produces a coloured image that shows the variation in surface temperature across the area investigated. The temperature is directly related to the presence of blood vessels near the skin, so the method can detect local inflammatory ...

PHILADELPHIA (March 27, 2013) -- In 370 million-year-old red sandstone deposits in a highway roadcut, scientists have discovered a new species of armored fish in north central Pennsylvania. Fossils of armored fishes like this one, a phyllolepid placoderm, are known for the distinctive ornamentation of ridges on their exterior plates. As with many such fossils, scientists often find the remains of these species as impressions in stone, not as three-dimensional versions of their skeletons. Therefore, in the process of studying and describing this fish's anatomy, scientists ...

Working with the International Tennis Federation and colleagues at the University of Exeter, the team from the University of Sheffield's Faculty of Engineering developed a test machine which applies large forces to a surface to mimic the impact of elite tennis players on tennis courts. This impact can be up to four times the bodyweight of a player. They used the machine to measure the friction on an acrylic (hard) court in dry conditions and two artificial clay court surfaces in both wet and dry conditions. The team found that on clay surfaces the size of the sand particles ...

In theory, silicon-based solar cells are capable of converting up to 30 percent of sunlight to electricity - although, in reality, the different kinds of loss mechanisms ensure that even under ideal lab conditions it does not exceed 25 %. Advanced heterojunction cells shall affront this problem: On top of the wafer's surface, at temperatures below 200 °C, a layer of 10 nanometer disordered (amorphous) silicon is deposited. This thin film is managing to saturate to a large extent the interface defects and to conduct charge carriers out of the cell. Heterojunction solar cells ...

This press release is available in Spanish. Researchers with the joint program between IRB Barcelona and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) have devised a new strategy to study the shape of proteins. This study has been led by Modesto Orozco, head of the Molecular Modeling and Bioinformatics Group, and Xavier Salvatella, head of the Molecular Biophysics Group, both ICREA scientists at IRB Barcelona. According to Orozco, also senior professor of the University of Barcelona and director of the Life Sciences Department at BSC, "by combining computational modeling ...

A new study by University of Pennsylvania linguists shows that the Philadelphia accent has changed in the last century. The traditional Southern inflections associated with Philadelphia native-born speakers are increasingly being displaced by Northern influences. "A Hundred Years of Sound Change," published in the March issue of the journal Language, documents Philadelphia's changing accent through an analysis of speech patterns of city residents spanning more than a century. The study is co-authored by William Labov, professor of linguistics and director of Penn's ...