Researchers at National Jewish Health have discovered a novel target for the treatment of food allergies. Erwin Gelfand, MD, and his colleagues report in the October 2012 issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology that levels of the enzyme Pim 1 kinase rise in the small intestines of peanut-allergic mice. Inhibiting activity of Pim 1 markedly reduced the allergic response to peanuts. "Pim 1, and its associated transcription factor, Runx3, play a crucial role in allergic reactions to peanuts," said Dr. Gelfand, senior author and chair of pediatrics at National ...

Montreal, November 1, 2012 – As urban populations expand, downtown buildings are going nowhere but up. The huge energy needs of these skyscrapers mean that these towers are not only office buildings, they're polluters with smokestacks billowing out toxins from the rooftop. Our cities are dirtier than we think. New research from Concordia University just might clean them up. By examining the trajectory and amount of air pollution from a building to its neighbours downwind, Concordia researchers Ted Stathopoulos and Bodhisatta Hajra have come up with environmentally friendly ...

Boulder, CO, USA – How have humans influenced Earth? Can geoscientists measure when human impacts began overtaking those of Earth's other inhabitants and that of the natural Earth system? Responding to increasing scientific recognition that humans have become the foremost agent of change at Earth's surface, organizers of this GSA technical session have brought together speakers and poster presentations from a variety of sources in order to answer these questions and define the "Geomorphology of the Anthropocene." "Anthropocene" is a fairly new term (first used ca. 2002 ...

Contact: David Hosansky hosansky@ucar.edu 303-497-8611 National Center for Atmospheric Research/University Corporation for Atmospheric Research Zhenya Gallon zhenya@ucar.edu 303-497-8607 National Center for Atmospheric Research/University Corporation for Atmospheric Research Christine Wiedinmyer christin@ucar.edu 303-497-1414 National Center for Atmospheric Research Mary Hayden mhayden@ucar.edu 303-497-8116 National Center for Atmospheric Research Scientists launch international study of open-fire cooking and air quality BOULDER -- Expanding ...

SALT LAKE CITY—Many patients who have genetic testing for Lynch syndrome, a hereditary predisposition to colon cancer, receive the inconclusive result "variants of uncertain clinical significance." This can be a problem, as people with Lynch syndrome have a much higher probability to develop colon cancer, and often develop colon cancer at an earlier age than is common among the general population; consequently, they need to begin screening at a much younger age. Now, between two-thirds and three-fourths of these genetic variants can be classified into categories that ...

Vision may be less important to "seeing" than is the brain's ability to process points of light into complex images, according to a new study of the fruit fly visual system currently published in the online journal Nature Communications. University of Virginia researchers have found that the very simple eyes of fruit fly larvae, with only 24 total photoreceptors (the human eye contains more than 125 million), provide just enough light or visual input to allow the animal's relatively large brain to assemble that input into images. "It blows open how we think about vision," ...

Physician-researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine have reported the first effective therapy for a class of previously untreatable and potentially life-threatening tumors often found in children. Announcing their findings in the online first edition of Lancet Oncology, the researchers said the drug imatinib mesylate, marketed as Gleevec as a treatment for chronic myeloid leukemia, provided relief to a significant number of patients with plexiform neurofibromas, tumors caused by neurofibromatosis type 1, or NF1. "Although this was a small study, the results ...

The most-distant, super-luminous supernovae found to date have been observed by an international team, including Raymond Carlberg of the University of Toronto's Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics. The stellar explosions would have occurred at a time when the universe was much younger and probably soon after the Big Bang. "The objects are both unusually bright and unusually slow to fade. These are properties that are consistent with what is known as pair-instability supernova, a rare mechanism for explosion which is expected to happen for high-mass stars with almost ...

Tendon injuries affect athletic horses at all levels. Researchers from the University of Connecticut are studying the use of stem cells in treating equine tendon injuries. Their findings were published Oct. 16 in the Journal of Animal Science Papers in Press. Tendon injuries in horses tend to worsen over time as damage to the tendon creates lesions. Currently, horse owners treat tendon injuries by resting the horse and then carefully exercising the horse to control the growth of scar tissue in the tendon. Unfortunately, this treatment does not always work. "These injuries ...

New Orleans, LA – Research led by Chu Chen, PhD, Associate Professor of Neuroscience at LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans, has identified an enzyme called Monoacylglycerol lipase (MAGL) as a new therapeutic target to treat or prevent Alzheimer's disease. The study was published online November 1, 2012 in the Online Now section of the journal Cell Reports. The research team found that inactivation of MAGL, best known for its role in degrading a cannabinoid produced in the brain, reduced the production and accumulation of beta amyloid plaques, a pathological hallmark ...

Many educators have long believed that when words differ on only one sound, early readers can learn the rules of phonics by focusing on what is different between the words. This is thought to be a critical gateway to reading words and sentences. But scientists at the University of Iowa are turning that thinking on its head. A recent study published in "Developmental Psychology" shows certain kinds of variation in words may help early readers learn better. When children see the same phonics regularities, embedded in words with more variation, they may learn these crucial ...

Using advanced microscopes equipped with tissue-penetrating laser light, cancer imaging experts at Johns Hopkins have developed a promising, new way to accurately analyze the distinctive patterns of ultra-thin collagen fibers in breast tumor tissue samples and to help tell if the cancer has spread. The Johns Hopkins researchers say their crisscrossing optical images, made by shining a laser back and forth across a biopsied tissue sample a few millionths of a meter thick, can potentially be used with other tests to more accurately determine the need for lymph node biopsy ...

Fairfax, Va. -- A malarial drug is showing promise in stopping breast cancer before it starts, Mason researchers are discovering during a clinical trial. "The bold long-term goal is a short-term oral treatment that prevents breast cancer by killing the precursor cells that initiate breast cancer," says Lance Liotta, co-director of Mason's Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine (CAPMM). "And it's looking hopeful." The PINC trial (Preventing Invasive Neoplasia with Chloroquine) targets ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS, the most common type of pre-invasive ...

Predicting how atherosclerosis, osteoporosis or cancer will progress or respond to drugs in individual patients is difficult. In a new study, researchers took another step toward that goal by developing a technique able to predict from a blood sample the amount of cathepsins—protein-degrading enzymes known to accelerate these diseases—a specific person would produce. This patient-specific information may be helpful in developing personalized approaches to treat these tissue-destructive diseases. "We measured significant variability in the amount of cathepsins produced ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Stanford University School of Medicine scientists have used bioengineered mice with livers composed largely of human cells to characterize a drug about to enter early-stage clinical development for combating hepatitis C. Tests using the new mouse model accurately predicted significant aspects of the drug's behavior in humans — including its interaction with another drug and the profile of its major breakdown products in the body (called metabolites) — far more accurately than would have been achieved using current methods. The study will be published ...

PITTSBURGH, Oct. 31, 2012 – Reforming Medicare payments based on large geographic regions may be too bluntly targeted to promote the best use of health care resources, a new analysis from the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health suggests. The analysis will be published in the Nov. 1 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. "Much policy attention has been drawn to the large geographic variation in health care spending across regions, and for good reason – because regional variation points to inefficient use of resources," said lead author Yuting ...

Berkeley — The more time it takes for an earthquake fault to heal, the faster the shake it will produce when it finally ruptures, according to a new study by engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, who conducted their work using a tabletop model of a quake fault. "The high frequency waves of an earthquake — the kind that produces the rapid jolts — are not well understood because they are more difficult to measure and more difficult to model," said study lead author Gregory McLaskey, a former UC Berkeley Ph.D. student in civil and environmental engineering. ...

The well-established elevated risk of melanoma among people with red hair and fair skin may be caused by more than just a lack of natural protection against ultraviolet (UV) radiation. In an article receiving Advance Online Publication in Nature, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cutaneous Biology Research Center (CBRC)and Cancer Center researchers report finding that the type of skin pigment predominantly found in red-haired, fair-skinned individuals may itself contribute to the development of melanoma. "We've known for a long time that people with red hair and ...

This month's special issue of Physics World is devoted to animal physics, and includes science writer Stephen Ornes explanation of how pond skaters effortlessly skip across water leaving nothing but a small ripple in their wake. As Ornes writes, our current understanding of the mechanisms adopted by the pond skater is down to the efforts of David Hu, who as a mathematics graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spent four years studying their behaviour. Hu, along with his PhD supervisor John Bush, found that pond skaters use the middle of their three ...

A new study suggests that increasing the amount of sleep that adults get could lead to reduced food intake, but the hormonal process differs between men and women. "Restricting sleep in healthy, normal weight participants has limited effects on metabolic risk factors and may affect food intake regulating hormones differently in men and women," said Marie-Pierre St-Onge, PhD, FAHA, the study's principal investigator. "We were surprised by the lack of a significant effect of sleep on glucose and insulin, leptin, and sex differences in the hunger-stimulating hormone ghrelin ...

Completing the second phase of the 1000 Genomes Project, a multinational team of scientists reports that they have sampled a total of 1092 individuals from 14 different populations and sequenced their full genomes. The researchers described the feat as a collegial effort to equip biologists and physicians with information that can be used to understand the normal range of human genetic variants so that a patient's disease genome can be interpreted in a broader context. A report on the research, published online in Nature on Nov. 1 represents the culmination of five years ...

HOUSTON -- (Nov. 1, 2012) – First, there was the single human reference genome completed in 2003. Then there was the HapMap project to identify the common genetic variants occurring in human beings with the first map published in 2005. Now an international consortium has released the first phase of the 1,000 Genomes Project that profiles the rare and common genetic variations in 1,092 people drawn from 14 human populations from Europe, Africa, East Asia and the Americas. The next phase of the project will include as many as 3,000 individuals, said Dr. Fuli Yu (www.bcm.edu/genetics/index.cfm?pmid=23673 ), ...

Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) – inflammatory diseases of the gastrointestinal tract – have puzzled the scientific community for decades. Ten years ago, researchers recognized that both genes and the environment contributed to these diseases but knew little about precisely how and why illness occurred. To begin to narrow in on the key pathways involved, they would need thousands of patients' samples, millions of data points, and the commitment of physicians and scientists at dozens of institutions. Today, researchers from across the CD and UC communities ...

Fear of math can activate regions of the brain linked with the experience of physical pain and visceral threat detection, according to research published Oct 31 by Ian Lyons and colleagues at the University of Chicago in the open access journal PLOS ONE. The researchers found that in individuals who experience high levels of anxiety when facing math tasks, the anticipation of math increases activity in regions of the brain associated with the physical sensation of pain. The higher an individual's math anxiety, the more such neural activity was increased. According ...

Children as young as five are generous when others are aware of their actions, but antisocial when sharing with a recipient who can't see them, according to research published Oct. 31 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Kristin Lyn Leimgruber and colleagues from Yale University. Adults are more likely to behave in ways that enhance their reputation when they are being watched or their actions are likely to be made public than when they are anonymous, but this study examines the origins of such behavior in young children for the first time. For their study, the researchers ...