March 13, 2013, Shenzhen, China - In a collaborative study published online today in Nature Communications, researchers from Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, BGI-Shenzhen, and University of Arizona have completed the genome sequencing of wild rice Oryza brachyantha. This work provides new insights for researchers to understand the function and evolution of Oryza genomes. The genus Oryza is an idea model system for studying plant comparative genomics, evolutionary biology and functional biology. There are two cultivated rice ...

VIDEO: Researchers from the La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology and Cardiff University in Wales (UK) have discovered a previously unknown cellular mechanism that could prove critical in creating a... Click here for more information. SAN DIEGO – (March 13, 2013) A virus most people probably have never heard of, but that the majority of us carry, is the No. 1 infectious cause of congenital birth defects in the U.S. today. Because of cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection during ...

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new technique for creating stronger, lightweight magnesium alloys that have potential structural applications in the automobile and aerospace industries. Engineers constantly seek strong, lightweight materials for use in cars and planes to improve fuel efficiency. Their goal is to develop structural materials with a high "specific strength," which is defined as a material's strength divided by its density. In other words, specific strength measures how much load it can carry per unit of weight. Researchers ...

Polycystic ovary syndrome, a condition affecting about 10 percent of women and characterized by excess male hormone and increased risk of diabetes and heart disease, appears to cause a sort of double jeopardy for those struggling the hardest to control blood sugar levels, researchers report. Humans use insulin and other non-insulin mechanisms to convert blood sugar, or glucose, into energy and control levels in the blood, where it becomes a destructive force. A new study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism comparing 28 healthy women to 28 women with ...

The widespread introduction of a chicken pox vaccine in Australia in 2006 has prevented thousands of children from being hospitalized with severe chicken pox and saved lives, according to new research. In a national study of chicken pox admissions at four participating Australian children's hospitals, researchers found the number of children hospitalized with chicken pox or shingles had dropped by 68% since 2006. The research was led by Associate Professor Helen Marshall from the University of Adelaide and Women's and Children's Hospital, and researchers of the Paediatric ...

Philadelphia, PA, March 13, 2013 – Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) deficits have been implicated in schizophrenia and depression. In schizophrenia, deficits have been particularly well-described for a subtype of GABA neuron, the parvalbumin fast-spiking interneurons. The activity of these neurons is critical for proper cognitive and emotional functioning. It now appears that parvalbumin neurons are particularly vulnerable to oxidative stress, a factor that may emerge commonly in development, particularly in the context of psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia or bipolar ...

TORONTO -- What can sports teams learn from the manufacturing industry? Plenty, according to Timothy Chan of the University of Toronto (U of T) and Douglas Fearing of the Harvard Business School. Using statistics from the 2012 Major League Baseball season, Chan and Fearing found that positional flexibility – the ability of a player to play multiple positions – is valuable, responsible for up to 15 per cent of the team's runs, as was the case with the Chicago Cubs. Other teams like the Washington Nationals and the Tampa Bay Rays were less robust to injuries. "Flexibility ...

New research on household pesticide contamination emphasizes the need for less reliance on pesticides and more emphasis on neatness, blocking cracks where insects can enter and other so-called "integrated pest management" (IPM) measures, scientists have concluded. Their study appears in the ACS' journal Environmental Science & Technology. Chensheng Lu and colleagues cite previous studies showing that urban, low-income, multifamily, public housing dwellings are prone to severe pest infestation problems. Families in Boston public housing developments, for instance, rank ...

Scientists are reporting an advance toward overcoming a major barrier to tapping the potential of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and India's Ayurvedic medicine in developing new and more effective modern drugs. Their report appears in ACS' Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. Andreas Bender and colleagues explain that TCM has made key contributions to modern medicine. In the world's largest international clinical trial, for instance, scientists concluded that Artesunate, a derivative of the Chinese herb qinghao, should replace quinine as a treatment for ...

Scientists at Griffith University's Institute for Glycomics and The Saban Research Institute of Children's Hospital Los Angeles have discovered a critical weakness in leukaemic cells, which may pave the way to new treatments. The research team has demonstrated that leukaemic cells can be eradicated by removing a carbohydrate modification displayed on the cell's surface. Director of Griffith University's Institute for Glycomics, Professor Mark von Itzstein is the Australian team leader. He said the discovery is an important advance against leukaemia, a cancer of malignant ...

When, how and why modern humans first stood up and walked on two legs is considered to be one of the greatest missing links in our evolutionary history. Scientists have gone to the far ends of the earth – and the wonderful creatures in it - to look for answers to why we walk the way we walk. In the latest such search, researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (South Africa) have taken a closer look at bipedal kangaroos and wallabies and how they move compared to their cousin-marsupials, such as the quadrupedal Tasmanian wolf. In an article ...

The search for sustainable new materials to store heat captured from the sun for release during the night has led scientists to a high-tech combination of paraffin wax and sand. Their report on the heat-storing capability of this microencapsulated sand appears in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering. Benxia Li and colleagues explain the need for better materials that can store and release heat. These so-called "phase-change" materials" (PCMs) are essential, for instance, for storing heat from the sun for use in providing energy at night or during cloudy periods. PCMs ...

This press release is available in German. VIDEO: Muffin and 13 other cockatoos showed the skills to wait and trade 'normal' for 'better' or 'more' nuts. Click here for more information. Waiting: a clever move! In the 70ties, self-control of human infants was investigated using the prominent 'Stanford Marshmallow Experiment': the children were presented with a marshmallow and ...

Younger doctors are more likely than older generations to train and work in the same region as their home before entering medical school. New research published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine investigating the geographical mobility of UK-trained doctors, reveals that 36% attended a medical school in their home region. 34% of hospital consultants and GP partners settled in the same region as their home before entering medical school. The geographical distribution of doctors is an important factor in the equitable distribution of health services. Trevor ...

Earth is the only known planet that holds water in massive quantities and in all three phase states. But the earthly, omnipresent compound water has very unusual properties that become particularly evident when subjected to high pressure and high temperatures. In the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a German-Finnish-French team published what happens when water is subjected to pressure and temperature conditions such as those found in the deep Earth. At pressures above 22 MPa and temperatures above 374°C, beyond the critical ...

Plain-looking but inherently strange crystalline materials called 3D topological insulators (TIs) are all the rage in materials science. Even at room temperature, a single chunk of TI is a good insulator in the bulk, yet behaves like a metal on its surface. Researchers find TIs exciting partly because the electrons that flow swiftly across their surfaces are "spin polarized": the electron's spin is locked to its momentum, perpendicular to the direction of travel. These interesting electronic states promise many uses – some exotic, like observing never-before-seen fundamental ...

Following several years of study, investigators have found more evidence that viral therapy to treat solid tumors can be enhanced by blocking the body's natural immune response. Oncolytic viruses have shown promise as anticancer agents, with variations of the herpes simplex virus (HSV) among the most commonly used. However, many studies have shown that the effectiveness of viral therapy to eradicate tumors has not been as successful with patients as it has been in the lab. These results have led researchers to examine the body's immune system response to determine what ...

EAST PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Newly released findings from Bradley Hospital published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry have found that autism spectrum disorders (ASD) affect the brain activity of children and adults differently. In the study, titled "Developmental Meta-Analysis of the Functional Neural Correlates of Autism Spectrum Disorders," Daniel Dickstein, M.D., FAAP, director of the Pediatric Mood, Imaging and Neurodevelopment Program at Bradley Hospital, found that autism-related changes in brain activity continue into adulthood. ...

We say that time flies, it marches on, it flows like a river — our descriptions of time are closely linked to our experiences of moving through space. Now, new research suggests that the illusions that influence how we perceive movement through space also influence our perception of time. The findings provide evidence that our experiences of space and time have even more in common than previously thought. The research, conducted by psychological scientist Eugene Caruso of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and colleagues, is published in Psychological ...

Why do innocent people go to jail in the United States every year for violent crimes they did not commit? It's a serious question representing the ultimate miscarriage of justice—taking away the freedom of a factually innocent person while also allowing the guilty person to remain free. The U.S. Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice (NIJ) wanted to learn answers to prevent wrongful convictions in the first place. Jon B. Gould, J.D., Ph.D., a professor and the director of the Washington Institute for Public and International Affairs Research at American ...

The stick can work just as well as the carrot in improving our performance, a team of academics at The University of Nottingham has found. A study led by researchers from the University's School of Psychology, published recently in the Journal of Neuroscience, has shown that punishment can act as a performance enhancer in a similar way to monetary reward. Dr Marios Philiastides, who led the work, said: "This work reveals important new information about how the brain functions that could lead to new methods of diagnosing neural development disorders such as autism, ADHD ...

An iron imbalance caused by prion proteins collecting in the brain is a likely cause of cell death in Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), researchers at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have found. The breakthrough follows discoveries that certain proteins found in the brains of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients also regulate iron. The results suggest that neurotoxicity by the form of iron, called redox-active iron, may be a trait of neurodegenerative conditions in all three diseases, the researchers say. Further, the role of the normal prion protein ...

A joint expedition of scientists led by Chapurukha M. Kusimba of The Field Museum and Sloan R. Williams of the University of Illinois at Chicago has unearthed a 600-year-old Chinese coin on the Kenyan island of Manda that shows trade existed between China and east Africa decades before European explorers set sail and changed the map of the world. The coin, a small disk of copper and silver with a square hole in the center so it could be worn on a belt, is called "Yongle Tongbao" and was issued by Emperor Yongle who reigned from 1403-1425AD during the Ming Dynasty. The ...

Scientists from various Australian universities in collaboration with the University of Barcelona have compared the effects of mobile use while driving with the effects of alcohol using a simulation. Their experiment demonstrates that using a handsfree kit or sending text messages is the same as being above the legal alcohol limit. The Australian universities of Wollongong, Victoria, Swinburne of Technology, the Institute for breathing and sleep and the University of Barcelona have measured the reaction capacity behind the wheel of twelve healthy volunteers who participated ...

The immune system's T cells, while coordinating responses to diseases and vaccines, act like honey bees sharing information about the best honey sources, according to a new study by scientists at UC San Francisco. "In the morning, each bee goes looking individually for a sugar source, then comes back to the hive and does a dance in front of the other bees describing the location of what it's found, which helps the hive decide collectively where the best source is," said senior scientist Matthew Krummel, PhD, a UCSF professor of pathology. They don't bust the same ...