A team using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the most powerful millimetre/submillimetre telescope in the world, has discovered a surprising spiral structure in the gas around the red giant star R Sculptoris [1][2][3]. This means that there is probably a previously unseen companion star orbiting the star [4]. The astronomers were also surprised to find that far more material than expected had been ejected by the red giant. "We've seen shells around this kind of star before, but this is the first time we've ever seen a spiral of material coming ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Guys who imitate Luciano Pavarotti or Justin Bieber to get the girls aren't alone. Male mice may do a similar trick, matching the pitch of other males' ultrasonic serenades. The mice also have certain brain features, somewhat similar to humans and song-learning birds, which they may use to change their sounds, according to a new study. "We are claiming that mice have limited versions of the brain and behavior traits for vocal learning that are found in humans for learning speech and in birds for learning song," said Duke neurobiologist Erich Jarvis, who ...

PHOENIX, Ariz. — Oct. 10, 2012 — Whole genome sequencing — spelling out all 3 billion letters in the human genome — "is an obvious and powerful method for advancing our understanding of pancreatic cancer," according to a new study from TGen, Mayo Clinic and Scottsdale Healthcare published today. The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) demonstrated that the use of WGS "represents a compelling solution to obtaining detailed molecular information on tumor biopsies in order to provide guidance for therapeutic selection," concluded the study published by the journal ...

PORTLAND, Ore. – Physician-scientists at Oregon Health & Science University Doernbecher Children's Hospital have demonstrated for the first time that banked human neural stem cells — HuCNS-SCs, a proprietary product of StemCells Inc. — can survive and make functional myelin in mice with severe symptoms of myelin loss. Myelin is the critical fatty insulation, or sheath, surrounding new nerve fibers and is essential for normal brain function. This is a very important finding in terms of advancing stem cell therapy to patients, the investigators report, because in most ...

Writing in Nature, Nobel Prize-winner Professor Kostya Novoselov and an international team of authors has produced a 'Graphene Roadmap' which for the first time sets out what the world's thinnest, strongest and most conductive material can truly achieve. The paper details how graphene, isolated for the first time at The University of Manchester by Professor Novoselov and colleague Professor Andre Geim in 2004, has the potential to revolutionise diverse applications from smartphones and ultrafast broadband to anticancer drugs and computer chips. One key area is touchscreen ...

A workshop sponsored by NIH's National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) has produced a set of consensus recommendations to improve the design and reporting of animal studies. By making animal studies easier to replicate and interpret, the workshop recommendations are expected to help funnel promising therapies to patients. Biomedical research involving animals has led to life-saving drugs for heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, HIV-AIDS, and many other conditions, but positive results from animal studies are sometimes difficult to translate ...

A Phase I clinical trial led by investigators from the University of California, San Francisco and sponsored by Stem Cells Inc., showed that neural stem cells successfully engrafted into the brains of patients and appear to have produced myelin. The study, published in the Oct. 10, 2012 issue of Science Translational Medicine, also demonstrated that the neural stem cells were safe in the patients' brains one year post transplant. The results of the investigation, designed to test safety and preliminary efficacy, are encouraging, said principal investigator David H. ...

An Australian research team has discovered how specialised immune cells recognise products of vitamin B synthesis that are unique to bacteria and yeast, triggering the body to fight infection. The finding opens up potential targets to improve treatments or to develop a vaccine for tuberculosis. The study, jointly led by the University of Melbourne and Monash University and published today in the journal Nature, has revealed for the first time that the highly abundant mucosal associated invariant T cells (MAIT cells), recognise products of vitamin B synthesis from ...

Researchers from the University of Southampton are designing incentives for collection and verification of information to make crowdsourcing more reliable. Crowdsourcing is a process of outsourcing tasks to the public, rather than to employees or contractors. In recent years, crowdsourcing has provided an unprecedented ability to accomplish tasks that require the involvement of a large number of people, often across wide-spread geographies, expertise, or interests. The world's largest encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, is an example of a task that can only be achieved through ...

Testosterone is considered THE male hormone, standing for aggression and posturing. Researchers around Prof. Dr. Armin Falk, an economist from the University of Bonn, have now been able to demonstrate that this sex hormone surprisingly also fosters social behavior. In play situations, subjects who had received testosterone clearly lied less frequently than individuals who had only received a placebo. The results have just been published in the Public Library of Science's international online journal "PLoS ONE." The hormone testosterone stands for typically male attributes ...

Melanoma is so dangerous because it tends to metastasize early on. New treatment approaches utilize, among other things, the ability of the immune defense to search out and destroy malignant cells. Yet this strategy is often only temporarily effective. A research team under the direction of Bonn University has discovered why this is the case: In the inflammatory reaction caused by the treatment, the tumor cells temporarily alter their external characteristics and thus become invisible to defense cells. This knowledge forms an important foundation for the improvement of ...

NEW YORK, October 11, 2012 – Researchers at NYU School of Medicine have discovered the protein product of a little-known gene may one day prove useful in identifying and monitoring the development of mesothelioma in early stages, when aggressive treatment can have an impact on the progression of disease and patient prognosis. "This gene produces a protein, fibulin-3, that is present in levels four to five times higher in the plasma of patients with mesothelioma compared to levels in asbestos-exposed patients or patients with several other conditions that cause tumors ...

Catalysts are substances that speed up the rates of chemical reactions without themselves being chemically changed. Industrial catalysts come in two main types - heterogeneous, in which the catalyst is in a different phase from the reactants; and homogeneous, in which catalyst and the reactants are in the same phase. Heterogeneous catalysts are valued for their sustainability because they can be recycled. Homogeneous catalysts are valued for their product selectivity as their properties can be easily tuned through relatively simple chemistry. Researchers with the U.S. ...

NEW YORK - October 10, 2012 - Thanks to blogs, online forums, and product review sites, companies and marketers now have access to a seemingly endless array of data on consumers' opinions and experiences. In principle, businesses should be able to use this information to gain a better understanding of the general market and of their own and their competitors' customers. Yet this wealth of consumer-generated content can be both a blessing and a curse. A new approach, described in a study by Oded Netzer, the Philip H. Geier Jr. Associate Professor at Columbia Business School, ...

HOUSTON – (Oct. 10, 2012) – Rice University researchers are doping graphene with light in a way that could lead to the more efficient design and manufacture of electronics, as well as novel security and cryptography devices. Manufacturers chemically dope silicon to adjust its semiconducting properties. But the breakthrough reported in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano details a novel concept: plasmon-induced doping of graphene, the ultrastrong, highly conductive, single-atom-thick form of carbon. That could facilitate the instant creation of circuitry – ...

A shipboard-capable system designed to support both the launch and recovery of the Scan Eagle unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) successfully completed final demonstration flight testing Sept. 27 at a testing range in eastern Oregon. Sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the Compact Launch and Recovery System (CLRE) will provide a small-scale solution for the unmanned surveillance craft's operations. "This system's shipboard capability is unique," said John Kinzer, who manages ONR's Air Vehicle Technology Program. "It's more compact than other systems, so you ...

One of the key achievements of the nanotechnology era is the development of manufacturing technologies that can fabricate nanostructures formed from multiple materials. Such nanometer-scale integration of composite materials has enabled innovations in electronic devices, solar cells, and medical diagnostics. While there have been significant breakthroughs in nano-manufacturing, there has been much less progress on measurement technologies that can provide information about nanostructures made from multiple integrated materials. Researchers at the University of Illinois ...

From politics to finance, government to education, ethics-related scandals seem to crop up with considerable regularity. As whistleblowers and investigative journalists bring these scandals to light, one can't help but wonder: Are there specific character traits that predispose people to unethical behavior? Converging evidence suggests that the answer could be guilt proneness. In a new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers Taya Cohen and Nazli Turan of Carnegie Mellon University and ...

This gallery shows four planetary nebulas from the first systematic survey of such objects in the solar neighborhood made with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The planetary nebulas shown here are NGC 6543, also known as the Cat's Eye, NGC 7662, NGC 7009 and NGC 6826. In each case, X-ray emission from Chandra is colored purple and optical emission from the Hubble Space Telescope is colored red, green and blue. In the first part of this survey, published in a new paper, twenty one planetary nebulas within about 5000 light years of the Earth have been observed. The paper ...

Sacramento, CA (October 9, 2012) – In a new observational study presented today at the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Food and Nutrition Conference and Exposition (FNCE) in Philadelphia, PA, researchers looked at the association of grape consumption, in the non-alcoholic forms most commonly consumed – fresh grapes, raisins and 100% grape juice – with the diet quality of a recent, nationally representative sample of U.S. children and adults. Their findings suggest that, among adults and children, consumption of grapes and grape products is associated with healthier dietary ...

Boston, MA – A new analysis of 37 national opinion polls conducted by 17 survey organizations finds that health care is the second most important issue for likely voters in deciding their 2012 presidential vote. This is the highest that health care has been ranked as a presidential election issue since 1992. When likely voters were asked to choose from a list of issues, similar to the approach used in election-day exit polls, one in five (20%) named "health care and Medicare" as the most important issue in their 2012 voting choice, far behind "the economy and jobs" (cited ...

LIVERMORE, Calif. -- In an effort to identify the thousands of John/Jane Doe cold cases in the United States, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher and a team of international collaborators have found a multidisciplinary approach to identifying the remains of missing persons. Using "bomb pulse" radiocarbon analysis developed at Lawrence Livermore, combined with recently developed anthropological analysis and forensic DNA techniques, the researchers were able to identify the remains of a missing child 41 years after the discovery of the body. In 1968, ...

The death throes of dying stars are the focus of a sweeping new survey using NASA's Chandra X-ray satellite observatory. More than two dozen astronomers have aligned their research goals to use Chandra to image a set of dying stars in the neighborhood of the Sun. The resulting X-ray images of these dying stars—called planetary nebulae—are shedding light on the violent "end game" of a Sun-like star's life. The research team, led by Joel Kastner from Rochester Institute of Technology, won seven days of observing time with Chandra in 2011 to survey and image nearly two ...

Researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine have identified a six-gene signature that can be used in a test to predict survival in men with aggressive prostate cancer, according to new research published in the October issue of The Lancet Oncology. This is the first study to demonstrate how prognostic markers may be useful in a clinical setting. Using blood from 202 men with treatment-resistant prostate cancer, researchers found six genes characteristic of treatment-resistant prostate cancer. Men with the six-gene signature were high-risk, with a survival time of ...

JUPITER, FL, October 10, 2012 – Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have identified small variations in a number of genes that are closely linked to an increased risk of bipolar disorder, a mental illness that affects nearly six million Americans, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. "Using samples from some 3,400 individuals, we identified several new variants in genes closely associated with bipolar disorder," said Scripps Florida Professor Ron Davis, who led the new study, which was published recently by the ...