China's endangered wild pandas may need new dinner reservations – and quickly – based on models that indicate climate change may kill off swaths of bamboo that pandas need to survive. In this week's international journal Nature Climate Change, scientists from Michigan State University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences give comprehensive forecasts of how changing climate may affect the most common species of bamboo that carpet the forest floors of prime panda habitat in northwestern China. Even the most optimistic scenarios show that bamboo die-offs would effectively ...

PHILADELPHIA - Fat cells store excess energy and signal these levels to the brain. In a new study this week in Nature Medicine, Georgios Paschos PhD, a research associate in the lab of Garret FitzGerald, MD, FRS director of the Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, shows that deletion of the clock gene Arntl, also known as Bmal1, in fat cells, causes mice to become obese, with a shift in the timing of when this nocturnal species normally eats. These findings shed light on the complex causes of obesity ...

How can solar energy be stored so that it can be available any time, day or night, when the sun shining or not? EPFL scientists are developing a technology that can transform light energy into a clean fuel that has a neutral carbon footprint: hydrogen. The basic ingredients of the recipe are water and metal oxides, such as iron oxide, better known as rust. Kevin Sivula and his colleagues purposefully limited themselves to inexpensive materials and easily scalable production processes in order to enable an economically viable method for solar hydrogen production. The device, ...

ANN ARBOR—A thin, flexible electrode developed at the University of Michigan is 10 times smaller than the nearest competition and could make long-term measurements of neural activity practical at last. This kind of technology could eventually be used to send signals to prosthetic limbs, overcoming inflammation larger electrodes cause that damages both the brain and the electrodes. The main problem that neurons have with electrodes is that they make terrible neighbors. In addition to being enormous compared to the neurons, they are stiff and tend to rub nearby cells ...

An international group of scientists has identified three genetic regions that predispose Asian women who have never smoked to lung cancer. The finding provides further evidence that risk of lung cancer among never-smokers, especially Asian women, may be associated with certain unique inherited genetic characteristics that distinguishes it from lung cancer in smokers. Lung cancer in never-smokers is the seventh leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, and the majority of lung cancers diagnosed historically among women in Eastern Asia have been in women who never smoked. ...

A novel miniature diagnostic platform using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technology is capable of detecting minuscule cell particles known as microvesicles in a drop of blood. Microvesicles shed by cancer cells are even more numerous than those released by normal cells, so detecting them could prove a simple means for diagnosing cancer. In a study published in Nature Medicine, investigators at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Center for Systems Biology (CSB) demonstrate that microvesicles shed by brain cancer cells can be reliably detected in human blood through ...

SEATTLE – An international research team co-led by a scientist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has identified two genetic factors behind the third most common form of muscular dystrophy. The findings, published online in Nature Genetics, represent the latest in the team's series of groundbreaking discoveries begun in 2010 regarding the genetic causes of facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, or FSHD. The team, co-led by Stephen Tapscott, M.D., Ph.D., a member of the Hutchinson Center's Human Biology Division, discovered that a rare variant of FSHD, called type ...

Nobody knows the remarkable properties of human skin like the researchers struggling to emulate it. Not only is our skin sensitive, sending the brain precise information about pressure and temperature, but it also heals efficiently to preserve a protective barrier against the world. Combining these two features in a single synthetic material presented an exciting challenge for Stanford Chemical Engineering Professor Zhenan Bao and her team. Now, they have succeeded in making the first material that can both sense subtle pressure and heal itself when torn or cut. Their ...

This press release is available in German. Using the world's most powerful X-ray laser in California, an international research team discovered a surprising behaviour of atoms: with a single X-ray flash, the group led by Daniel Rolles from the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) in Hamburg (Germany) was able to kick a record number of 36 electrons at once out of a xenon atom. According to theoretical calculations, these are significantly more than should be possible at this energy of the X-ray radiation. The team present their unexpected observations in the ...

Scientists from the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM) published a study today in Nature Climate Change showing that besides marine inundation (flooding), low-lying coastal areas may also be vulnerable to "groundwater inundation," a factor largely unrecognized in earlier predictions on the effects of sea level rise (SLR). Previous research has predicted that by the end of the century, sea level may rise 1 meter. Kolja Rotzoll, Postdoctoral Researcher at the UHM Water Resources Research Center and Charles Fletcher, UHM Associate Dean, found that the flooded area in urban ...

(SALT LAKE CITY)—In a discovery that can fundamentally change how drugs for arthritis, and potentially many other diseases, are made, University of Utah medical researchers have identified a way to treat inflammation while potentially minimizing a serious side effect of current medications: the increased risk for infection. These findings provide a new roadmap for making powerful anti-inflammatory medicines that will be safer not only for arthritis patients but also for millions of others with inflammation-associated diseases, such as diabetes, traumatic brain injury, ...

Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. – Flowers don't just catch our eyes, they catch those of pollinators like bees as well. They have to, in order to reproduce. Because plants need to maximize the opportunity for pollinators to gain access to their seeds, variations in the timing of flowering can have profound effects on flower, fruit, and seed production, and consequently agricultural yields. We know that the major driving forces of flowering are external factors such as light and temperature. However, new research from CSHL Assistant Professor Zach Lippman, Ph.D. and his collaborators, ...

A recent finding by medical geneticists sheds new light on how Facioscapulohumeral Muscular Dystrophy develops and how it might be treated. More commonly known as FSHD, the devastating disease affects both men and women. FSHD is usually an inherited genetic disorder, yet sometimes appears spontaneously via new mutations in individuals with no family history of the condition. "People with the condition experience progressive muscle weakness and about 1 in 5 require wheelchair assistance by age 40," said Dr. Daniel G. Miller, University of Washington associate professor ...

Researchers using the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have found a way to strip most of the electrons from xenon atoms, creating a "supercharged," strongly positive state at energies previously thought too low. The findings, which defy expectations and theory, could help scientists deliberately induce the high levels of damage needed to study extreme states of matter or ward off damage in samples they're trying to image. The results were reported this week in Nature Photonics. While the ...

The first direct evidence that marked changes to Antarctic sea ice drift have occurred over the last 20 years, in response to changing winds, is published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience. Scientists from NERC's British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena California explain why, unlike the dramatic losses reported in the Arctic, the Antarctic sea ice cover has increased under the effects of climate change. Maps created by JPL using over 5 million individual daily ice motion measurements captured over a period of 19 years ...

In 2010, 35 people in Greece died from a West Nile virus (WNV) outbreak, with a further 262 laboratory-confirmed human cases. A new article published in BioMedCentral's open access journal Virology Journal examines whether wild or migratory birds could have been responsible for importing and amplifying the deadly virus. WNV is a flavivirus of major public health concern, spread through the bite of infected mosquitoes. Discovered in Uganda in 1937, it was only sporadically reported up until the 1990s, after which disease outbreaks were reported world-over, leading to ...

Scientists studying the genes and proteins of human cells infected with a common cold virus have identified a new gene identification technique that could increase the genetic information we hold on animals by around 70 to 80 per cent. The findings, published in Nature Methods, could revolutionise our understanding of animal genetics and disease, and improve our knowledge of dangerous viruses such as SARS that jump the species barrier from animals to humans. Modern advances in genome sequencing — the process of determining the genetic information and variation controlling ...

The impact of climate change on many aspects of cultural life for people all over the world is not being sufficiently accounted for by scientists and policy-makers. University of Exeter-led research by an international team, published on 11th November in Nature Climate Change, shows that cultural factors are key to making climate change real to people and to motivating their responses. From enjoying beaches or winter sports and visiting iconic natural spaces to using traditional methods of agriculture and construction in our daily lives, the research highlights the cultural ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- The first functional "cloaking" device reported by Duke University electrical engineers in 2006 worked like a charm, but it wasn't perfect. Now a member of that laboratory has developed a new design that ties up one of the major loose ends from the original device. These new findings could be important in transforming how light or other waves can be controlled or transmitted. Just as traditional wires gave way to fiber optics, the new meta-material could revolutionize the transmission of light and waves. Because the goal of this type of research involves ...

New York, NY (November 11, 2012) — Although schizophrenia is highly genetic in origin, the genes involved in the disorder have been difficult to identify. In the past few years, researchers have implicated several genes, but it is unclear how they act to produce the disorder. A new study by researchers at Columbia University Medical Center identifies affected gene networks and provides insight into the molecular causes of the disease. The paper was published today in the online edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience. Using an unbiased collection of hundreds of mutations ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Animals that are socially isolated for prolonged periods make less myelin in the region of the brain responsible for complex emotional and cognitive behavior, researchers at the University at Buffalo and Mt. Sinai School of Medicine report in Nature Neuroscience online. The research sheds new light on brain plasticity, the brain's ability to adapt to environmental changes. It reveals that neurons aren't the only brain structures that undergo changes in response to an individual's environment and experience, according to one of the paper's lead authors, ...

Among patients with the most common form of kidney cancer, whites consistently have a survival advantage over blacks, regardless of patient and tumor characteristics or surgical treatment. That is the conclusion of a new study published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society. The study's results suggest that additional efforts are needed to prolong the survival of all patients with kidney cancer. Since the mid-1990s, black Americans have had a higher incidence of renal cell carcinoma, the most common form of kidney cancer, than ...

While general pediatricians and pediatric emergency physicians value their role in concussion management, a study of their self-reported knowledge, practices and attitudes points to the need for improved concussion-specific training and infrastructure to support optimal patient care. The study, released today in the journal Pediatrics, served as a catalyst for The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) to create a new "medical home" model for managing pediatric and adolescent concussion. The study surveyed 145 emergency medicine and primary care providers, among whom ...

The use of helmets by skiers and snowboarders decreases the risk and severity of head injuries and saves lives, new Johns Hopkins-led research suggests. The findings debunk long-held beliefs by some that the use of helmets gives athletes a false sense of security and promotes dangerous behavior that might increase injuries. "There really is a great case to be made for wearing helmets," says Adil H. Haider, M.D., M.P.H., an associate professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the leader of the study published in the November issue of the ...

VIDEO: First approved for use in the 1950s, beta blockers have been called the first "blockbuster " drug ever developed in the US. Today, millions of people take them for everything from... Click here for more information. (COLUMBUS, Ohio) November 2012 - First developed in the 1950s, beta blockers have been a mainstay in medicine for decades, used to treat everything from heart disease to stage fright to glaucoma. But some older classes of beta blockers are causing ...