A new video article in JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, demonstrates procedures to harvest and process synthetic spider silk from bacteria. The procedure presented in the video article revolutionizes the spider silk purification process by standardizing a key step known as "post-spin." In this step, silk molecules are stretched by a mechanical actuator to increase fiber strength. These mechanical improvements produce uniform spider silk and remove human error from the spinning process. As a result, the synthetic silk is much closer to the natural fibers produced ...

BIOLOGY -- Waterlogged protein . . . Proteins' biological functions, such as the ability to metabolize drugs in our bodies, are known to rely heavily on the presence of water, but mechanisms behind the relationship have remained unclear. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory have provided new evidence that suggests water is even more involved in protein dynamics than previously thought. Through a novel combination of supercomputer simulations and neutron scattering experiments, the research team found that the ...

PITTSBURGH— As an old proverb goes, "before borrowing money from a friend, decide which you need most." New research from Carnegie Mellon University's George Loewenstein and the University of Vienna's Linda Dezsö provides evidence of the pitfalls of making or receiving personal loans. Published in the Journal of Economic Psychology, the study is the first to systematically investigate the contours and consequences of loans between peers, such as friends, siblings, and coworkers and shows how self-serving bias behavior affects future relationships. "This research ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Severe sepsis, a body's dangerous defensive response against an infection, not only diminishes the quality of life for patients – it puts their spouses at a greater risk of depression, a joint University of Michigan Health System and University of Washington School of Medicine study shows. Wives whose husbands were hospitalized for severe sepsis were nearly four times more likely to experience substantial depressive symptoms, according to the study released July 18 ahead of the August publish date in Critical Care Medicine. Sepsis happens when an ...

Forget bad guys and gunfire: Being a police officer can be hazardous to your health in other ways. Researchers at the University of Iowa have found that police officers who sleep fewer than six hours per night are more susceptible to chronic fatigue and health problems, such as being overweight or obese, and contracting diabetes or heart disease. The study found that officers working the evening or night shifts were 14 times more likely to get less restful sleep than day-shift officers, and also were subjected to more back-to-back shifts, exacerbating their sleep deficit. The ...

(Washington) – "We know that the current Medicare payment system is not serving the needs of patients, physicians or taxpayers," David L. Bronson, MD, FACP, president of the American College of Physicians (ACP), today told the House Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Health. "Congress needs to do its part by repealing the SGR, once and for all. But the medical profession needs to do its part by leading the adoption of innovative models to align payment policies with the value of care provided to patients." Dr. Bronson pointed to several promising payment and delivery ...

New Rochelle, NY, July 18, 2012— Approximately 1 in 3 Americans suffers from chronic sleep deprivation and another 10-15% of the population has chronic insomnia. Sleep disorders can profoundly affect a person's whole life and have been linked to a range of diseases, including obesity, depression, anxiety, and inflammatory disorders. Over-the-counter herbal remedies are often used to treat insomnia, but surprisingly, very little research has been done to study their efficacy, according to an article in Alternative and Complementary Therapies, published by Mary Ann Liebert, ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Nearly a quarter of college women try smoking tobacco with a hookah, or water pipe, for the first time during their freshman year, according to new research from The Miriam Hospital's Center for Behavioral and Preventive Medicine. The study, published online by Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, suggests a possible link to alcohol and marijuana use. Researchers found the more alcohol women consumed, the more likely they were to experiment with hookah smoking, while women who used marijuana engaged in hookah smoking more frequently than their peers. They ...

Researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center and colleagues have demonstrated that the inhibition of signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) in mouse models of mantle cell lymphoma (MCL), an aggressive and incurable subtype of B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma that becomes resistant to treatment, can harness the immune system to eradicate residual malignant cells responsible for disease relapse. Their study appears in a recent issue of Cancer Research, published by the American Association for Cancer Research. "Despite good initial response to first-line treatment ...

Scientists at The University of Nottingham believe they've found a way of fighting obesity — with a pioneering technique which uses thermal imaging. This heat-seeking technology is being used to trace our reserves of brown fat — the body's 'good fat' — which plays a key role in how quickly our body can burn calories as energy. This special tissue known as Brown Adipose Tissue, or brown fat, produces 300 times more heat than any other tissue in the body. Potentially the more brown fat we have the less likely we are to lay down excess energy or food as white fat. Michael ...

The University of Central Florida has detected what could be its first planet, only two-thirds the size of Earth and located right around the corner, cosmically speaking, at a mere 33light- years away. The exoplanet candidate called UCF 1.01, is close to its star, so close it goes around the star in 1.4 days. The planet's surface likely reaches temperatures of more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The discoverers believe that it has no atmosphere, is only two-thirds the gravity of Earth and that its surface may be volcanic or molten. "We have found strong evidence for ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A team of archaeologists led by Brown University's Stephen Houston has uncovered a pyramid, part of the Maya archaeological site at El Zotz, Guatemala. The ornately decorated structure is topped by a temple covered in a series of masks depicting different phases of the sun, as well as deeply modeled and vibrantly painted stucco throughout. The team began uncovering the temple, called the Temple of the Night Sun, in 2009. Dating to about 350 to 400 A.D., the temple sits just behind the previously discovered royal tomb, atop the Diablo ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Most U.S. adults support laws that allow teens to get medical care for sexually transmitted infections without parental consent. But when asked about the vaccine against the human papillomavirus (HPV), most adults want parents to have the final say on whether their teen or pre-teen gets the shots. The University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health recently asked a national sample of adults about allowing adolescents age 12 to 17 years old to receive the HPV vaccinations without parental consent. Only 45 percent ...

It's summer. For many of us, summer is a time synonymous with fresh corn, one of the major field crops produced in the United States. In 2011, corn was planted on more than 92 million acres in the U.S., helping the nation continue its trend as the world's largest exporter of the crop. Corn is a nitrogen-loving plant. To achieve desired production levels, most U.S. farmers apply synthetic nitrogen fertilizer to their fields every year. Once nitrogen fertilizer hits the ground, however, it's hard to contain and is easily lost to groundwater, rivers, oceans and the atmosphere. "That's ...

BEER-SHEVA, Israel, July 17, 2012 –Sleep deprivation in the first few hours after exposure to a significantly stressful threat actually reduces the risk of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), according to a study by researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) and Tel Aviv University. The new study was published in the international scientific journal, Neuropsychopharmacology. It revealed in a series of experiments that sleep deprivation of approximately six hours immediately after exposure to a traumatic event reduces the development of post trauma-like ...

Using a two-photon microscope capable of peering deep within living tissue, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have found new evidence that alpha-synuclein protein build-up inside neurons causes them to not only become "leaky," but also to misfire due to calcium fluxes. The findings – the first recorded in vivo using a transgenic mouse model of Parkinson's disease – are published in the July 18 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience and provide new insights into how Parkinson's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders known as ...

U.S. Forest Service scientists have found that prescribed fires with the heat insulation of leaf litter and soil can help restore oak ecosystems. Forest Service researchers are helping land managers find the best time to use prescribed fire when oak regeneration from acorns is a concern. "Acorns inside the leaf litter or in the soil are for the most part protected from fire," says Cathryn Greenberg, Forest Service Southern Research Station (SRS) researcher and lead author of the study published in July in the journal Forest Ecology and Management. "However, when acorns ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Climate change, habitat destruction, pollution and invasive species are all involved in the global crisis of amphibian declines and extinctions, researchers suggest in a new analysis, but increasingly these forces are causing actual mortality in the form of infectious disease. Amphibians are now, and always have been hosts for a wide range of infectious organisms, including viruses, bacteria and fungi, scientists said in a review published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. But in recent decades, disease seems to have taken a more ...

Patients who are frequently hospitalized account for a disproportionate amount of health care spending in the United States. Working with a $6.1 million grant, a new University of Chicago Medicine program will test whether an updated version of the traditional general practitioner can reduce spending while also improving care for these patients. Under the new model, funded by a Health Care Innovation Award from the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation, multidisciplinary teams led by a comprehensive care physician (CCP) will care for patients in both outpatient and ...

Trees, bushes and other greenery growing in the concrete-and-glass canyons of cities can reduce levels of two of the most worrisome air pollutants by eight times more than previously believed, a new study has found. A report on the research appears in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology. Thomas Pugh and colleagues explain that concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and microscopic particulate matter (PM) — both of which can be harmful to human health — exceed safe levels on the streets of many cities. Past research suggested that trees and other green ...

The widespread practice of allowing laboratory rats and mice to eat as much as they want may be affecting the outcome of experiments in which scientists use these "test-tubes-on-four-feet" to test new drugs and other substances for toxicity and other effects. That's the conclusion of a new analysis published in ACS' journal Chemical Research in Toxicology. Laboratory mice and rats serve as stand-ins for people for research that cannot be done on humans. In the article, Gale Carey and Lisa Merrill point out that the millions of lab rodents used in laboratory studies each ...

Scientists have discovered a way to make worker bees produce an enhanced version of royal jelly (RJ) – the super-nutritious substance that dictates whether larvae become workers or queens, and that is also renowned as a health supplement for people. Their study, which found that the super RJ that makes queen bee larvae grow 2-3 times larger than normal, appears in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Chia-Nan Chen and colleagues explain that royal jelly is a thick liquid made up of proteins, sugars and fats that is secreted by glands in the throats and jaws ...

Suppliers of the orange, vanilla and other flavor and fragrance ingredients used in hundreds of foods, beverages and personal care products are putting their faith in microbes as new sources for these substances. That migration away from the natural plant oils used for centuries to delight the taste buds and nose is the topic of a story in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News. C&EN is the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society. Melody M. Bomgardner, C&EN senior business editor, points out that manufacturers ...

Building on previous work with the botanical abscisic acida, researchers in the Nutritional Immunology and Molecular Medicine Laboratory (NIMML) have discovered that abscisic acid has anti-inflammatory effects in the lungs as well as in the gut. The results will be published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry. "While the immune effects of abscisic acid are well understood in the gut, less was known about its effects in the respiratory tract. We've shown definitively that not only does abscisic acid ameliorate disease activity and lung inflammatory pathology, it ...

What makes soldiers abuse prisoners? How could Nazi officials condemn thousands of Jews to gas chamber deaths? What's going on when underlings help cover up a financial swindle? For years, researchers have tried to identify the factors that drive people to commit cruel and brutal acts and perhaps no one has contributed more to this knowledge than psychological scientist Stanley Milgram. Just over 50 years ago, Milgram embarked on what were to become some of the most famous studies in psychology. In these studies, which ostensibly examined the effects of punishment on ...