WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – Jan. 31, 2013 – Some people with the flu emit more of the air-borne virus than others, suggesting that the current recommendations for infection control among health care providers may not be adequate, according to a new study from researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. The study is published in the Jan. 31 online edition of The Journal of Infectious Disease. "Our study provides new evidence that infectiousness may vary between influenza patients and questions the current medical understanding of how influenza spreads," said Werner Bischoff, ...

A new way of measuring the mass of supermassive black holes could revolutionise our understanding of how they form and help to shape galaxies. The technique, developed by a team including Oxford University scientists, can spot the telltale tracer of carbon monoxide within the cloud of gas (mostly hydrogen) circling a supermassive black hole at the centre of a distant galaxy. By detecting the velocity of the spinning gas they are able to 'weigh' (determine the mass) of the black hole. Detailed information on supermassive black holes, thought to be at the heart of most ...

Melbourne scientists have discovered how female steroid hormones can make dramatic changes to the genetic material in breast cells, changes that could potentially lead to breast cancer. Researchers from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia, have identified how pregnancy hormones send signals to critical molecules on the DNA to make changes in the epigenome. The epigenome is a series of chemical tags that modify DNA, controlling which genes are switched on and off. Professor Jane Visvader, Dr Bhupinder Pal, Professor Geoff Lindeman ...

It came out of Siberia, swirling winds over an area that covered almost the entire Arctic basin in the normally calm late summer. It came to be known as "The Great Arctic Cyclone of August 2012," and for some observers it suggested that the historic sea ice minimum may have been caused by a freak summer storm, rather than warming temperatures. But new results from the University of Washington show that the August cyclone was not responsible for last year's record low for Arctic sea ice. The study was published online this week in Geophysical Research Letters. "The ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — A national shortage of critical care physicians and beds means difficult decisions for healthcare professionals: how to determine which of the sickest patients are most in need of access to the intensive care unit. What if patients' electronic health records could help a physician determine ICU admission by reliably calculating which patient had the highest risk of death? Emerging health technologies – including reliable methods to rate the severity of a patient's condition – may provide powerful tools to efficiently use scarce and costly health resources, ...

AMHERST, Mass. – Just-forming stars, like growing babies, are always hungry and must "feed" on huge amounts of gas and dust from dense envelopes surrounding them at birth. Now a team of astronomers including Robert Gutermuth, a University of Massachusetts Amherst expert in imaging data from the Spitzer Space Telescope, reports observing an unusual "baby" star that periodically emits infrared light bursts, suggesting it may be twins, that is, a binary star. The discovery is reported this month in Nature. The extremely young object, dubbed LRLL 54361, is about 100,000 years ...

DURHAM, N.C. – Just as horses shake off pesky flies by twitching their skin, ships may soon be able to shed the unwanted accumulation of bacteria and other marine growth with the flick of a switch. Duke University engineers have developed a material that can be applied like paint to the hull of a ship and will literally be able to dislodge bacteria, keeping it from accumulating on the ship's surface. This buildup on ships increases drag and reduces the energy efficiency of the vessel, as well as blocking or clogging undersea sensors. The material works by physically ...

The rate of chemical processes in cells is dictated by the speed of movement (diffusion) of molecules needed for a given reaction. Using a versatile method developed at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, researchers were able to predict for the first time the diffusion coefficients of all proteins in Escherichia coli. The achievement is important not only for biologists and chemists, but also for... transport companies. Understanding of chemical foundations of life requires knowledge about the rate of chemical reactions in ...

A team of scientists have described twenty four new species of dipterans belonging to Quichuana genus, of which only a further 24 species were known. The researchers, including two Spanish biologists, have been studying the forests of Central and Southern America for ten years and they have now published their results in the 'Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society'. A ten-year study in forests of the American continent has resulted in the description of 24 new insect species from the Quichuana genus that are also known as 'flower flies'. Up until now only a further ...

Research led by Queen Mary, University of London, has shown that recovery from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is possible for some patients, and has identified two treatments most likely to lead to recovery. The latest results from the PACE trial* show that cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) and graded exercise therapy (GET), as supplements to specialist medical care, increase the likelihood of recovery from CFS three-fold compared to other treatments studied. The trial, carried out in collaboration with researchers from King's College London, the University of Oxford ...

Simple 'blast' fences called baffles could deliver improvements in air quality for people living near airports, new research has found. Placed behind a runway, the baffles could serve as a 'virtual chimney', funnelling emissions from aircraft engines upwards where they can disperse more effectively, thereby reducing the environmental impact on people living nearby. Prototype baffles have been tested by a team of researchers from Manchester Metropolitan University, Cranfield University, University of Southampton and the University of Cambridge, with funding from the ...

Philadelphia, PA, January 31, 2013 – Disulfiram was the first medication approved for the treatment of alcoholism over 50 years ago. It works, at least in part, by preventing the metabolism of an alcohol by-product, acetaldehyde. High levels of acetaldehyde in the body quickly cause unpleasant symptoms, including nausea, vomiting, headache, and accelerated heart rate. Thus, disulfiram provides a very strong incentive to avoid drinking. Beginning in the late 1990s, a series of studies conducted at Yale University found that disulfiram reduced the consumption of cocaine, ...

Proteins are elementary building blocks of life. They often perform vital functions. In order to become active, proteins have to fold into three-dimensional structures. Misfolding of proteins leads to diseases such as Alzheimer's or Creutzfeld-Jakob. So which strategies did nature develop over the course of evolution to improve protein folding? To examine this question, the chemist Dr. Frauke Gräter (Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies) looked far back into the history of the Earth. Together with her colleague Prof. Gustavo Caetano-Anolles at the University of ...

A recent discovery funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) may very well lead to a process that not only benefits every uniformed service member of the Department of Defense, but everyone else as well: protection from Chemical/Biological agents, to self-cleaning apparel, to effortless thermal management, to fuel purification as well as enhanced control of leaks—especially oil and fuels. In 2006, AFOSR Program Manager Dr. Charles Lee funded Professor Gareth McKinley at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exploring nanocomposite technology ...

OAK BROOK, Ill. (January 31, 2013) – Researchers using a newly approved advanced computed tomography (CT) system were able to significantly reduce radiation exposure in patients undergoing coronary CT angiography (CCTA), according to a new study published online in the journal Radiology. "Radiation exposure during diagnostic imaging is a substantial public concern," said Marcus Y. Chen, M.D., lead author of the study from the advanced cardiovascular imaging laboratory at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. "Minimizing radiation exposure while maintaining ...

This press release is available in Spanish. Corn crop residues are often left on harvested fields to protect soil quality, but they could become an important raw material in cellulosic ethanol production. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) research indicates that soil quality would not decline if post-harvest corn cob residues were removed from fields. This work, led by Agricultural Research Service (ARS) soil scientist Brian Wienhold, supports the USDA priority of developing new sources of bioenergy. ARS is USDA's chief intramural scientific research agency. Wienhold ...

Texas Biomed scientists in San Antonio have found that moderate gum disease in an animal model exposed to an AIDS- like virus had more viral variants causing infection and greater inflammation. Both of these features have potential negative implications in long term disease progression, including other kinds of infections, the researchers say in a new report. The public health message from the study is that even mild inflammation in the mouth needs to be controlled because it can lead to more serious consequences, said Luis Giavedoni, Ph. D, a Texas Biomed virologist and ...

It would be a terrible thing if laboratories striving to grow graphene from carbon atoms kept winding up with big pesky diamonds. "That would be trouble, cleaning out the diamonds so you could do some real work," said Rice University theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson, chuckling at the absurd image. Yet something like that keeps happening to experimentalists working to grow two-dimensional boron. Boron atoms have a strong preference to clump into three-dimensional shapes rather than assemble into pristine single-atom sheets, like carbon does when it becomes graphene. ...

Recent natural disasters illustrate vulnerability of older people: majority of deaths from the Great East Japan Earthquake (2011) and Hurricane Katrina (2005) occurred among older people. Researchers at the Stockholm Environment Institute at the University of York and Simon Fraser University's Gerontology Research Centre in Canada are calling for better awareness among policy makers and the public of the impact climate change and deteriorating environmental quality will have on an ageing population. According to UN projections, by 2050, nearly 25 per cent of the global ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – In the last decade, a new strain of MRSA has emerged that can spread beyond hospital walls, putting everyone at risk of contracting the dangerous bacterial infection. This particular strain of MRSA – known as USA300 – contains a chunk of genes not shared by any other strains, though it is unclear how this unique genetic material enables the bacteria to survive and persist in the community. Now, research from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine has pinpointed a gene that causes the infection to linger on the skin longer than other strains, ...

January 31, 2013, New York, NY and Brussels, Belgium – Clear communication between cells is essential to every aspect of the body's internal function. But since cells can't talk, or send emails, how do they communicate? The answer, in a nutshell, is by dispatching signaling molecules that selectively bind to protein receptors on the outer surface of other cells with which they must "talk." This activates the tail end of such receptors inside the cell, initiating a cascade of enzymatic reactions, or signaling pathways that reach into the nucleus, turning genes on and off. ...

Researchers from the group on stem cells and cancer at IMIM (Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute) have deciphered one of the gene regulation circuits which would make it possible to generate hematopoietic blood cells, i.e. blood tissue stem cells. This finding is essential to generate these cells in a laboratory in the future, a therapy that could benefit patients with leukaemia or other diseases who need a transplant and who, in many cases, do not have a compatible donor. In the process of generating stem cells, many molecule signals intervene which, through ...

This press release is available in German. The disk surrounding the young star TW Hydrae is regarded as a prototypical example of planetary nurseries. Due to its comparatively close proximity of 176 light-years, the object plays a key role in cosmological birth models. Using the Herschel Space Telescope, researchers including Thomas Henning from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg have, for the first time, determined the mass of the disk very precisely. The new value is larger than previous estimates and proves that planets similar to those of our solar ...

Experiencing a positive family climate as a teenager may be connected to your relationships later in life, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. While research has demonstrated long-term effects of aggression and divorce across generations, the impact of a positive family climate has received less attention. Psychological scientist Robert Ackerman of the University of Texas at Dallas and colleagues wanted to examine whether positive interpersonal behaviors in families might also have long-lasting ...

Zebrafish, the staple of genetic research, may hold the answer to repairing damaged retinas and returning eye-sight to people. University of Alberta researchers discovered that a zebrafish's stem cells can selectively regenerate damaged photoreceptor cells. Lead U of A researcher Ted Allison says that for some time geneticists have known that unlike humans, stem cells in zebrafish can replace damaged cells involved in many components of eyesight. Rods and cones are the most important photoreceptors. In humans, rods provide us with night vision while cones give us a full ...