PITTSBURGH, Jan. 2, 2013 – The presence of a certain molecule allows the immune system to effectively police tuberculosis (TB) of the lungs and prevent it from turning into an active and deadly infection, according to a new study led by researchers at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Their findings appear today in the online version of the Journal of Clinical Investigation. More than 2 billion people or one-third of the world's population are infected with mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes ...

Medical centers that elect to keep psychiatric files private and separate from the rest of a person's medical record may be doing their patients a disservice, a Johns Hopkins study concludes. In a survey of psychiatry departments at 18 of the top American hospitals as ranked by U.S. News & World Report's Best Hospitals in 2007, a Johns Hopkins team learned that fewer than half of the hospitals had all inpatient psychiatric records in their electronic medical record systems and that fewer than 25 percent gave non-psychiatrists full access to those records. Strikingly, ...

Certain plants and animals protect themselves against temperatures below freezing with antifreeze proteins. How the larva of the beetle Dendroides canadensis manages to withstand temperatures down to -30 degrees Celsius is reported by an international team of researchers led by Prof. Dr. Martina Havenith from the Department of Physical Chemistry II at the Ruhr-Universität in the journal PNAS. Together with American colleagues, the RUB-researchers showed that interactions between the antifreeze proteins and water molecules contribute significantly to protection against the ...

Magnets have practically become everyday objects. Earlier on, however, the universe consisted only of nonmagnetic elements and particles. Just how the magnetic forces came into existence has been researched by Prof. Dr. Reinhard Schlickeiser at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. In the journal Physical Review Letters, he describes a new mechanism for the magnetisation of the universe even before the emergence of the first stars. No permanent magnets in the early universe Before the formation of the first stars, the luminous matter consisted ...

Elementary school students often learn that plants grow toward the light. This seems straightforward, but in reality, the genes and pathways that allow plants to grow and move in response to their environment are not fully understood. Leading plant scientists explore one of the most fundamental processes in plant biology—plant movement in response to light, water, and gravity—in a January Special Issue of the American Journal of Botany. Plant movements, known as tropisms, are crucial for plant survival from the second a plant germinates to how a plant positions its flowers ...

The western long-beaked echidna, one of the world's five egg-laying species of mammal, became extinct in Australia thousands of years ago…or did it? Smithsonian scientists and colleagues have found evidence suggesting that not only did these animals survive in Australia far longer than previously thought, but that they may very well still exist in parts of the country today. The team's findings are published in the Dec. 28, 2012 issue of the journal ZooKeys. With a small and declining population confined to the Indonesian portion of the island of New Guinea, the western ...

Two new species of cichlid fish from Lake Victoria are described by biologists from Naturalis Biodiversity Center (Research Department Marine Zoology) and the Institute of Biology Leiden (Section Integrative Zoology), the Netherlands. One of these species is named in honour of Tijs Goldschmidt, author of Darwin's Dreampond. This book, published in nine languages, describes the dramatic extinction of hundreds of cichlid species in Lake Victoria in the 1980s due to the introduced Nile perch and other human induced environmental changes. In 1985, Leiden biologists made a ...

Advances in bio-technologies and computer software have helped make genome sequencing much more common than in the past. But still in question are both the accuracy of different sequencing methods and the best ways to evaluate these efforts. Now, computer scientists have devised a tool to better measure the validity of genome sequencing. The method, which is described in the journal PLOS ONE, allows for the evaluation of a wide range of genome sequencing procedures by tracking a small group of key statistical features in the basic structure of the assembled genome. Such ...

ANN ARBOR—Researchers used electricity on certain regions in the brain of a patient with chronic, severe facial pain to release an opiate-like substance that's considered one of the body's most powerful painkillers. The findings expand on previous work done at the University of Michigan, Harvard University and the City University of New York where researchers delivered electricity through sensors on the skulls of chronic migraine patients, and found a decrease in the intensity and pain of their headache attacks. However, the researchers then couldn't completely explain ...

Many scenarios in business and communication require that two parties share information without either being sure if they can trust the other. Examples include secure auctions and identification at ATM machines. Exploiting the strange properties of the quantum world could be the answer to dealing with such distrust: researchers at the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) at the National University of Singapore have used the quantum properties of light to perform the world's first demonstration of a 'secure bit commitment' technology. The work is described in Nature Communications. Secure ...

DARIEN, IL – A new study suggests that treatment of mild sleep-disordered breathing with continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy in pregnant women with preeclampsia improves fetal activity levels, a marker of fetal well-being. Results show that the average number of fetal movements increased from 319 during a night without CPAP treatment to 592 during the subsequent night with CPAP therapy. During the course of the night without CPAP treatment, the number of fetal movements decreased steadily by 7.4 movements per hour. In contrast, the number of fetal movements ...

A team of international archaeologists including Christian Cloke of the University of Cincinnati is providing new insights into successful and extensive water management and agricultural production in and around the ancient desert city of Petra, located in present-day Jordan. Ongoing investigations, of which Cloke is a part, are led by Professor Susan Alcock of the Brown University Petra Archaeological Project (BUPAP). Using a variety of tools and techniques, including high-resolution satellite imagery and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating of soils, Cloke, ...

By comparing reconstructions of atmospheric CO2 concentrations and sea level over the past 40 million years, researchers based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton have found that greenhouse gas concentrations similar to the present (almost 400 parts per million) were systematically associated with sea levels at least nine metres above current levels. The study determined the 'natural equilibrium' sea level for CO2 concentrations ranging between ice-age values of 180 parts per million and ice-free values of more than 1,000 parts per million. It takes many ...

As Twelfth Night approaches and the Christmas decorations start to look increasingly congruous as the last crumbs of cake are swept away and the remnants of the turkey have finally been consumed, there is the perennial question as to what to do with the tree. Research published in the International Journal of Biomedical Nanoscience and Nanotechnology suggests that the needles of the plant Pseudotsuga menziesii, commonly known as the Douglas fir could be used to sterilize nano devices destined for medical applications. Chemist Poushpi Dwivedi of MNNIT in Allahabad, India, ...

Taking inspiration from Mother Nature, scientists are reporting an advance toward preventing the tooth sensitivity that affects millions of people around the world. Their report on development of the substance, similar to the adhesive that mussels use to attach to rocks and other surfaces in water, appears in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. Quan-Li Li, Chun Hung Chu and colleagues explain that about 3 out of every 4 people have teeth that are sensitive to hot, cold, sweet or sour foods and drinks. It occurs when the hard outer enamel layer on teeth and ...

Johns Hopkins researchers have uncovered strong evidence that mice have a specific set of nerve cells that signal itch but not pain, a finding that may settle a decades-long debate about these sensations, and, if confirmed in humans, help in developing treatments for chronic itch, including itch caused by life-saving medications. At the heart of their discovery is a type of sensory nerve cell whose endings receive information from the skin and relay it to other nerves in the spinal cord, which then coordinates a response to the stimulus. Published online Dec. 23 in Nature ...

Reston, Va. (January 2, 2013) – New research published in the January issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine shows that 18F-fludeoxyglucose (18F-FDG) positron emission tomography (PET)/computed tomography (CT) imaging offers significant prognostic stratification information at initial staging for patients with locally advanced breast cancer. When compared to conventional imaging, 18F-FDG PET/CT more accurately showed lesions in the chest, abdomen and bones in a single session, changing management for more than 50 percent of the patients in the study. Guidelines from ...

Amid growing concern over the surprisingly large amount of greenhouse gas produced by the Internet and other telecommunications activities, researchers are reporting new models of emissions and energy consumption that could help reduce their carbon footprint. Their report appears in ACS' journal Environmental Science & Technology. Researchers from the Centre for Energy-Efficient Telecommunications (CEET) and Bell Labs explain that the information communications and technology (ICT) industry, which delivers Internet, video, voice and other cloud services, produces more ...

Medieval Afghanistan, Iran and the one-time Soviet Central Asian states were frontiers in flux as the Islamic Caliphate spread beyond the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh through 10th centuries. As such, different groups, such as the new Arab ruling class, the native landed gentry and local farmers, jockeyed for power, position and economic advantage over an approximately 300-year period as the Sasanian Empire collapsed and the Caliphate took its place. University of Cincinnati historian Robert Haug, assistant professor, will present his research on how social, cultural ...

Side effects are a major reason that drugs are taken off the market and a major reason why patients stop taking their medications, but scientists are now reporting the development of a new way to predict those adverse reactions ahead of time. The report on the method, which could save patients from severe side effects and save drug companies time and money, appears in ACS' Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. Yoshihiro Yamanishi and colleagues explain that drug side effects are a major health problem — the fourth-leading cause of death in the U.S. — which by ...

What were the most notable advances in the chemical world in 2012? Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society — the world's largest scientific society — considers this question in a package of cover stories on the year past in chemistry. It also provides a reality check on discoveries that seemed promising a decade ago. In "Research Year in Review," which focuses on 11 key developments, C&EN cites several advances in integrating man and machine in efforts to combine electronics with living tissue, developments that the ...

LSS Life Safety Services (LSS), a leader in passive fire protection inspection services, announced today that Kathy Clements has joined them as their new Controller. Kathy will lead LSS Life Safety Services' accounting department, as well as direct the financial plans of the business. Kathy brings with her valuable accounting, budgeting, and management experience. Her years as the President of a local Direct Mail Marketing company will allow her to further enhance the mission of LSS Life Safety Services by providing the LSS team with yet another strong member of the ...

DURHAM, N.C. – Patients who received an implantable heart defibrillator in everyday practice had survival benefits on par with those who received the same devices in carefully controlled clinical trials, according to a new study that highlights the value of defibrillators in typical medical settings. Led by the Duke Clinical Research Institute and published Jan. 2, 2013, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the study used data from a large national Medicare registry to assess the survival of patients receiving defibrillators, which are commonly used to ...

CHICAGO – In an analysis of nearly 100 studies that included approximately 3 million adults, relative to normal weight, overall obesity (combining all grades) and higher levels of obesity were both associated with a significantly higher all-cause risk of death, while overweight was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality, according to a study in the January 2 issue of JAMA. "Estimates of the relative mortality risks associated with normal weight, overweight, and obesity may help to inform decision making in the clinical setting," according to background ...

CHICAGO – In a study examining possible factors regarding the associations between fructose consumption and weight gain, brain magnetic resonance imaging of study participants indicated that ingestion of glucose but not fructose reduced cerebral blood flow and activity in brain regions that regulate appetite, and ingestion of glucose but not fructose produced increased ratings of satiety and fullness, according to a preliminary study published in the January 2 issue of JAMA. "Increases in fructose consumption have paralleled the increasing prevalence of obesity, and ...