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Science11 Dec 2012

Researchers identify new components of the epigenetic 'code' for honey bee development

Researchers from the UK and Australia have uncovered a new element of the honeybee's genetic makeup, which may help to explain why bees are so sensitive to environmental changes. Scientists from the University of Sheffield, Queen Mary, University of London and the Australian National University, have found that honeybees have a 'histone code' – a series of marks on the histone proteins around which their DNA is wrapped in order to fit into the nucleus of a cell. This code is known to exist in humans and other complex organisms in order to control changes in cell development ...

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Medicine11 Dec 2012

Does the brain become unglued in autism?

Philadelphia, PA, December 11, 2012 – A new study published in Biological Psychiatry suggests that autism is associated with reductions in the level of cellular adhesion molecules in the blood, where they play a role in immune function. Cell adhesion molecules are the glue that binds cells together in the body. Deficits in adhesion molecules would be expected to compromise processes at the interfaces between cells, influencing tissue integrity and cell-to-cell signaling. In the brain, deficits in adhesion molecules could compromise brain development and communication ...

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Social Science11 Dec 2012

A mobile app helps children with special needs improve language and social skills

University of Granada researchers have developed a cell phone that can be downloaded free from App Store and improves basic competences (maths, language, knowledge of the environment, autonomy and social skills) in children with autism-related disorders or Down Syndrome. This application--named Picaa--can be used on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch and has been translated into several languages (English, Galician, Arab, etc.). This application has topped the 20,000 downloads from App Store--mainly from Spain and the USA--since its release. Picaa is a system designed for the ...

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Space11 Dec 2012

New knowledge about the remarkable properties of black holes

Black holes are surrounded by many mysteries, but now researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute, among others, have come up with new groundbreaking theories that can explain several of their properties. The research shows that black holes have properties that resemble the dynamics of both solids and liquids. The results are published in the prestigious scientific journal, Physical Review Letters. Black holes are extremely compact objects in the universe. They are so compact that they generate an incredibly strong gravitational pull and everything that comes near them ...

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Medicine11 Dec 2012

Anti-aging gene identified as tumor suppressor in mice, research finds

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — A new study sheds more light on how an anti-aging gene suppresses cancer growth, joint University of Michigan Health System and Harvard Medical School research shows. Loss of the SIRT6 protein in mice increases the number, size and aggressiveness of tumors, according to the new research published in the scientific journal Cell. The study also suggests that the loss of SIRT6 promotes tumor growth in human colon and pancreatic cancers. "It is critical to understand the spectrum of genes that suppress tumor development," says co-senior author David Lombard, ...

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Medicine11 Dec 2012

Salmonella spreads by targeting cells in our gut, study shows

Researchers have found that the bacteria are able to change key cells that line the intestine, enabling the bugs to thrive. By changing the make-up of these cells, the salmonella bacteria are able to cross the gut wall and infect vital organs, such as the kidneys and the liver. Salmonella food poisoning – commonly caused by eating undercooked poultry or eggs – can lead to diarrhoea, fever and even death in young children. Scientists say the study furthers our understanding of how bacterial infections occur and what enables them to spread. The University of Edinburgh ...

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Medicine11 Dec 2012

Alternative to fullerenes in organic solar cells -- just as exciting

An insight into the properties of fullerene is set to open the door to a new class of electronic acceptors which can be used to build better and cheaper organic solar cells. Organic solar cells have advanced a great deal since they were first invented nearly 20 years ago, but the fullerene component has remained largely the same and this has had a braking effect on the evolution of the technology. But now scientists at the University of Warwick have pinpointed an unappreciated property of fullerenes, namely the availability of additional electron accepting states, which ...

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Medicine11 Dec 2012

RI Hospital: Borderline personality, bipolar disorders have similar unemployment rates

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Unemployment poses a significant burden on the public no matter what the cause. But for those who have been diagnosed with a psychiatric illness, chronic unemployment is often coupled with significant health care costs. A Rhode Island Hospital study compared unemployment rates among those with various psychiatric disorders, and found that borderline personality disorder is associated with as much unemployment as bipolar disorder. Researcher Mark Zimmerman, M.D., the director of outpatient psychiatry at Rhode Island Hospital, and his colleagues studied ...

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Medicine11 Dec 2012

Children born prematurely are at higher risk of esophageal inflammation, cancer

Infants that are born preterm or with impaired growth have an increased risk of developing gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), possibly leaving them vulnerable to the development of esophageal adenocarcinoma later in life. Gestational age and size at birth affect the risk of an early diagnosis of esophagitis — inflammation of the esophagus — according to a new study in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, the official clinical practice journal of the American Gastroenterological Association. "Long-term exposure to reflux is a major risk factor for esophageal ...

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Medicine11 Dec 2012

Foreign multidrug resistant bacteria contained in Toronto hospital

CHICAGO (December 11, 2012) – As the prevalence of antibiotic-resistant infections continue to rise around the world, a hospital in Canada detected the presence of New Delhi Metallo-ß-lactamase-1-Producing Klebsiella pneumoniae (NDM1-Kp), a multidrug resistant bacteria that is resistant to carbapenems, one of the last lines of antibiotics. The retrospective report, featured in the January issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, analyzes risk factors and infection control strategies taken to ...

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Medicine11 Dec 2012

Contact precautions shown to modify healthcare workers care delivery

CHICAGO (December 11, 2012) – The prevention and control of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) can help reduce patient morbidity and mortality, but a common prevention effort for patients with hard to treat infections known as contact precautions, can have positive and negative impacts on patient care. A new report published in the January issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, found when patients with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and other antibiotic-resistant bacteria ...

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Physics11 Dec 2012

UT study: Students who are more physically fit perform better academically

KNOXVILLE—Middle school students who are more physically fit make better grades and outperform their classmates on standardized tests, according to a newly published study from a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The study is among the first to examine how academic achievement relates to all aspects of physical fitness including endurance, muscular strength, flexibility and body fat. It appears in this month's issue of the Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness. "Not only does improving fitness have physical health implications for the child, ...

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Medicine11 Dec 2012

Drug resistant leukemia stem cells may be source of genetic chaos, Temple scientists find

(Philadelphia, PA) – An international team of scientists, led by researchers from Temple University School of Medicine, has found that a source of mounting genomic chaos, or instability, common to chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) may lie in a pool of leukemia stem cells that are immune to treatment with potent targeted anticancer drugs. They have shown in mice with cancer that even after treatment with the highly effective imatinib (Gleevec), stem cells that become resistant to these drugs – tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) – may continue to foster DNA damage, potentially ...

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Science11 Dec 2012

Dead or alive? A new test to determine viability of soybean rust spores

URBANA – Spores from Asian soybean rust (Phakopsora pachyrhizi) pose a serious threat to soybean production in the United States because they can be blown great distances by the wind. University of Illinois researchers have developed a method to determine whether these spores are viable. "Finding spores is different from finding spores that are living and able to infect plants," said USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientist and crop sciences professor Glen Hartman. Soybean rust, which first appeared in Japan at the beginning of the 20th century, is a foliar ...

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Energy11 Dec 2012

EARTH: The bright future for natural gas in the United States

Alexandria, VA – Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," has changed the energy landscape. We can now affordably produce natural gas from previously inaccessible rock formations, which has led to increasing natural gas consumption. Thanks to its low prices and abundant domestic supply, natural gas may have a chance to overtake coal as the primary energy source for electricity in the United States. Natural gas has been a part of our energy economy for more than a century; however, it wasn't until recently that it started to play a key role. While it has always been useful ...

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Social Science11 Dec 2012

Social ties help drive user content generation that leads to online ad revenue growth

NEW YORK — December 11, 2012 — A research study on online social networks reveals that networking sites can drive advertising revenue by encouraging the density of social ties, or boosting the level of friendship or social connections between users. According to the findings, in a forthcoming paper in Management Science, more connected users prompt increases in visitation and browsing on the site, which helps stimulate online advertising revenue growth. The research co-authored by Scott Shriver, assistant professor of marketing at Columbia Business School, Harikesh Nair, ...

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Medicine11 Dec 2012

Potential gene therapy approach to sickle cell disease highlighted at American Society of Hematology

Boston, Mass.—Researchers at Dana-Farber/Children's Hospital Cancer Center (DF/CHCC) have taken the first preliminary steps toward developing a form of gene therapy for sickle cell disease. In an abstract presented on Dec. 10 at the 54th annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology, the research team—led by DF/CHCC's Raffaele Renella, MD, PhD, Stuart H. Orkin, MD, and David A. Williams, MD—announced that they had demonstrated in an animal model the feasibility of activating a form of hemoglobin unaffected by the sickle cell mutation. The study was included as ...

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Science11 Dec 2012

New anticoagulant discovered based on the same used by malaria vectors to feed on

An international project lead by the Molecular and Cell Biology Institute of Porto University with the participation of researchers from IMIM (Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute) has, for the first time ever, deciphered the mechanism by which a substance called anophelin binds to an enzyme (thrombin) involved in the process of blood coagulation. This discovery was published in the last issue of the PNAS journal and opens the door to, on the one hand, designing a new generation of anticoagulant drugs with a totally different functioning to current ones and, on the ...

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Science11 Dec 2012

Daycare double duty

Montreal, December 11, 2012 – Nearly 1.5 million Canadian children grow up living double lives: one at home with their parents and another in some form of childcare environment. While parents hope to be informed of what goes on when they're not around, a recent Concordia study suggests that parents ought to be more involved in the daycare experience, a major component of their child's development. Nina Howe, a professor in Concordia's Department of Education and a lead author on the study, set out to uncover what Canadian parents really know about their children's care. ...

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Medicine11 Dec 2012

Primary care physicians play vital role in caring for diabetes patients

Boston, MA – Previous research has shown that patients without a consistent primary care physician (PCP) have worse outcomes than those who do, but little is known about why this is true. New research from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) has brought to light the importance of the role of a primary care physician in a population of diabetes patients. Their findings are published in the December 10, 2012 issue of Diabetes Care. "We found that primary care physicians provide better care to diabetes patients when compared to other providers in a primary care setting ...

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Science11 Dec 2012

Words have feelings

Does the emotion in our voice have a lasting effect? According to Annett Schirmer and colleagues from the National University of Singapore, emotion helps us recognize words quicker and more accurately straight away. In the longer term however, we do not remember emotionally intoned speech as accurately as neutral speech. When we do remember the words, they have acquired an emotional value; for example words spoken in a sad voice are remembered as more negative than words spoken in a neutral voice. The study, looking at the role of emotion in word recognition memory, ...

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Medicine11 Dec 2012

NIH scientists reflect on gains in emerging infectious disease awareness, research and response

WHAT: In a new essay, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., and David Morens, M.D., reflect on what has been learned about emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) in the two decades since a major report from the U.S. Institute of Medicine rekindled interest in this important topic. Heightened awareness of EIDs is itself a countermeasure against disease, note the authors. The emergence of new diseases can now be monitored in real time online through Internet resources such as ProMED. In 2012 alone, such resources kept the ...

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Science11 Dec 2012

Best of both worlds: Hybrid approach sheds light on crystal structure solution

Understanding the arrangement of atoms in a solid — one of solids' fundamental properties — is vital to advanced materials research. For decades, two camps of researchers have been working to develop methods to understand these so-called crystal structures. "Solution" methods, championed by experimental researchers, draw on data from diffraction experiments, while "prediction" methods of computational materials scientists bypass experimental data altogether. While progress has been made, computational scientists still cannot make crystal structure predictions routinely. ...

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Medicine11 Dec 2012

Weekly dose reduces targeted drug's side effects, but not its activity against ALL

ATLANTA - A potent chemotherapy agent wrapped within a monoclonal antibody selectively destroys the malignant cells responsible for acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) in either weekly or monthly dosing, researchers report at the 54th ASH Annual Meeting and Exposition. This 'Trojan horse' assault on the cancer cells has significantly increased the response rate among patients with ALL, and now a clinical trial finds that weekly dosing works well and reduces side effects. "The CD22 antigen is a specific marker for B-cell malignancies and is expressed in more than 90 percent ...

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Technology11 Dec 2012

New system for aircraft forecasts potential storm hazards over oceans

Contact: David Hosansky hosansky@ucar.edu 303-497-8611 Zhenya Gallon, NCAR/UCAR Media Relations zhenya@ucar.edu 303-497-8607 National Center for Atmospheric Research/University Corporation for Atmospheric Research New system for aircraft forecasts potential storm hazards over oceans BOULDER—The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has developed a prototype system to help flights avoid major storms as they travel over remote ocean regions. The 8-hour forecasts of potentially dangerous atmospheric conditions are designed for pilots, air traffic ...

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