This press release is available in French. Have you ever wondered why some people find it so much easier to stop smoking than others? New research shows that vulnerability to smoking addiction is shaped by our genes. A study from the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital - The Neuro, McGill University shows that people with genetically fast nicotine metabolism have a significantly greater brain response to smoking cues than those with slow nicotine metabolism. Previous research shows that greater reactivity to smoking cues predicts decreased success at smoking cessation ...

SAN FRANCISCO, CA—September 11, 2012—Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes have gotten us one step closer to understanding and overcoming one of the least-understood mechanisms of HIV infection—by devising a method to precisely track the life cycle of individual cells infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. In a paper being published online today in Lab on a Chip, the laboratory of Gladstone Investigator Leor Weinberger, PhD, announced the development of a device that can pinpoint and track HIV inside CD4 T cells—the type of white blood cell that the AIDS virus ...

In 1604, a new star appeared in the night sky that was much brighter than Jupiter and dimmed over several weeks. This event was witnessed by sky watchers including the famous astronomer Johannes Kepler. Centuries later, the debris from this exploded star is known as the Kepler supernova remnant. Astronomers have long studied the Kepler supernova remnant and tried to determine exactly what happened when the star exploded to create it. New analysis of a long observation from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is providing more clues. This analysis suggests that the supernova ...

A groundbreaking survey of Pakistanis has found stronger support for militant groups among the middle class than the poor. The finding by a team including Princeton researchers challenges the conventional wisdom about links between economic status and views on militants that has helped shaped American foreign-aid policies since 2001. The nationally representative survey of 6,000 Pakistani adults, conducted in the spring of 2009, also found that Pakistanis in general held militant groups in low regard. And, when the survey results were analyzed along with data that identified ...

Airborne wind energy—an emerging approach to harnessing high-altitude winds—could scale up fairly quickly if given significant government support for research and development, according to a survey of experts by Near Zero, a nonprofit energy research organization. Winds near Earth's surface are already used to generate substantial amounts of electricity. However, higher in the sky—much higher than today's wind turbines can reach—winds tend to be stronger and steadier, making these winds an even larger source of energy. According to recent research, the amount of energy ...

It's morning, deep in the Amazon jungle. In the still air innumerable leaves glisten with moisture, and fog drifts through the trees. As the sun rises, clouds appear and float across the forest canopy ... but where do they come from? Water vapor needs solid surfaces to condense on. Airborne particles are the seeds of liquid droplets in fog, mist, and clouds. To learn how aerosol particles form in the Amazon, Mary Gilles of the Chemical Sciences Division at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and David Kilcoyne of the Lab's ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- A study by University of Florida and University of Kansas researchers describing eight new cusk-eel species provides data for better understanding how disasters like the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill impact biodiversity and the environment. The 60-year study appearing Tuesday in the Florida Museum of Natural History Bulletin provides a comprehensive taxonomic revision of one of the least-studied groups of cusk-eels, bony fishes distantly related to cod. Although abundant and widespread in the Americas, the fishes in the genus Lepophidium have previously ...

New Rochelle, NY, September 10, 2012-- Therapies for retinal diseases are expected to overtake those for glaucoma by 2014, reports Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN). Because current retinal disease treatments only improve vision for six to eight weeks, there is a critical need for new remedies, according to a recent issue of GEN. "As increasing numbers of baby-boomers continue to grow older, many will have to deal with eye diseases such as age-related macular degeneration," said John Sterling, Editor-in-Chief of GEN. "Some estimates put the current AMD and ...

NEW YORK (September 10, 2012) -- An off-patent anti-inflammatory drug that costs around two cents for a daily dose in developing countries has been found by researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College to kill both replicating and non-replicating drug resistant tuberculosis in the laboratory -- a feat few currently approved TB drugs can do, and resistance to those is spreading. Their findings, published online by the journal PNAS, point to a potential new therapy for the more than 500,000 people worldwide whose TB has become resistant to standard drug treatments. But ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – The next time you call someone a drunken pig, remember this study. Rhode Island Hospital researcher Frank Sellke, M.D., chief of cardiothoracic surgery at Rhode Island and The Miriam hospitals, and his colleagues studied the effects of red wine and vodka on pigs with high cholesterol and found that the pigs with a penchant for pinot noir fared better than their vodka swilling swine counterparts. The paper is published in the September issue of the journal Circulation. "There has been previous research touting the benefits of moderate consumption of ...

Ants have four to five times more odor receptors than most other insects, a team of researchers have discovered. The research team, led by Lawrence Zwiebel at Vanderbilt, recently completed the first full map of olfactory system that provides ants with their sense of taste and smell. They found the industrious insects have genes that make about 400 distinct odorant receptors, special proteins that detect different odors. By comparison, silk moths have 52, fruit flies have 61, mosquitoes range from 74 to 158 and honeybees have 174. "The most exciting moment for me was ...

This press release is available in Portuguese. ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Two different genetic mutations cooperate to induce adrenal cancer, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center and University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. The finding provides new clues to this rare and deadly cancer type, and researchers hope it will lead to better treatments by targeting both mutations. About 600 Americans are diagnosed with adrenal cancer per year. It is typically diagnosed in late stages when there is nearly no chance of survival ...

According to AARP, the annual cost of unpaid elder caregiving – work that falls mainly on the backs of family members – runs about $450 billion. While some companies document the physical and emotional toll that the workplace takes on their employees, exactly how draining caregiving might be has never really been measured. So Case Western Reserve University nurse researchers studied it. "Without knowing the impact of effort, we have two vulnerable people at risk for health issues—the caregiver and the care receiver," said Evanne Juratovac, assistant professor at ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. -- People who commit cyber-attacks against the government also tend to download music illegally and participate in physical protests. Surprisingly, however, they don't appear to be acting out of some sense of national pride or patriotism. Those are some of the findings to emerge from a Michigan State University study that for the first time begins to paint a profile of "civilian cyber-warriors," or people who engage in attacks against domestic or foreign governments. Cybercrimes pose a huge societal risk and have become a hot issue globally, yet little ...

Results of a new study tie forest "greenness" in the western United States to fluctuating year-to-year snowpack extent. The results show that mid-elevation mountain ecosystems are the most sensitive to rising temperatures and to changes in precipitation and snowmelt. University of Colorado-Boulder scientist Noah Molotch and colleagues used satellite images and ground measurements to identify the threshold at which mid-level forests sustained by moisture change to higher-elevation forests sustained by sunlight. A paper reporting the results was published yesterday ...

Satellite images from two NASA satellites were combined to create a full picture of Tropical Storm Leslie and Hurricane Michael spinning in the Atlantic Ocean. Imagery from NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites showed Leslie now past Bermuda and Michael in the north central Atlantic, and Leslie is much larger than the smaller, more powerful Michael. Images of each storm were taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS instrument that flies onboard both the Aqua and Terra satellites. Both satellites captured images of both storms on Sept. 7 and Sept. ...

PORTLAND, Ore. — A novel human liver-chimeric mouse model developed at Oregon Health & Science University and Yecuris Corporation has made possible a research breakthrough at Seattle Biomedical Research Institute that will greatly accelerate studies of the most lethal forms of human malaria. The study findings are published online in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Study photos were selected to appear in "Scientific Show Stoppers" on the JCI blog. Plasmodium falciparum, one of two human-specific malaria parasites, is a global health crisis, causing more than ...

PHILADELPHIA — Dogs with hemangiosarcoma that were treated with a compound derived from the Coriolus versicolor mushroom had the longest survival times ever reported for dogs with the disease. These promising findings offer hope that the compound may one day offer cancer patients — human and canine alike — a viable alternative or complementary treatment to traditional chemotherapies. The study was conducted by two University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine faculty. Dorothy Cimino Brown is professor and chair of the Department of Clinical Studies and director ...

The fearless dominance associated with psychopathy may be an important predictor of U.S. presidential performance, suggests an analysis published this week in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. "Certain psychopathic traits may be like a double-edged sword," says lead author Scott Lilienfeld, a psychologist at Emory University. "Fearless dominance, for example, may contribute to reckless criminality and violence, or to skillful leadership in the face of a crisis." In fact, fearless dominance, linked to diminished social and physical apprehensiveness, ...

AUGUSTA, Ga. – A 10-week program that fits easily into the high school curriculum could give students a lifetime of less anger and lower blood pressure, researchers report. Health and physical education teachers taught anger and stress management to 86 ninth graders in Augusta, Ga., and found their ability to control anger increased, their anxiety decreased and their blood pressures were generally lower over the course of a day compared to 73 of their peers who received no intervention, according to a study published in the journal Translational Behavioral Medicine. Among ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—A strip of glass covered in hairy nanoparticles can cheaply and conveniently measure mercury, which attacks the nervous system, and other toxic metals in fluids. Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Northwestern University and the University of Michigan found that their new method can measure methyl mercury, the most common form of mercury pollution, at unprecedentedly small concentrations. The system, which could test for metal toxins in drinking water and fish, is reported in the current edition of Nature Materials. Methyl ...

Baltimore, MD – September 10, 2012 – Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, who are exploring novel ways to treat serious heart problems in children, have conducted the first direct comparison of the regenerative abilities of neonatal and adult-derived human cardiac stem cells. Among their findings: cardiac stem cells (CSCs) from newborns have a three-fold ability to restore heart function to nearly normal levels compared with adult CSCs. Further, in animal models of heart attack, hearts treated with neonatal stem cells pumped stronger than those ...

LA JOLLA, CA – September 10, 2012 – Over the last decade, metabolomics has emerged as the newest of the "omic" sciences (following genomics and proteomics) to provide comprehensive biochemical information about cellular metabolism. This new field has revealed that many of the chemicals involved in or produced through metabolism are currently unknown, but may play vital and previously unappreciated roles in human health and disease. A major hurdle in profiling both unknown and known metabolic compounds ("metabolites") has been the scarce amount of reference data. But ...

TORONTO, Sept. 10, 2012—Researchers at St. Michael's Hospital are one step closer to understanding why plaque bursts in coronary arteries and causes heart attacks. The clue might be something called microRNA-145. MicroRNAs are short chains of bossy molecules that scientists are increasingly coming to realize control a wide variety of biological processes. Dr. Subodh Verma, a cardiac surgeon at St. Michael's, published a paper in the journal Circulation today, describing for the first time how microRNA-145 gene therapy can drastically reduce the severity and progression ...

A new kind of roof-and-attic system field-tested at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory keeps homes cool in summer and prevents heat loss in winter, a multi-seasonal efficiency uncommon in roof and attic design. The system improves efficiency using controls for radiation, convection and insulation, including a passive ventilation system that pulls air from the underbelly of the attic into an inclined air space above the roof. "Heat that would have gone into the house is carried up and out," says Bill Miller of ORNL's Building Envelope Group. "And ...