Prostate cancer cells thrive on stress Prostate cancer patients have increased levels of stress and anxiety; however, several recent studies have found that men who take drugs that interfere with the stress hormone adrenaline have a lower incidence of prostate cancer. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation George Kulik and colleagues at Wake Forest University examined the relationship between stress and cancer progression in a mouse model of prostate cancer. Kulik and colleagues found that mice that had been subjected to stress (exposed to the scent of ...

The bread and butter of investing for Silicon Valley tech companies is stale. Instead, a new method of predicting the evolution of technology could save tech giants millions in research and development or developments of new products—and help analysts and venture capitalists determine which companies are on the right track. The high-tech industry has long used Moore's Law as a method to predict the growth of PC memory. Moore's Law states that the number of chips on a transistor doubles every 18 months (initially every year). A paper by Gareth James and Gerard Tellis, ...

Researchers at Hospital for Special Surgery have identified a potential new target for drugs to treat patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), a protein known as IRHOM2. The finding could provide an effective and potentially less toxic alternative therapy to tumor necrosis factor-alpha blockers (TNF-blockers), the mainstay of treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, and could help patients who do not respond to this treatment. Efforts to develop drugs that hone in on this new target are underway. "This study is an elegant example of the capacity of basic science cell biologists ...

A study conducted at the University of Granada has demonstrated that men like female thinness more than women and they find female overweight more unpleasant than women. In addition, the study revealed that women who are not comfortable with their body perceive women with a "normal" body –i.e. women with a healthy weight– as a threat. Specifically, when these women see a "normal" body they experience feelings of displeasure and lack of control, since they feel they have not any control on their own body and cannot make it be as they want. This research study was conducted ...

BOSTON – In recent years, it has been thought that select sets of genes might reveal cancer patients' prognoses. However, a study published last year examining breast cancer cases found that most of these "prognostic signatures" were no more accurate than random gene sets in determining cancer prognoses. While many saw this as a disappointment, investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and the Institut de Recherches Cliniques de Montréal (IRCM) saw this as an opportunity to design a new method to identify gene sets ...

The research group led by Associate Professor Kenji Osafune and his colleague Shin-ichi Mae, both from Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA), Kyoto University in Japan, has succeeded in developing a highly efficient method of inducing human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells to differentiate into intermediate mesoderm, the precursor of kidney, gonad, and other cell lineages. This represents a major step toward realizing renal regeneration. As nearly all kidney cells are derived through differentiation from intermediate mesoderm, to realize kidney regeneration ...

Population explosions of pine beetles, which have been decimating North American forests in recent decades, may be prevented by boosting competitor and predator beetle populations, a Dartmouth study suggests. Bark beetles are the most destructive forest pests worldwide. Management and climate change have resulted in younger, denser forests that are even more susceptible to attack. Though intensively studied for decades, until now an understanding of bark beetle population dynamics—extreme ups and downs—has remained elusive. The Dartmouth-led study, published in the ...

About ten percent of all cases of malignant melanoma are familial cases. The genome of affected families tells scientists a lot about how the disease develops. Prof. Dr. Rajiv Kumar of the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) together with Prof. Dr. Dirk Schadendorf from Essen University Hospital studied a family where 14 family members were affected by malignant melanoma. The scientists analyzed the genomes of family members and found an identical mutation in the gene for telomerase, an enzyme often called 'immortality enzyme', in all ...

The highest rates of infection were in children, with 47 per cent of those aged five to 19 showing signs of having caught the virus. Older people were affected less, with only 11 per cent of people aged 65 or older becoming infected. The findings come from an international collaboration led by the World Health Organization and Imperial College London, which analysed data from 19 countries, including the UK, US, China and India, to assess the global impact of the 2009 influenza pandemic. The results, published in the journal Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses, showed ...

Internationally renowned climate researcher Caroline Leck of Stockholm University has evaluated the Norwegian project and is enthusiastic. "These results are truly sensational," says Dr Leck. "If confirmed by other studies, this could have far-reaching impacts on efforts to achieve the political targets for climate." Temperature rise is levelling off After Earth's mean surface temperature climbed sharply through the 1990s, the increase has levelled off nearly completely at its 2000 level. Ocean warming also appears to have stabilised somewhat, despite the fact that ...

PITTSBURGH—The language and reading comprehension skills of low-income upper elementary-school students—especially English-language learners—can improve markedly if trained literacy coaches engage teachers in conducting interactive text discussions with students, according to a three-year University of Pittsburgh study. The Pitt researchers report in the journal Learning and Instruction that language and reading comprehension showed measurable improvement for young students when their teachers had worked "at-elbow" with content-specific literacy coaches to foster a more ...

This press release is available in Spanish. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists in Fort Pierce, Fla. are helping citrus growers and juice processors address the threat posed by Huanglongbing (HLB), a disease that is costing the citrus industry millions of dollars each year. Citrus trees infected with HLB, also called citrus greening, usually die within five to 10 years. Fruit on infected trees often falls to the ground before harvest, and fruit that remains on trees may become misshapen and sometimes only partially ripen. Supervisory horticulturalist ...

Supplementing children's diets with fish oil, enrolling them in quality preschool, and engaging them in interactive reading all turn out to be effective ways to raise a young child's intelligence, according to a new report published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Using a technique called meta-analysis, a team led by John Protzko, a doctoral student at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, combined the findings from existing studies to evaluate the overall effectiveness ...

This press release is available in German. Scientists at Aalto University, Finland, have demonstrated results that show a huge improvement in the light absorption and the surface passivation on highly absorbing silicon nanostructures. This has been achieved by applying atomic layer coating. The results advance the development of devices that require high sensitivity light response such as high efficiency solar cells. This method provides extremely good surface passivation. Simultaneously, it reduces the reflectance further at all wavelengths. These results are ...

A team of researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has shown that by bringing gold nanoparticles close to the dots and using a DNA template to control the distances, the intensity of a quantum dot's fluorescence can be predictably increased or decreased.* This breakthrough opens a potential path to using quantum dots as a component in better photodetectors, chemical sensors and nanoscale lasers. Anyone who has tried to tune a radio knows that moving their hands toward or away from the antenna can improve or ruin the reception. Although ...

Two American physicists outline the role played by Austrian physicist Friedrich Hasenöhrl in establishing the proportionality between the energy (E) of a quantity of matter with its mass (m) in a cavity filled with radiation. In a paper about to be published in EPJ H, Stephen Boughn from Haverford College in Pensylvannia and Tony Rothman from Princeton University in New Jersey argue how Hasenöhrl's work, for which he now receives little credit, may have contributed to the famous equation E=mc2. According to science philosopher Thomas Kuhn, the nature of scientific progress ...

Reducing the level of mutant p53 gene increases susceptibility to treatment Scientists from the National Cancer Centre Singapore (NCCS) have discovered the workings of the gene that has been hindering treatment response in cancer patients. This discovery was made after 5 years of studying the mutant form of the p53 gene, the major tumor suppressor in humans, which is generally found mutated in over 50% of all type of human cancers. The dominant-negative (DN) effect of the mutant p53 gene in cancers was found to affect the outcome of cancer treatment modalities. DN effect ...

The sun's energy is virtually limitless, but harnessing its electricity with today's single-crystal silicon solar cells is extremely expensive — 10 times pricier than coal, according to some estimates. Organic solar cells — polymer solar cells that use organic materials to absorb light and convert it into electricity — could be a solution, but current designs suffer because polymers have less-than-optimal electrical properties. Researchers at Northwestern University have now developed a new design for organic solar cells that could lead to more efficient, less expensive ...

This press release is available in German. The detector combines near-unity detection efficiency with high timing resolution and has a very low error rate. The results have been published by Nature Communications (doi:10.1038/ncomms2307). Ultrafast, efficient, and reliable single-photon detectors are among the most sought-after components in photonics and quantum communication, which have not yet reached maturity for practical application. Physicist Dr. Wolfram Pernice of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), in cooperation with colleagues at Yale University, ...

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has demonstrated a novel chip-scale instrument made of carbon nanotubes that may simplify absolute measurements of laser power, especially the light signals transmitted by optical fibers in telecommunications networks. The prototype device, a miniature version of an instrument called a cryogenic radiometer, is a silicon chip topped with circular mats of carbon nanotubes standing on end.* The mini-radiometer builds on NIST's previous work using nanotubes, the world's darkest known substance, to make an ultraefficient, ...

A new study that provides surprising details on changes in Earth's climate from more than 100,000 years ago indicates that the last interglacial--the period between "ice ages"--was warmer than previously thought and may be a good analog for future climate, as greenhouse gases increase in the atmosphere and global temperatures rise. The research findings also indicate that melting of the massive West Antarctic ice sheet may have contributed more to sea-level rise at that time than melting of the Greenland ice sheet. The new results from the North Greenland Eemian Ice ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – Jan. 25, 2013 – Not surprisingly, a cancer diagnosis creates stress. And patients with prostate cancer show higher levels of anxiety compared to other cancer patients. A new study by researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center indicates that stress is not just an emotional side effect of the diagnosis; it also can reduce the effectiveness of prostate cancer drugs and accelerate the development of prostate cancer. The findings are published in the February issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The Wake Forest Baptist team, headed ...

Montreal, January 25, 2013 – By achieving the synthesis of a novel nanohybrid structure by means of the pulsed laser ablation (PLA) technique, Professor My Ali El Khakani and his team paved the way for a new generation of optoelectronic materials. The combination of carbon nanotubes and lead sulfide (PbS) nanoparticles was performed using an effective and relatively simple process that offers considerable latitude for creating other nanohybrids for a variety of applications. The INRS Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications Research Centre researcher's work, published in the ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – The "empty nest" of past generations, in which the kids are grown up and middle-aged adults have more time to themselves, has been replaced in the United States by a nest that's full – kids who can't leave, can't find a job and aging parents who need more help than ever before. According to a new study by researchers at Oregon State University, what was once a life stage of new freedoms, options and opportunities has largely disappeared. An economic recession and tough job market has made it hard on young adults to start their careers and families. ...

Vanderbilt biochemists have discovered that the process bacteria undergo when they become drug resistant can act as a powerful tool for drug discovery. Their findings – reported this week in the Online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – should give a major boost to natural products drug discovery – the process of finding new drugs from compounds isolated from living organisms – by substantially increasing the number of novel compounds that scientists can extract from individual microorganisms. Bacteria have traditionally been the ...