The innate immune system detects invasive pathogens and activates defense mechanisms to eliminate them. Pathogens, however, employ a variety of tricks to block this process. A new study led by Karl-Peter Hopfner of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich shows how the measles virus thwarts the system, by means of a simple hairpin-like structure. The innate immune system is the body's first line of defense against invasive pathogens and noxious chemicals. Essentially the system consists of an array of receptors that recognize particular molecular conformations ...

Endangered Mexican howler monkeys are consuming more leaves and less fruit as a result of habitat disturbance by humans, which is forcing them to invest much more time foraging for sustenance and leading to increased 'stress' levels, as detected through hormone analysis. The research, published today in the International Journal of Primatology, took place in the tropical rainforests of the Mexican state of Veracruz, which are being deforested and fragmented by human activity - primarily the clearing of forest for cattle raising. It shows that increases in howler monkey ...

The introduction of smoke-free legislation in England was immediately followed by a fall in the number of children admitted to hospital with asthma symptoms, a new study has found. NHS statistics analysed by researchers at Imperial College London show a 12.3 per cent fall in admissions for childhood asthma in the first year after the law on smoking in enclosed public places and workplaces came into effect in July 2007. The researchers found that asthma admissions continued to fall in subsequent years, suggesting that the benefits of the legislation were sustained over ...

A new study has found strong evidence for a link between cleaning jobs and risk of developing asthma. Researchers at Imperial College London tracked the occurrence of asthma in a group of 9,488 people born in Britain in 1958. Not including those who had asthma as children, nine per cent developed asthma by age 42. Risks in the workplace were responsible for one in six cases of adult onset asthma – even more than the one in nine cases attributed to smoking, according to the analysis. There are many occupations that are thought to cause asthma. In this study, 18 occupations ...

Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) together with researchers at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), have developed a special treatment for cotton fabric that allows the cotton to absorb exceptional amounts of water from misty air: 340 % of its own weight. What makes this 'coated cotton' so interesting is that the cotton releases the collected water by itself, as it gets warmer. This property makes of the coated cotton materials a potential solution to provide water to the desert regions, for example for agricultural purposes. The results ...

A new study from Lund University in Sweden shows that the average life expectancy of men and women with schizophrenia is 15 years and 12 years shorter respectively than for those who do not suffer from the disease. The study has been carried out in collaboration with Stanford University in the US. The reasons why people with schizophrenia have a shorter life expectancy have previously been unknown, but have been much discussed in recent years. The research report that has now been published shows that individuals with schizophrenia are more likely to die of two major ...

Investigators from 15 children's medical centers, including Nationwide Children's Hospital, observed and evaluated critically ill children with influenza to evaluate the relationships between levels of systemic inflammation, immune function and likelihood to die from the illness. The study appears in the January issue of Critical Care Medicine. The innate immune system is the cellular arm of the immune system that serves as a first-responder to new threats, and is thought to drive the inflammatory response in many forms of critical illness. Recent evidence indicates that ...

Wildlife conservationists are well aware of the potential conflicts that exist between the endangered species they seek to protect and the human populations which inhabit areas where the animals live. Carnivores, such as tigers, pose a risk to humans and their livestock and can be killed because of this potential risk. Previous research has found that killing of animals can be motivated as much by social and psychological factors, such as perception of danger, as by any actual real risk posed by a species. A new study published in the Springer journal Human Ecology ...

Mama bear appears to know best when it comes to selecting a place to call home, according to a new University of Alberta study. The study, published in the latest issue of PLOS ONE, explored whether the rearing of cubs by their mothers shaped which habitats grizzly bears eventually choose. The findings "suggest that habitat selection is learned by young grizzly bears from their mothers, and would likely be a more adaptive strategy than using instinct," said lead author Scott Nielsen, assistant professor in the U of A Department of Renewable Resources. The University ...

University of Leicester planetary scientists have found new evidence suggesting auroras – similar to Earth's Aurora Borealis - occur on bodies outside our solar system. Auroras occur on several planets within our solar system, and the brightest - on Jupiter – are 100 times brighter than those on Earth. However, no auroras have yet been observed beyond Neptune. A new study led by University of Leicester lecturer Dr Jonathan Nichols has shown that processes strikingly similar to those which power Jupiter's auroras could be responsible for radio emissions detected from ...

PHILADELPHIA - Independent clinical trials, including one conducted at the Scheie Eye Institute at the Perelman School of Medicine, have reported safety and efficacy for Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), a congenital form of blindness caused by mutations in a gene (RPE65) required for recycling vitamin A in the retina. Inherited retinal degenerative diseases were previously considered untreatable and incurable. There were early improvements in vision observed in the trials, but a key question about the long-term efficacy of gene therapy for curing the retinal degeneration ...

This time of year many people make resolutions to live a healthier lifestyle, exercise more, lose weight and eat better. For the adolescents who are extremely obese in this country, diet and exercise alone often are not enough to get their weight down. Some of those teens will require weight loss surgery to improve their overall health. According to a recent study published in the January print issue of the Journal of Pediatric Surgery, bariatric surgery in extremely obese adolescents also was shown to be beneficial in helping to reverse previously undiagnosed cardiovascular ...

A new study from the University of British Columbia Sauder School of Business shows that bosses should pick favourites if they want top performing teams. "Conventional wisdom tells us that we should treat everyone the same to create a collegial and productive work atmosphere," says Sauder Professor Karl Aquino, who co-authored the forthcoming study for the Journal of Business Ethics. "But our research shows this can be a disincentive for workers who would otherwise go above and beyond on behalf of the team with a little bit of extra attention." In a series of experiments, ...

This press release is available in German. An international team of researchers including Svante Pääbo and Qiaomei Fu of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, sequenced nuclear and mitochondrial DNA that had been extracted from the leg of an early modern human from Tianyuan Cave near Beijing, China. Analyses of this individual's DNA showed that the Tianyuan human shared a common origin with the ancestors of many present-day Asians and Native Americans. In addition, the researchers found that the proportion of Neanderthal and Denisovan-DNA ...

A collaborative research team including a Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) pediatric neuropathologist successfully mitigated some of the effects of a muscular disease by using a new targeted enzyme replacement therapy strategy from 4s3 Bioscience. The findings are published in the January edition of Human and Molecular Genetics http://hmg.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/01/09/hmg.ddt003.full.pdf+html. X-linked myotubular myopathy (XLMTM) is a severe muscle disease caused by an absence of a protein called myotubularin. There is currently no treatment for this ...

Scientists at CSIRO and RMIT University have produced a new two-dimensional material that could revolutionise the electronics market, making "nano" more than just a marketing term. The material – made up of layers of crystal known as molybdenum oxides – has unique properties that encourage the free flow of electrons at ultra-high speeds. In a paper published in the January issue of materials science journal Advanced Materials, the researchers explain how they adapted a revolutionary material known as graphene to create a new conductive nano-material. Graphene was ...

Light-sensing cells in the eye rely on their outer segment to convert light into neural signals that allow us to see. But because of its unique cylindrical shape, the outer segment is prone to breakage, which can cause blindness in humans. A study published by Cell Press on January 22nd in the Biophysical Journal provides new insight into the mechanical properties that cause the outer segment to snap under pressure. The new experimental and theoretical findings help to explain the origin of severe eye diseases and could lead to new ways of preventing blindness. ...

Charlottesville, VA (January 22, 2013). Researchers from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (New York, NY) have found that tumor "separation surgery" followed by high-dose hypofractionated stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) or high-dose single-fraction SRS is safe and effective in controlling spinal metastases regardless of the radiosensitivity of the particular tumor type that has invaded the spine. This finding is fleshed out in the article "Local disease control for spinal metastases following 'separation surgery' and adjuvant hypofractionated or high-dose single-fraction ...

Johns Hopkins researchers have identified a rare gene mutation in a single family with a high rate of schizophrenia, adding to evidence that abnormal genes play a role in the development of the disease. The researchers, in a report published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, say that family members with the mutation in the gene Neuronal PAS domain protein 3 (NPAS3) appear at high risk of developing schizophrenia or another debilitating mental illnesses. Normally functioning NPAS3 regulates the development of healthy neurons, especially in a region of the brain known ...

KANSAS CITY, MO – Over the past several years, Rong Li, Ph.D., at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research has been making crucial discoveries about the development of cell polarity—the process by which one side of a cell becomes different from the other side. Such polarity is critical for the functioning of the vast majority of cells. The outside surface of skin cells is very different from the surface inside the body, for example, while nerve cells have delicately branching dendrites on one end and axons on the other. Li's lab studies yeast cells, which form a unique ...

In the fall of 2010, Hoi-Ying Holman of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) was approached by an international team researching a mysterious microbial community discovered deep in cold sulfur springs in southern Germany. "They told me what they were doing and said, 'We know what you contributed to the oil-spill research,'" recalls Holman, who heads the Chemical Ecology group in Berkeley Lab's Earth Sciences Division. "They wondered if I could help them determine the biochemistry of their microbe samples." Holman had ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have found a novel way to engineer key cells of the immune system so they remain resistant to infection with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. A new study describes the use of a kind of molecular scissors to cut and paste a series of HIV-resistant genes into T cells, specialized immune cells targeted by the AIDS virus. The genome editing was made in a gene that the virus uses to gain entry into the cell. By inactivating a receptor gene and inserting additional anti-HIV genes, the virus was blocked ...

In a paper published in Nature Communications on January 22, 2013, a team of paleontologists including Dr. Luis Chiappe, Director of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County's (NHM) Dinosaur Institute, has discovered a way to determine the sex of an avian dinosaur species. Confuciusornis sanctus, a 125-million-year-old Mesozoic bird, had remarkable differences in plumage — some had long, almost body length ornamental tail feathers, others had none — features that have been interpreted as the earliest example of avian courtship. However, the idea that male Confuciusornis ...

These mechanisms, described in vivo in mice, engage molecule CD98hc, which is involved in epidermis renewal and could be an indicator of the skin's capacity for regeneration. The results were published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine review. The epidermis, the surface layer of the skin, is mainly composed of keratinocytes cells, which, in humans, are renewed continuously over a 21-day cycle. These cells are located on a membrane made up of components from the extracellular matrix that provides the junction with the dermis, the deep layer of the skin (see diagram). ...

Bisphenol A (BPA) is a chemical compound that is included in the composition of plastics and resins. It is used, for example, in the manufacture of food containers such as bottles and babies' feeding bottles. It is also found in the protective films used inside food and drink cans and on till receipts where it used as a discloser. Significant levels of BPA have also been found in human blood, urine, amniotic fluid and placentas. Recent studies have shown that this industrial component has harmful effects on reproductive ability, development and the metabolism of laboratory ...