Tiny strands of RNA affect how our cells burn fat and sugar — a finding that gives biologists a place to start in the quest for therapies to treat obesity and related health problems, said scientists at Virginia Tech and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. Mice on high fat diets are resistant to obesity when two mini-molecules called microRNAS are missing from their genetic makeup, according to a study this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science The discovery suggests that treatments targeting these two specific microRNAs ...

HONOLULU, HI - University of Hawai'i Cancer Center researchers have discovered germline BAP1 mutations are associated with a novel cancer syndrome characterized by malignant mesothelioma, uveal melanoma, cutaneous melanoma and atypical melanocytic tumors. Germline mutations are hereditary gene defects that are present in every cell. The study investigated two unrelated families with BAP1 defects and found an increase in the occurrence of mole-like melanocytic tumors that are non-cancerous flat or slightly elevated and pigmented skin lesions. These benign skin lesions ...

TEMPE, Ariz. – Diarrheal disease is the second leading cause of death in children under five years old — killing as many as 1.5 million children worldwide every year. These startling statistics from the World Health Organization (2009) point to the reason why a group of undergraduate students from Arizona State University is working to develop a low-cost biosensor — a simple device that would detect contaminated drinking water. An interdisciplinary team of nine students is participating in the 2012 International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition — a prestigious ...

Los Angeles, CA (September 6, 2012) While commentators and scholars argue that political groups have become more polarized in the US, a new study finds that moderate political groups are not as well covered in newspaper articles as more radical right and left-wing groups. This study is found in a recent article from Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, a SAGE journal and an official journal of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. "Extremes are more intuitively novel, entertaining, and colorful, representing another common news value," ...

Radiation therapy is one of the most widely used cancer treatments, but it often damages normal tissue and can lead to debilitating conditions. A class of drugs known as mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) inhibitors can prevent radiation-induced tissue damage in mice by protecting normal stem cells that are crucial for tissue repair, according to a preclinical study published by Cell Press in the September issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell. "We can exploit the emerging findings for the development of new preventive strategies and more effective treatment options ...

Researchers at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute have discovered that a pair of molecules work together to kill so-called 'self-reactive' immune cells that are programmed to attack the body's own organs. The finding is helping to explain how autoimmune diseases develop. Dr Daniel Gray and colleagues from the institute's Molecular Genetics of Cancer division and the University of Ballarat discovered that the absence of two related proteins, called Puma and Bim, led to self-reactive immune cells accumulating and attacking many different body organs, causing illness. The ...

6 September 2012: Two very different galaxies feature in this family portrait taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, together forming a peculiar galaxy pair called Arp 116. The image shows the dramatic differences in size, structure and colour between spiral and elliptical galaxies. Arp 116 is composed of a giant elliptical galaxy known as Messier 60, and a much smaller spiral galaxy, NGC 4647. Being a typical elliptical galaxy, Messier 60 on its own may not be very exciting to look at, but together with its adjacent spiral friend, the pair becomes a rather interesting ...

PHILADELPHIA — Newly discovered molecular differences between small cell lung cancer and nonsmall cell lung cancer have revealed PARP1 and EZH2 as potential therapeutic targets for patients with small cell lung cancer, according to the results of a study published in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. Currently, small cell lung cancer accounts for about 15 percent of lung cancer diagnoses in the United States. Patients with the disease will initially respond to chemotherapy, but almost all will have disease recurrence within a ...

HOUSTON - (Sept. 7, 2012) – When mice are born lacking the master gene Atoh1, none breathe well and all die in the newborn period. Why and how this occurs could provide new answers about sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), but the solution has remained elusive until now. Research led by Baylor College of Medicine and the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children's Hospital demonstrates that when the gene is lacking in a special population of neurons called RTN (retrotrapezoid nucleus), roughly half the young mice die at birth. Those who survive ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (September 6, 2012) – Using a stepwise trans-differentiation process, Whitehead Institute researchers have turned skin cells into embryonic Sertoli-like cells. The main role of mature Sertoli cells is to provide support and nutrition to the developing sperm cells. Furthermore, Sertoli cells have been demonstrated to possess trophic properties, which have been utilized for the protection of non-testicular cellular grafts in transplantations. However, mature Sertoli cells are mitotically inactive, and the primary immature Sertoli cells during prolonged ...

Pollinating insects contribute to agricultural production in 150 (84%) European crops. These crops depend partly or entirely upon insects for their pollination and yield. The value of insect pollinators is estimated to be €22 billion a year in Europe. Declines in managed pollinators, such as honeybees, and wild pollinator such bumblebees, solitary bees and hoverflies, are therefore of growing concern as we need to protect food production and the maintain wildflower diversity. Scientists involved in STEP, a large-scale project funded by the 7th Framework Program (FP7) ...

CHICAGO – Sept. 6, 2012. Married patients with locally advanced lung cancer are likely to survive longer after treatment than patients who are single, according to a study by researchers at the University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Cancer Center in Baltimore. The results of the retrospective study are being presented at the 2012 Chicago Multidisciplinary Symposium in Thoracic Oncology. The University of Maryland researchers studied 168 patients with Stage III non-small cell lung cancer, the most common type of lung cancer, who were treated with chemotherapy ...

Chicago – (Sept. 6, 2012) – Savvy consumers and health professionals know that fibre is an essential nutrient associated with important health benefits, yet barriers such as overall poor tolerance to higher-fibre diets may be why average intake is far less than experts recommend (1). Two new research studies supported by Tate & Lyle, the global provider of specialty food ingredients and solutions, provide further evidence that certain higher-fibre diets can in fact be well-tolerated, and that fibre may play an important role in supporting a healthy gut as well as promoting ...

The study, published today in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention is the largest of its kind in Australia and one of the largest in the world. It followed about 4,000 women in a study of the BreastScreen program in Western Australia. University of Melbourne Research Fellow Dr Carolyn Nickson and colleagues from the Melbourne School of Population Health said the findings reaffirmed the importance and efficacy of mammography. The study focused on women aged 50-69 years, who are in the target age range for screening. It included 427 cases where women had died ...

Off Hachinohe, Japan—Scientific deep sea drilling vessel Chikyu sets a world new record by drilling down and obtains rock samples from deeper than 2,111 meters below the seafloor off Shimokita Peninsula of Japan in the northwest Pacific Ocean. The Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), the implementing organization for scientific expedition aboard the Chikyu, announced this achievement on 6th September, 2012. Chikyu made this achievement during the Deep Coalbed Biosphere expedition, Expedition 337, conducted within the framework of an international ...

People who suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder relive their traumatic experiences in the form of flashbacks and nightmares – and in childhood, also in traumatic plays during which they re-enact the experience over and over again. They avoid stimuli that remind them of the trauma or suffer from vegetative hyperarousal such as insomnia, hypervigilance or concentration problems. For the first time, researchers from the University of Zurich and the University Children's Hospital Zurich now show that infants and toddlers can also develop posttraumatic stress disorder in ...

Sophia Antipolis, 6 September 2012: The European Association for Cardiovascular Prevention and Rehabilitation (EACPR), a registered branch of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), and the American Heart Association (AHA) have today issued a joint scientific statement http://eurheartj.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/08/24/eurheartj.ehs221.short?rss=1 that sets out to produce easy-to-follow guidance on Clinical Cardiopulmonary Exercise (CPX) testing based on current scientific evidence. The document, which has been published simultaneously online in the European ...

A unique approach to early literacy work with families where children develop their language skills and their ability to read and write from an early age has had a huge success. Researchers from the University of Sheffield funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) initially planned to use the approach with around 60 families, but discovered that around 6,000 had actually benefited from their work. Professor Cathy Nutbrown of the University of Sheffield, who led the project, shared her approach to family literacy with Early Years practitioners including ...

This press release is available in German. It had been thought that mothers delivering later in life have children that are less healthy as adults, because the body of the mother had already degenerated due to physiological effects like decreasing oocyte quality or a weakened placenta. In fact, what affects the health of the grown-up children is not the age of their mother but her education and the number of years she survives after giving birth and thus spends with her offspring. This is the conclusion of a new study by Mikko Myrskylä from the Max Planck Institute for ...

Jerusalem, Sept. 6, 2012 – A synthetic, anti-inflammatory and anti-allergic family of drugs to combat a variety of illnesses while avoiding detrimental side effects has been developed by a Hebrew University of Jerusalem researcher. The researcher is Saul Yedgar, who is the Walter and Greta Stiel Professor of Heart Studies at the Institute for Medical Research Israel-Canada at the Hebrew University Faculty of Medicine. Inflammatory/allergic diseases affect billions of people worldwide, and treatments for these conditions are a major focus of the pharmaceutical industry. ...

Scientists from A*STAR's Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences (SICS), together with clinical collaborators from London , discovered for the first time that children and young patients with chronic Hepatitis B Virus infection (HBV carriers) do have a protective immune response, contrary to current belief, and hence can be more suitable treatment candidates than previously considered. This discovery by the team of scientists led by Professor Antonio Bertoletti, programme director and research director of the infection and immunity programme at SICS, could lead to ...

On Mars's poles there are ice caps of ice and dust with layers that reflect to past climate variations on Mars. Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute have related the layers in the ice cap on Mars's north pole to variations in solar insolation on Mars, thus established the first dated climate history for Mars, where ice and dust accumulation has been driven by variations in insolation. The results are published in the scientific journal, Icarus. The ice caps on Mars's poles are kilometres thick and composed of ice and dust. There are layers in the ice caps, which ...

This press release is available in German. Stefan Remy and colleagues at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) and the University of Bonn have illuminated how this system works. "The system acts like a filter, only letting the most important impulses pass," explains Remy. "This produces the targeted neuronal patterns that are indispensible for long-term memory storage." How does this refined control system work? How can inhibitory signals produce precise output signals? This was the question investigated by Remy and his colleagues. Scientists have known ...

The GENCODE Consortium expects the human genome has twice as many genes than previously thought, many of which might have a role in cellular control and could be important in human disease. This remarkable discovery comes from the GENCODE Consortium, which has done a painstaking and skilled review of available data on gene activity. Among their discoveries, the team describe more than 10,000 novel genes, identify genes that have 'died' and others that are being resurrected. The GENCODE Consortium reference gene catalogue has been one of the underpinnings of the larger ...

Patients in Japan who underwent living donor liver transplantation (LDLT) for acute liver failure (ALF) were classified as having excellent outcomes, with ten-year survival at 73%. The findings, published in the September issue of Liver Transplantation, a journal of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD), suggest that the type of liver disease or treatment plan does not affect long-term patient survival following LDLT. Donor and patient age, however, does impact long-term outcome post-transplant. According to the AASLD, roughly 2,000 Americans ...