Theoretical physicist Elad Eizner from Ben Gurion University, Israel, and colleagues created models to study the attractive forces affecting atoms located at a wide range of distances from a surface, in the hundreds of nanometers range. Their results, about to be published in EPJ D, show that these forces depend on electron diffusion, regardless of whether the surface is conducting or not. Ultimately, these findings could contribute to designing minimally invasive surface probes. Bombarding a surface with atoms helps us understand the distribution of its electrons and ...

The putative remains of Carin Göring, wife of Nazi leader Herman Göring, were found in 1991 at a site close to where she had been buried. In a recently published article, Maria Allen, professor of forensic genetics at Uppsala University, Sweden, and her associates present evidence supporting that it is Carin Göring's remains that have been identified. The Swedish Carin Göring was married to the well-known Nazi leader Herman Göring. When she died in 1931 she was buried in Stockholm, but three years later Herman Göring had her remains moved to his residence Karinhall outside ...

This press release is available in German. Using the world's most powerful X-ray free-electron laser, an international team of researchers, including scientists of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, has obtained new insight into the structure of a medicinally important protein that may serve as a blueprint for the development of drugs to fight sleeping sickness. Science magazine have chosen the experimental study as one of the top ten scientific breakthroughs of the year. Sleeping sickness is caused by the unicellular organism Trypanosoma ...

In a recent publication, researchers achieved new accuracy in the ability to measure energy differences between states of molecules, thus predicting which states will be observed. It has been known since the seventies that excessive salt causes DNA to reverse its twist, from a right-handed spiral to a left-handed one. DNA in the Z form is treated by our natural repair enzymes as damaged, and is therefore usually deleted from the cell. Deletion of genetic material can lead to cancer or to other problems, so the B-Z transition is no mere curiosity. However such is the ...

The climate after the largest mass extinction so far 252 million years ago was cool, later very warm and then cool again. Thanks to the cooler temperatures, the diversity of marine fauna ballooned, as paleontologists from the University of Zurich have reconstructed. The warmer climate, coupled with a high CO2 level in the atmosphere, initially gave rise to new, short-lived species. In the longer term, however, this climate change had an adverse effect on biodiversi-ty and caused species to become extinct. Until now, it was always assumed that it took flora and fauna ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Six weeks of weight training can significantly improve blood markers of cardiovascular health in young African-American men, researchers report in the Journal of Human Hypertension. The researchers measured blood markers associated with inflammation, immune response or the remodeling of arteries that normally occur after tissue damage, infection or other types of stress. They found that levels of two of these markers dropped significantly in African-American men but not in Caucasian men after six weeks of resistance training. "This suggests that resistance ...

AUSTIN, Texas—Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have designed a simulation that for the first time emulates key properties of electronic topological insulators. Their simulation, which was described this week in Nature Materials, is part of a rapidly moving scientific race to understand and exploit the potential of topological insulators, which are a state of matter that was only discovered in the past decade. These insulators may enable dramatic advances in quantum computing and spintronics. "The discovery of these materials, which are insulators in ...

New Rochelle, NY, December 20, 2012—Small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) are a potent new drug class that can silence a disease-causing gene, but delivering them to a target cell can be challenging. An innovative delivery approach that dramatically increases the efficacy of an siRNA drug targeted to the liver and has made it possible to test the drug in non-human primates is described in an article in Nucleic Acid Therapeutics, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. publishers (http://www.liebertpub.com). The article is available on the Nucleic Acid Therapeutics ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Researchers at Oregon State University today announced the discovery of an underlying genetic cause of atopic dermatitis, a type of eczema most common in infancy that also affects millions of adults around the world with dry, itchy and inflamed skin lesions. The findings were just published in PLoS ONE, a professional journal, and may set the stage for new therapeutic approaches to this frustrating syndrome, which is difficult to treat and has no known cure. Eczema is also related to, and can sometimes cause asthma, a potentially deadly immune dysfunction. Pharmaceutical ...

Highlights Six months of steroid treatment in children with nephrotic syndrome did not reduce relapse rates or side effects compared with three months of treatment. Because many children with nephrotic syndrome face frequent relapses, future research should focus on preventing relapses through new treatment strategies. Nephrotic syndrome has an estimated incidence of two to seven cases per 100,000 children and a prevalence of nearly 16 cases per 100,000. Washington, DC (December 20, 2012) — Extending steroid treatment for the most common form of kidney disease ...

Highlights Retention of certain compounds that are normally excreted by the kidneys may cause insulin resistance, or prediabetes, in kidney disease patients. When mice with kidney disease were treated with a prebiotic that reduces blood levels of these compounds, insulin resistance and lipid abnormalities were prevented. Washington, DC (December 20, 2012) —Insulin resistance, or prediabetes, in individuals with kidney disease may be caused by the progressive retention of certain compounds that are normally excreted by the kidneys in healthy individuals, ...

The observation of an elusive sub-atomic particle, known as the Higgs boson, has been heralded by the journal Science as the most important scientific discovery of 2012. This particle, which was first hypothesized more than 40 years ago, holds the key to explaining how other elementary particles (those that aren't made up of smaller particles), such as electrons and quarks, get their mass. In addition to recognizing the detection of this particle as the 2012 Breakthrough of the Year, Science and its international nonprofit publisher, AAAS, have identified nine other ...

Until today, Alfred Russell Wallace's century old map from 1876 has been the backbone for our understanding of global biodiversity. Thanks to advances in modern technology and data on more than 20,000 species, scientists from University of Copenhagen have now produced a next generation map depicting the organisation of life on Earth. Published online in Science Express today, the new map provides fundamental information regarding the diversity of life on our planet and is of major significance for future biodiversity research. An essential question in understanding life ...

PASADENA, Calif.—Protein engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have tapped into a hidden talent of one of nature's most versatile catalysts. The enzyme cytochrome P450 is nature's premier oxidation catalyst—a protein that typically promotes reactions that add oxygen atoms to other chemicals. Now the Caltech researchers have engineered new versions of the enzyme, unlocking its ability to drive a completely different and synthetically useful reaction that does not take place in nature. The new biocatalysts can be used to make natural products—such ...

AMHERST, Mass. – Malaria brings misery and death to millions in the developing world each year, and fighting it keeps medical researchers up at night because the mosquito-borne parasite Plasmodium falciparum, which causes the deadliest form of the disease, has developed resistance to every drug thrown at it. Resistance has cut short the useful life of nearly every therapy tried so far, experts say. But now molecular parasitologist Stephen Rich at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has led a research team who report a promising new low-cost combined therapy with a ...

Johns Hopkins researchers have developed a new way of looking at standard MRI scans that more accurately measures damage to the blood-brain barrier in stroke victims, a process they hope will lead to safer, more individualized treatment of blood clots in the brain and better outcomes. The blood-brain barrier is a unique shielding of blood vessels that limits the passage of molecules from the blood stream into the brain. Without it, the brain is open to infection, inflammation and hemorrhage. Ischemic stroke patients are at risk of bleeding into the brain when there is ...

One third of the world is infected with the bacterium that causes tuberculosis (TB), a disease that is increasingly difficult to treat because of wide spread resistance to available drugs. Researchers from the Institute of Pharmacology and Structural Biology (CNRS, Université de Toulouse) in Toulouse (France) have identified a fresh target to develop new drugs for TB. The study, published in the Open Access journal PLOS Pathogens, shows why the target will be important in developing new TB treatments. The deadliest form of human tuberculosis is caused by Mycobacterium ...

The pain relief offered by cannabis varies greatly between individuals, a brain imaging study carried out at the University of Oxford suggests. The researchers found that an oral tablet of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, tended to make the experience of pain more bearable, rather than actually reduce the intensity of the pain. MRI brain imaging showed reduced activity in key areas of the brain that substantiated the pain relief the study participants experienced. 'We have revealed new information about the neural basis of cannabis-induced pain relief,' ...

Over recent years, hospital-acquired Clostridium difficile infections have been a significant problem in UK hospitals and globally. There have been concerns that infections may be due to transmission between symptomatic patients, either directly, or indirectly via hospital staff; these concerns were strengthened when enhanced infection control was introduced in England in 2007, and the incidence of C. difficile infection declined. A recent study published in the open access journal Genome Biology, published by BioMed Central, took a genomics approach to assess the incidence ...

A study into newborn screening for fragile X syndrome (FXS) demonstrates that testing for mutations in the gene FMR1 can be done on a large scale. The research, published in BioMed Central's open access journal Genome Medicine, shows that the number of carrier babies who carry the form of the gene known as the "premutation" is higher than previously estimated. Three large hospitals in the USA participated in this study, testing more than 14,000 newborns, including children of different ethnic backgrounds. While only one child was identified with the full mutation, the ...

Relatives of family members diagnosed with cancer are still at risk of the disease even if the diagnosis came at an older age, suggests a paper published on bmj.com today. It is known that early onset cancer cases carry more hereditary risk than late onset cases, but little is known about whether any familial component exists in cancer at a very old age. Researchers from the German Cancer Research Centre and Lund University in Sweden therefore took data from the Swedish Family-Cancer Database (the largest one of its kind) on just under eight million offspring and their ...

The study, published in PLOS Genetics on 20 December, adds to growing evidence that particular genes are involved in chronic pain and highlights this pathway as a potential target for more effective pain relief treatments for patients. The collaborative study between King's, Pfizer Ltd and the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), used a new method to study and compare DNA, called 'exome sequencing', to identify genetic variations relating to pain sensitivity. Lead author Dr Frances Williams, from the Department of Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology at King's College ...

Worcester, Mass. – In the worldwide battle to curtail malaria, one of the most prevalent and deadly infectious diseases of the developing world, drug after drug has fallen by the wayside as the malaria parasite has become resistant to it. Only artemisinin, derived from the sweet wormwood plant, Artemisia annua, remains as an effective treatment, but it is expensive to produce (particularly when combined with other antimalarial medications to make it less prone to resistance) and is frequently in short supply. A new study by scientists at Worcester Polytechnic Institute ...

A single genetic defect on the X chromosome that can result in a wide array of conditions — from learning and emotional difficulties to primary ovarian insufficiency in women and tremors in middle-aged men — occurs at a much greater frequency than previously thought, research led by the UC Davis MIND Institute has found. The research is based on the first large-scale, multi-center newborn screening effort for the defect in the United States, conducted in a group of more than 14,200 male and female infants at three research university medical centers piloting a new infant ...

December 20, 2012, Shenzhen, China – An international team, comprised King's College London, Pfizer, BGI and other organizations, has explored the genetic variation related with pain sensitivity in the normal population, revealing some existing discovery that treatments for high blood pressure may also be used to treat chronic pain in the future. The latest study was published online in the international journal PLoS Genetics. When the pain lasts a long time for six months or longer, it generally called chronic pain, one of the most costly health problems. Chronic pain ...