A study dating the age of more than 1 million single-letter variations in the human DNA code reveals that most of these mutations are of recent origin, evolutionarily speaking. These kinds of mutations change one nucleotide – an A, C, T or G – in the DNA sequence. Over 86 percent of the harmful protein-coding mutations of this type arose in humans just during the past 5,000 to 10,000 years. Some of the remaining mutations of this nature may have no effect on people, and a few might be beneficial, according to the project researchers. While each specific mutation is ...

Fly larvae fed on alcohol-spiked food for a period of days grow dependent on those spirits for learning. The findings, reported in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, on November 29th, show how overuse of alcohol can produce lasting changes in the brain, even after alcohol abuse stops. The report also provides evidence that the very human experience of alcoholism can be explored in part with studies conducted in fruit flies and other animals, the researchers say. "Our evidence supports the long-ago proposed idea that functional ethanol tolerance is produced by ...

By using noninvasive stimulation, researchers were able to temporarily improve the ability of people with spinal cord injuries to use their hands. The findings, reported on November 29th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, hold promise in treating thousands of people in the United States alone who are partially paralyzed due to spinal cord injury. "This approach builds on earlier work and highlights the importance of the corticospinal tract—which conducts impulses from the brain's motor cortex to the spinal cord and is a major pathway contributing to voluntary ...

This press release is available in German. Now, scientists at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) have looked into the origin of Tregs and uncovered a central role played by the protein IkBNS. Armed with this knowledge, the researchers hope to manipulate Tregs in order to either inhibit or activate the immune system. Biochemist Prof. Ingo Schmitz and his team have now published their findings in the scientific journal Immunity. The immune system is a complex network of different types of cells and chemical messengers. The regulatory cells and other immune ...

MADISON – In efforts to understand what influences life span, cancer and aging, scientists are building roadmaps to navigate and learn about cells at the molecular level. To survey previously uncharted territory, a team of researchers at UW-Madison created an "atlas" that maps more than 1,500 unique landmarks within mitochondria that could provide clues to the metabolic connections between caloric restriction and aging. The map, as well as the techniques used to create it, could lead to a better understanding of how cell metabolism is re-wired in some cancers, age-related ...

A team of scientists, led by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, has shown for the first time how cancer cells control the ON/OFF switch of a program used by developing embryos to effectively metastasize in vivo, breaking free and spreading to other parts of the body, where they can proliferate and grow into secondary tumors. The findings are published in the December 11 issue of the journal Cancer Cell. In 90 percent of cancer deaths, it is the spreading of cancer, known as metastasis, which ultimately kills the patient by impacting ...

A diagnosis of pancreatic cancer is particularly devastating since the prognosis for recovery is usually poor, with the cancer most often not detected until late stages. Research led by scientists at the University of California, San Diego and UC San Francisco Schools of Medicine examined the tumor-initiating events leading to pancreatic cancer (also called pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma or PDA) in mice. Their work, published on line November 29 in the journal Cancer Cell, may help in the search for earlier detection methods and treatments. "Previously, it was believed ...

The scents which permeate our health spas from aromatic essential oils may provide more benefits than just a sense of rest and well-being. For according to a new study(1) in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, the essential oils which form the basis of aromatherapy for stress relief are also reported to have a beneficial effect on heart rate and blood pressure following short-term exposure - and may therefore reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. However, on the downside, those beneficial effects were reversed when exposure to essential oils lasted more ...

Washington, DC (November 27, 2012) –A new study in the Journal of Communication links verbal aggression to prenatal testosterone exposure. The lead researcher, at University at Buffalo – The State University of New York, used the 2D:4D measure to predict verbal aggression. This study is the first to use this method to examine prenatal testosterone exposure as a determinant of a communication trait. Allison Z. Shaw, University at Buffalo – The State University of New York, Michael R. Kotowski, University of Tennessee, and Franklin J. Boster and Timothy R. Levine, Michigan ...

Treatment with a novel agent that inhibits the activity of SIRT2, an enzyme that regulates many important cellular functions, reduced neurological damage, slowed the loss of motor function and extended survival in two animal models of Huntington's disease. The study led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers will appear in the Dec. 27 issue of Cell Reports and is receiving advance online release. "I believe that the drug efficacy demonstrated in two distinct genetic HD mouse models is quite unique and highly encouraging," says Aleksey Kazantsev, PhD, of ...

Researchers have defined the gene responsible for a rare developmental disorder in children. The team showed that rare variation in a gene involved in brain development causes the disorder. This is the first time that this gene, UBE3B, has been linked to a disease. By using a combination of research in mice and sequencing the DNA of four patients with the disorder, the team showed that disruption of this gene causes symptoms including brain abnormalities and reduced growth, highlighting the power of mouse models for understanding the biology behind rare diseases. "Ubiquitination, ...

Economists and professionals praise the merits of competition, as it leads to lower prices and improvements in quality. But in the automobile smog-testing industry, competition can lead to corruption and even public health problems, according to research by USC Marshall School of Business Assistant Professor of Management Victor Bennett. Bennett, along with colleagues Lamar Pierce of Washington University's Olin School of Business, Jason Snyder at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and Michael W. Toffel of Harvard Business School, found that the structure of the smog-testing ...

PASADENA, Calif., Nov. 29, 2012 – Immunizing older adults with the tetanus-diphtheria-acellular-pertussis vaccine (Tdap) to prevent pertussis (more commonly referred to as whooping cough) was found to be as safe as immunizing them with the tetanus and diphtheria (Td) vaccine, according to a study by Kaiser Permanente published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. Researchers examined the electronic health records of nearly 120,000 people ages 65 and older at seven U.S. health systems between Jan. 1, 2006 and Dec. 31, 2010. The study looked at a number of medical ...

Actuator saturation is ubiquitous in engineering systems. Anti-windup approach to dealing with actuator saturation has been receiving considerable attention from both the industry and the academic community during the past decades. Professor Zongli Lin and his student Xiongjun Wu developed a new anti-windup design paradigm that is capable of achieving significantly improved performances of the resulting closed-loop system. Their work, entitled "Design of multiple anti-windup loops for multiple activations," was published in SCIENCE CHINA Information Sciences, 55(9), 2012. ...

The detection and recognition of an object with small RCS, such as a stealth target, is the most difficult problem to solve for the modern radar system. Professor Hu Cheng and his group at Radar Research Lab, Beijing Institute of Technology set out to tackle this problem. After seven years of innovative research, they have developed a series of methods to detect, track and recognize some targets with small RCS. In particular, they proposed a novel imaging method based on the principle of shadow inverse synthetic aperture radar (SISAR) to extract the target profile accurately ...

The use of technology in the classroom is nothing new, but Topcliffe Primary School in Birmingham is breaking new ground by using technology to help pupils with autism communicate more effectively. The school, which teaches around 30 children with various levels of autism, was one of four schools across UK, which participated in the ECHOES research project, jointly funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) from universities across the UK to explore how technology can make a difference in ...

Together with the Basque R+D centre's researchers, the group of advisers is made up of researchers from the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO), the French Institute for Exploration of the Sea (IFREMER), the French Institute for Research for Development (IRD),and the Portuguese Institute for Fisheries and Sea Research (IPIMAR).This work comes within the 'European Community's Action Plan on Sharks' which has funding from the European Commission's Directorate-General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, and is set to take 15 months. Shark are caught with fishing gear ...

Philadelphia, PA, November 29, 2012 – A potential new therapeutic strategy for treating Fragile X syndrome is detailed in a new report appearing in the current issue of Biological Psychiatry, from researchers led by Dr. Lucia Ciranna at University of Catania in Italy. Fragile X syndrome (FXS), the most common heritable form of autism and intellectual disability, is one of the most exciting areas in brain research at the moment. A decade ago, Dr. Mark Bear and his colleagues discovered that an animal model for FXS was associated with a distinctive alteration in brain ...

The wing of a fruit fly may hold the key to unraveling the genetic and molecular events that transform a normal cell into a cancerous one. The study, conducted on Drosophila melanogaster by scientists at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) and led by ICREA researcher Marco Milán, has reproduced each of the steps known to take place when a healthy cell turns cancerous. The researchers have thus provided an inexpensive and effective model that will allow the scientific community to scrutinize the genes and molecules involved in each step. Given that ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Homicide moves through a city in a process similar to infectious disease, according to a new study that may give police a new tool in tracking and ultimately preventing murders. Using Newark, N.J., as a pilot case, a team of Michigan State University researchers led by April Zeoli successfully applied public health tracking methods to the city's 2,366 homicides between 1982 and 2008. They found the killings were not randomly located but instead followed a pattern, evolving from the city's center and moving southward and westward over time. Like ...

Bethesda, MD—Breakthrough drugs have made it possible for people to live with HIV longer than ever before, but more work must be done to actually cure the disease. One of the challenges researchers face involves fully eradicating the virus when it is latent in the body. A new report appearing in the December 2012 issue of the Journal of Leukocyte Biology suggests that a cancer drug, called JQ1, may be useful in purging latent HIV infection by activating the virus in the presence of potent therapy – essentially a dead end for the virus. "This drug may be useful as adjunctive ...

In order to be effective, a Conservation Unit must have available a list of the species that live within it. They also should have detailed information about the distribution of species among the available habitats. It would be difficult to correctly plan the conservation actions and/or monitoring programs without some minimal knowledge about the species (who are the object of those measures). "This is why our study is so important to the park", said Dr. Miranda from Universidade Federal do Maranhão (CCAA/UFMA), leading author of the article, published in the open access ...

As a result of field work by associate professor James Davis Reimer and two graduate students from the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa, Japan has found two new species of encrusting anemones, or colonial zoanthids, in unexpected locations. The species belong to the genus Neozoanthus, which was previously known only from a single species in the Indian Ocean. Surprisingly, the new species were found in the Pacific Ocean, in southern Japan and on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys. The only previous species ...

This press release is available in German. A group headed by Remco van den Bosch from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy has discovered a black hole that shakes the foundations of current models of galaxy evolution. This monster has 17 billion solar masses and is thus significantly heavier than the models predict. And even more significantly: the object could be the most massive black hole known to date. Astronomers believe there is a super-massive black hole at the heart of every galaxy. Its mass ranges from several hundred thousand solar masses to a few billion. ...

Giving customers a chance to complain can be a bad idea if customers believe they're to blame for a product's failure, a new study from the Sauder School of Business at UBC shows. "It's commonly assumed that giving customers a chance to voice grievances allows companies to maintain relationships," says Marketing Professor Darren Dahl, who co-authored the recent Journal of Marketing study with PhD student Lea Dunn. "But our research shows that when a person feels implicated in a product's failure – think building Ikea furniture – they're more likely to shift blame to ...