COLUMBUS, Ohio – A South American butterfly flapped its wings, and caused a flurry of nanotechnology research to happen in Ohio. Researchers here have taken a new look at butterfly wings and rice leaves, and learned things about their microscopic texture that could improve a variety of products. For example, the researchers were able to clean up to 85 percent of dust off a coated plastic surface that mimicked the texture of a butterfly wing, compared to only 70 percent off a flat surface. In a recent issue of the journal Soft Matter, the Ohio State University engineers ...

A presentation at the American Society of Human Genetics 2012 meeting updated genetics experts about a one-year-old research initiative that brought together researchers, clinicians and policy experts to tackle the challenges of incorporating new genomic technologies into clinical care of newborns, infants and children with anatomical defects whose causes are unknown. Among the challenges is interpreting how variations in patients' DNA cause or contribute to their medical problems, said Duke University Assistant Professor of Pediatrics Erica E. Davis, Ph.D., who presented ...

Humans share over 90% of their DNA with their primate cousins. The expression or activity patterns of genes differ across species in ways that help explain each species' distinct biology and behavior. DNA factors that contribute to the differences were described on Nov. 6 at the American Society of Human Genetics 2012 meeting in a presentation by Yoav Gilad, Ph.D., associate professor of human genetics at the University of Chicago. Dr. Gilad reported that up to 40% of the differences in the expression or activity patterns of genes between humans, chimpanzees and rhesus ...

Scientists have adopted a novel laboratory approach for determining the effect of genetic variation on the efficiency of the biological process that translates a gene's DNA sequence into a protein, such as hemoglobin, according to a presentation, Nov. 6, at the American Society of Human Genetics 2012 meeting in San Francisco. In the 0.1% of the DNA that differs between any two individuals, scientists search for the biological mechanisms underlying human genetic differences, including disease susceptibility. "How exactly these slight changes in the DNA affect the biology ...

WASHINGTON – High cigarette prices, smoke-free air laws, marketing restrictions and other measures, all part of Brazil's strong tobacco control policies, are credited for a 50 percent reduction in smoking prevalence between 1989 and 2010. The reduction contributed to an estimated 420,000 lives saved during that time period. Those are the findings of a new study published today in PLOS Medicine by a team of researchers from Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Brazilian National Cancer Institute. Adding to the dramatic conclusion of the study, which ...

People who do regular physical activity, such as brisk walking, live longer than those who don't do any leisure time exercise, even when overweight, reports a study by international researchers published in this week's PLOS Medicine. These findings are important because, according to the authors (led by Steven Moore from the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, USA): "This finding may help convince currently inactive persons that a modest physical activity program is ''worth it'' for health benefits, even if it may not result in weight control." The researchers from ...

Smoking rates in Brazil have dropped by half over the past two decades thanks to strict tobacco control policies, according to a study by US and Brazilian researchers published in this week's PLOS Medicine. Using a modeling simulation study called Brazil SimSmoke, the authors from authors from Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center of Georgetown University in Washington DC and the Brazilian National Cancer Institute in Rio de Janeiro, calculated that 46% of the reduction in smoking rates between 1989 and 2010 (34.8% of Brazilian adults smoked in 1989 compared to 18.5% in ...

In this week's PLOS Medicine, David Hipgrave from the University of Melbourne, Australia and colleagues discuss health system reform in China and argue that parallel reforms in governance, financing, and accountability are also needed to ensure health equity. ### Funding: No specific funding was received to write this article. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. The opinions expressed in this paper reflect the perspectives of the authors alone, and may not be inferred to represent the position of their parent institutions. Citation: ...

A new study shows that defibrillators – devices designed to detect and correct dangerous heart rhythms – can help people with heart disease live longer, and with a much better quality of life, than they do now. A small, very simple change in the way physicians set or programmed the device led to a dramatic 80 to 90 percent reduction in inappropriate therapies – potentially painful and anxiety-provoking shocks delivered for rhythms that aren't dangerous or life threatening. And, to the authors' surprise, the new programming also significantly increased survival, lowering ...

Leisure-time physical activity is associated with longer life expectancy, even at relatively low levels of activity and regardless of body weight, according to a study by a team of researchers led by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health. The study, which found that people who engaged in leisure-time physical activity had life expectancy gains of as much as 4.5 years, appeared Nov. 6, 2012, in PLOS Medicine. In order to determine the number of years of life gained from leisure-time physical activity in adulthood, which translates ...

LOS ANGELES – Marked sustained improvement in all patients with zero adverse effects. For a phase I clinical trial, these results are the Holy Grail. Yet researchers from the University of Louisville and Brigham and Women's Hospital today reported just such almost-never-attained data. In a Late-Breaking Clinical Trial session at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions 2012 meeting, Roberto Bolli, M.D., of the University of Louisville and Piero Anversa, M.D., of Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, presented data from their groundbreaking research in the ...

Scientists at the Universities of Liverpool and Glasgow have uncovered a possible new method of enhancing nerve repair in the treatment of spinal cord injuries. It is known that scar tissue, which forms following spinal cord injury, creates an impenetrable barrier to nerve regeneration, leading to the irreversible paralysis associated with spinal injuries. Scientists at Liverpool and Glasgow have discovered that long-chain sugars, called heparan sulfates, play a significant role in the process of scar formation in cell models in the laboratory. Research findings have ...

Scientists in the United States have tested all possible pairings of the 100 cancer drugs approved for use in patients in order to discover whether there are any combinations not tried previously that are effective in certain cancers. Dr Susan Holbeck (PhD), a biologist in the Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis at the National Cancer Institute (USA) will tell the 24th EORTC-NCI-AACR [1] Symposium on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics in Dublin, Ireland, today (Wednesday) that she and her colleagues have completed testing the 100 drugs, with 300,000 experiments ...

A newly developed antibody targeting a signalling pathway that is frequently active in solid tumours has shown encouraging signs of efficacy in its first trial in humans, researchers will report at the 24th EORTC-NCI-AACR [1] Symposium on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics in Dublin, Ireland, today (Wednesday). [2] A patient with advanced malignant melanoma has shown signs of tumour shrinkage and has been receiving treatment for more than 30 weeks without any serious adverse side-effects. Other patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), mesothelioma, ...

A mother's age at menopause may predict her daughter's fertility in terms of the numbers of eggs remaining in her ovaries, according to the new research published online in Europe's leading reproductive medicine journal Human Reproduction [1] today. By assessing ovarian reserve with two accepted methods – levels of anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) and antral follicle count (AFC) – in daughters and comparing it with the age of menopause in their mothers, researchers found that both AMH and AFC declined faster in women whose mothers had an early menopause compared to women ...

MINNEAPOLIS, MN – November 6, 2012 – Administering autologous stem cells obtained from bone marrow either 3 or 7 days following a heart attack did not improve heart function six months later, reports a new clinical trial supported by the National Institutes of Health. The results of this trial, called TIME (Transplantation In Myocardial Infarction Evaluation), were presented by Jay Traverse, MD of the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation Tuesday, Nov. 6, at the 2012 Scientific Sessions of the American Heart Association in Los Angeles. The results of this trial mirror ...

Boston, MA—We all know that exercise is good for you, but how good? While previous studies have shown the link between physical activity and a lower risk of premature mortality, the number of years of life expectancy gained among persons with different activity levels has been unclear—until now. In a new study from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute, researchers have quantified how many years of life are gained by being physically active at different levels, among all individuals as well as among various groups with ...

ANN ARBOR—The fossilized fangs of saber-toothed cats hold clues to how the extinct mammals shared space and food with other large predators 9 million years ago. Led by the University of Michigan and the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid, a team of paleontologists has analyzed the tooth enamel of two species of saber-toothed cats and a bear dog unearthed in geological pits near Madrid. Bear dogs, also extinct, had dog-like teeth and a bear-like body and gait. The researchers found that the cat species—a leopard-sized Promegantereon ogygia and a much larger, ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Heart failure patients with a condition called "heart block" derive significant benefit from cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT), according to the results of the Block HF clinical trial, presented today at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions 2012 meeting in Los Angeles. Anne B. Curtis, MD, Charles and Mary Bauer Professor and Chair of Medicine in the University at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and principal investigator of Block HF, presented results of the eight-year-long, national, multicenter, randomized clinical ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – A direct, head-to-head comparison of two of the newer treatments available for type 2 diabetes yielded mixed results. The 26-week, multicenter DURATION-6 clinical trial found that daily injections of liraglutide (Victoza) were slightly more effective than weekly injections of exenatide (Bydureon) in lowering blood sugar and promoting weight loss in patients with type 2 diabetes. However, the patients taking exenatide suffered fewer negative side effects such as nausea, diarrhea and vomiting. "Both of these agents are very exciting diabetes products ...

The drug, geldanamycin, is well known for attacking a protein associated with the spread of breast cancer. However, a laboratory-based study found it also degraded a different protein that triggers blood vessel growth. Stopping unwanted blood vessel growth is a key challenge in the battle against cancer, according to Dr Sreenivasan Ponnambalam, reader in human disease biology in the University of Leeds' Faculty of Biological Sciences. "This is potentially very significant because tumours secrete substances that stimulate blood vessels to develop around them, forming ...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 6, 2012 — Personalized medicine — the promise of customizing treatments that will work best for each individual patient — could get a boost from advances in understanding how the proteins that help determine health and disease take the three-dimensional shapes needed to work in the body. That's the message of the latest episode of the 2012 edition of a popular video series from the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society. The videos are available at www.acs.org/PrizedScience and on DVD. Titled Prized Science: How the Science ...

BOSTON, MA—For many people with high cholesterol, statins serve as the first line of treatment. However, some patients are unable to effectively reduce their low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL cholesterol) or "bad cholesterol" levels with statins, the most commonly used medication to treat high cholesterol, due to their bodies' inability to tolerate or sufficiently respond to the medicine. Now researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital have shown that in patients already on a statin, the addition of a new drug, called AMG 145, can reduce LDL cholesterol levels ...

San Carlos, CA; November 6, 2012 – BioCardia, Inc., focused on regenerative biologic therapies for cardiovascular disease, today announced positive results from a Phase 1/2 heart failure trial using the Company's Helical Infusion System, comprising the Helical Infusion System Catheter™ and Morph® Vascular Access Catheter, to deliver allogeneic, or "off-the-shelf," and autologous, or from the treated patient, mesenchymal (adult) stem cells (MSCs) via transendocardial injection. According to the results, both the allogeneic and autologous MSCs were safe and well-tolerated ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Specialty stores do not have to compete with supermarket prices to increase sales, according to a recent study from the University at Buffalo School of Management. Researchers found that consumers are not concerned about higher prices when shopping at specialty stores, and that they are more likely to buy items related to their main purchase than at a supermarket. In addition, specialty stores' customers are more apt to respond to holiday promotions than to sale prices. The study was conducted by Ram Bezawada, PhD, assistant professor, and Minakshi ...