The findings appear in the current edition of the journal PLoS Biology. "Within our cells, we have communicating compartments called vesicles (a bubble-like membrane structure that stores and transports cellular products)," said Dr. Christopher Peters, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at BCM and lead author on the study. "These vesicles migrate through the cell, meet other vesicles and fuse. That fusion process is, in part, mediated through SNARE proteins that bring the vesicles together. How this happens has been in question for years." The ...

As scientific researchers become evermore competitive for scarce funding, scientific journals are increasing efforts to identify submissions that plagiarize the work of others. Still, it may take years to identify and retract the plagiarized papers and give credit to the actual researchers. "We need a better system," said Harold Garner, executive director of the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech. Garner discussed the problem and solution in a Comment in the January 4, 2012 issue of Nature and in a January 19, 2012 radio interview with NPR's Leonard Lopate. ...

Research involving scientists at The University of Nottingham has taken us a step closer to breeding hardier crops that can better adapt to different environmental conditions and fight off attack from parasites. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), the researchers have shown that they can alter root growth in the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, or thale cress, by controlling an important regulatory protein. Dr Ive De Smet, a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) David ...

New Rochelle, NY, January 24, 2012—The time for commercial development of gene therapy has come. Patients with diseases treatable and curable with gene therapy deserve access to the technology, which has demonstrated both its effectiveness and feasibility, says James Wilson, MD, PhD, Editor-in-Chief of Human Gene Therapy in a provocative commentary and accompanying videocast. Human Gene Therapy and Human Gene Therapy (HGT) Methods are peer-reviewed journals published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.. Until recently, gene therapy has been reserved for severe diseases with few ...

San Diego – Cytori Therapeutics (NASDAQ: CYTX) announced today the publication of previously reported six-month outcomes from APOLLO, the Company's European clinical trial evaluating adipose-derived stem and regenerative cells (ADRCs) in patients with acute myocardial infarction (heart attack or AMI), as Research Correspondence in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The APOLLO trial was a 14-patient, prospective, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, feasibility trial (Phase I/IIA) evaluating autologous ADRCs extracted with the Company's proprietary ...

A molecule embedded in the membrane of human liver cells that aids in cholesterol absorption also allows the entry of hepatitis C virus, the first step in hepatitis C infection, according to research at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine. The cholesterol receptor offers a promising new target for anti-viral therapy, for which an approved drug may already exist, say the researchers, whose findings were reported online in advance of publication in Nature Medicine. An estimated 4.1 million Americans are infected with hepatitis C virus, or HCV, which ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – In August 2010, an entomologist at the University of California, Riverside discovered a tiny fairyfly wasp in upstate New York that had never been seen in the United States until then. Nearly exactly a year later, he discovered the wasp in Irvine, Calif., strongly suggesting that the wasp is well established in the country. Called Gonatocerus ater, the wasp is about 1 millimeter long and arrived in North America from Europe. It lays its eggs inside the eggs of leafhoppers. Leafhopper females lay their eggs inside plant tissue. Gonatocerus ater ...

Hampton Inn Atlanta-Southlake Morrow GA Hotel offers affordable accommodations to participants and guests attending the Metropolitan Opera National Council auditions. Taking place at Clayton State University's Spivey Hall, the auditions will be held on Sunday, February 5, 2012. At the event, outstanding young vocalists from North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia will sing opera arias before a panel of expert judges, competing to advance to the national finals on stage at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Tickets are $35 and can be purchased through Spivey ...

Sheraton Atlanta Perimeter North / Dunwoody Hotel, located at Atlanta Perimeter Center, announces a new special savings package for travelers to enjoy. Guests who register for the SPG Better by the Night promotion can earn unlimited bonus Starpoints even faster. With every stay from January 9 through April 8, 2012, at this property and over 750 other participating hotels and resorts worldwide, guests earn double Starpoints on two-night stays and triple Starpoints on stays of three nights or longer. Register by March 15, 2012, and then book your stays to begin earning ...

Researchers have found a genetic variation predisposing children to six-times greater risk of developing metabolic syndrome when taking second-generation anti-psychotic medications. Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of conditions that are risk factors for cardiovascular disease. The study showed a close association with two conditions in particular: high blood pressure and elevated fasting blood sugar levels, which is a precursor to diabetes. The research is published today in the medical research journal Translational Psychiatry. "This is the first report of an underlying ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – A research team led by physicists at the University of California, Riverside has identified a property of "bilayer graphene" (BLG) that the researchers say is analogous to finding the Higgs boson in particle physics. Graphene, nature's thinnest elastic material, is a one-atom thick sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice. Because of graphene's planar and chicken wire-like structure, sheets of it lend themselves well to stacking. BLG is formed when two graphene sheets are stacked in a special manner. Like graphene, BLG has high current-carrying ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – On any given weekend, at least 10 percent of students at a single college could be hosting a party, and on average, party hosts who live off campus are drinking more and engaging in more alcohol-related problem behaviors than are the students attending their bashes, research suggests. In contrast, hosts of parties held on campus tend to drink less than do the students attending their gatherings, according to the study. The research also suggests that college party hosts are more likely than the students attending parties to be male, living off campus, ...

Santa Barbara, CA –The Bren School-based authors of a study published Jan. 20 in the journal PLoS ONE have observed toxicity to marine organisms resulting from exposure to a nanoparticle that had not previously been shown to be toxic under similar conditions. Lead author and assistant research biologist Robert Miller and co-authors Arturo Keller and Hunter Lenihan – both Bren School professors and lead scientists at the UC Center for Environmental Implications of Nanotechnology (UC CEIN) – Bren Phd student Samuel Bennett, and Scott Pease, a former UCSB undergraduate ...

The fate of the world's great whale species commands global attention as a result of heated debate between pro and anti-whaling advocates, but the fate of smaller marine mammals is less understood, specifically because the deliberate and accidental catching and killing of dolphins, porpoises, manatees, and other warm-blooded aquatic species are rarely studied or monitored. To shed more light on the issue, researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society and Okapi Wildlife Associates have conducted an exhaustive global study of human consumption of marine mammals using ...

HOUSTON -- Rice University physicists have gone to extremes to prove that Isaac Newton's classical laws of motion can apply in the atomic world: They've built an accurate model of part of the solar system inside a single atom of potassium. In a new paper published this week in Physical Review Letters, Rice's team and collaborators at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Vienna University of Technology showed they could cause an electron in an atom to orbit the nucleus in precisely the same way that Jupiter's Trojan asteroids orbit the sun. The findings uphold a ...

When it comes to conserving the world's orchids, not all forests are equal. In a paper to be published Jan. 25 in the journal Molecular Ecology, Smithsonian ecologists revealed that an orchid's fate hinges on two factors: a forest's age and its fungi. Roughly 10 percent of all plant species are orchids, making them the largest plant family on Earth. But habitat loss has rendered many threatened or endangered. This is partly due to their intimate relationship with the soil. Orchids depend entirely on microscopic fungi in the early stages of their lives. Without the ...

BOSTON, MA -- Lifestyle counseling, practiced as part of routine care for people with diabetes, helps people more quickly lower blood glucose, blood pressure and cholesterol levels and keep them under control, according to a large, long-term study published in the February issue of Diabetes Care. Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) conducted a retrospective cohort study of more than 30,000 people with diabetes who received diet, exercise and weight-loss counseling in a primary care setting over the course of at least two years (with an average follow-up ...

Amsterdam, NL -- The sudden popularity of tablet computers such as the Apple iPad® has not allowed for the development of guidelines to optimize users' comfort and well-being. In a new study published in Work: A Journal of Prevention, Assessment, and Rehabilitation, researchers from Harvard School of Public Health, Microsoft Corporation, and Brigham and Women's Hospital report that head and neck posture during tablet computer use can be improved by placing the tablet higher to avoid low gaze angles, and through the use of a case that provides optimal viewing angles. "Compared ...

Smart Software, Inc., provider of industry-leading demand forecasting, planning, and inventory optimization solutions, today announced that two Latin American companies, Volvo Parts in Mexico, and Preca in Venezuela, purchased its flagship product, SmartForecasts , through its new reseller in Mexico and Latin America, Grupo de Outsourcing Tecnologico, S.A (GOTSA). Both customers are using the software's patented intermittent demand forecasting capabilities to optimize their inventories, reduce costs, and improve service levels. GOTSA defined and configured both solutions, ...

Adding the acid reflux drug lansoprazole to a standard inhaled steroid treatment for asthma does not improve asthma control in children who have no symptom of acid reflux, according to a new study funded in part by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of the National Institutes of Health. Lansoprazole therapy slightly increased the risk of sore throats and other respiratory problems in children, however. Results of this study, which was also sponsored by the American Lung Association (ALA), will appear Jan. 25 in the Journal of the American Medical ...

Scientists at USC have uncovered evidence that even when hydrothermal sea vents go dormant and their blistering warmth turns to frigid cold, life goes on. Or rather, it is replaced. A team led by USC microbiologist Katrina Edwards found that the microbes that thrive on hot fluid methane and sulfur spewed by active hydrothermal vents are supplanted, once the vents go cold, by microbes that feed on the solid iron and sulfur that make up the vents themselves. These findings – based on samples collected for Edwards by US Navy deep sea submersible Alvin (famed for its ...

Ignacio Clemente, CSIC researcher (Institució Milà I Fontanals) and manager of the project, explains: "Until now, it was thought that the Mesolithic groups had seasonal as opposed to permanent settlements. According to the results obtained during the excavations, in both Mesolithic and Neolithic periods, the human group that lived in the Dubna river basin, near Moscow, carried out productive activities during the entire year". According to Clemente and his team, during Neolithic and Mesolithic periods, the inhabitants of this region known as Zamostje 2 preferred to hunt ...

On Friday, January 27, Concurrency and Microsoft Corporation are teaming up to offer the Milwaukee business community insight into best-practice Microsoft marketing automation and web content management techniques. This educational event is part of Concurrency's ongoing series of hands-on sessions that highlight cutting-edge technology designed to boost business productivity. Concurrency and Microsoft will demonstrate how to use Microsoft's Dynamics CRM 2011 capabilities to manage both sales and marketing across varied media. This new tool set revolutionizes how companies ...

The HCG Diet is famous for producing rapid weight loss results in a very short amount of time. HCG Dieters are rewarded with high fat loss, but maintaining their new weight can be difficult. This is because of the overnight transition a severely restricted diet, to one with hardly any restrictions at all. At this stage it is critical to find foods that will help them maintain their weight. The HCG Diet works by combining HCG, a supplement, with the specific Very Low Calorie Diet (VLCD) which consists of only about 20 foods to choose from daily. During this time, typical ...

Local aspiring male and female vocalists who missed the opportunity to dazzle the American Idol judges with their talent will have a chance to compete for a shot at fame. For the sixth consecutive year, Jam Sports, in conjunction with Billboard Magazine will host the Soul Search singing competition on Saturday, January 28 to kick off the week of activities during Super Bowl XVLI in Indianapolis, IN. Exclusive to Indiana state residents ages 5 to 50, Soul Search will showcase the best and brightest unsigned amateur vocal talent who will perform before a celebrity panel of ...