A new study to be presented at the Society for Experimental Biology meeting on 30th June has shown that caffeine boosts power in older muscles, suggesting the stimulant could aid elderly people to maintain their strength, reducing the incidence of falls and injuries. For adults in their prime, caffeine helps muscles to produce more force. But as we age, our muscles naturally change and become weaker. Sports scientists at Coventry University looked for the first time at whether these age-related changes in muscle would alter the effect of caffeine. They found that ...

On the centenary of Scott's ill-fated Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole, a study to be presented at the Society for Experimental Biology meeting on Sunday 1st July has shown that Scott's men starved to death because they were consuming far too few calories to fuel their daily exertion. The researchers, environmental physiologist Dr Lewis Halsey of the University of Roehampton and polar explorer and physician Dr Mike Stroud, examined the voyage in light of today's knowledge of nutrition and how our bodies respond to extreme exercise, cold, and high altitude. They ...

New research published in BMC Genetics shows that the rhesus macaque has three times as much genetic variation than humans. However despite much of this extra variation being within genes, it does not affect protein function. Consequently damaging variations are at similar levels in macaques and humans - indicating a strong selection pressure to maintain gene function regardless of mutation rate or population size. Humans and rhesus macaques shared a common ancestor approximately 25 million years ago. Although there are now over seven billion humans on the planet only ...

Millions of people worldwide are exposed to arsenic from contaminated water, and we are all exposed to arsenic via the food we eat. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Nutrition Journal has demonstrated that people who ate more dietary vitamin B12 and animal protein had lower levels of arsenic (measured by deposition in toenails). Total dietary fat, animal fat, vegetable fat and saturated fat were also all associated with lower levels of arsenic, while omega 3 fatty acids, such as those found in fish oil, were associated with increased arsenic. Long ...

SAN FRANCISCO, CA—June 28, 2012—Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes and an international team of researchers have generated a human model of Huntington's disease—directly from the skin cells of patients with the disease. For years, scientists have studied Huntington's disease primarily in post-mortem brain tissue or laboratory animals modified to mimic the disease. Today, in Cell Stem Cell, the international team shows how they developed a human model of Huntington's disease, which causes a diverse range of neurological impairments. The new model should help scientists ...

Baltimore, MD — In mammals, most lipids (such as fatty acids and cholesterol) are absorbed into the body via the small intestine. The complexity of the cells and fluids that inhabit this organ make it very difficult to study in a laboratory setting. New research from Carnegie's Steven Farber, James Walters and Jennifer Anderson reveals a technique that allows scientists to watch lipid metabolism in live zebrafish. This method enabled them to describe new aspects of lipid absorption that could have broad applications for human health. Their work is published in Chemistry ...

For many grocery shoppers, those perfect, red tomatoes from the store just can't match the flavor from the home garden. Now, researchers at Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research at Cornell University, USDA and the University of California at Davis have decoded a gene that contributes to the level of sugar, carbohydrates and carotenoids in tomatoes. (Science, June 29, 2012) Cuong Nguyen, a Cornell graduate student in plant breeding working at the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI), along with colleagues at BTI, USDA, UC Davis, Universidad Politecénica de Valencia (Spain), ...

LOS ANGELES (EMBARGOED UNTIL NOON EDT ON JUNE 28, 2012) – Cedars-Sinai scientists have joined with expert colleagues around the globe in using stem cells to develop a laboratory model for Huntington's disease, allowing researchers for the first time to test directly on human cells potential treatments for this fatal, inherited disorder. As explained in a paper published June 28 on the Cell Stem Cell website and scheduled for print in the journal's Aug. 3 issue, scientists at Cedars-Sinai's Regenerative Medicine Institute and the University of Wisconsin took skin cells ...

Christina Wang, M.D., lead investigator at Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute (LA BioMed) – one of the leading biomedical research institutes in the country – recently completed a study utilizing a new contraceptive gel that has the potential to be developed as a user controlled chemical birth control agent for males. The gel, which contains testosterone and a synthetic progestin called Nestorone, sharply lowers sperm counts in men with few side effects. The study conducted at LA BioMed and the University of Washington is funded by the National Institutes of Child ...

Johns Hopkins researchers, working with an international consortium, say they have generated stem cells from skin cells from a person with a severe, early-onset form of Huntington's disease (HD), and turned them into neurons that degenerate just like those affected by the fatal inherited disorder. By creating "HD in a dish," the researchers say they have taken a major step forward in efforts to better understand what disables and kills the cells in people with HD, and to test the effects of potential drug therapies on cells that are otherwise locked deep in the brain. Although ...

The visual information from eyes is sent into the brain unconsciously even if you are not aware. One of examples of unconscious seeing is a phenomenon of "blindsight" [Subjects have no awareness, but their brains can see ] in subjects with visual impairment, caused by the damage of a part of the brain called the visual cortex. Although it is already reported that the patients with damage in the visual cortex, who were not aware of seeing, can walk and avoid obstacles, it was not proved whether this was really blindsight. In this new study, the international collaborative ...

Not lying is regarded as a learned and well-known rule of honesty among 14 and 15-year-olds at Zurich's high schools. Additional theoretical moral knowledge also includes conventional rules of honesty such as not using unfair aids during school tests or forging parents' signatures. What might seem like a duty to live up to school expectations at face value is actually a very different story beneath the surface. After all, dishonest practices are permitted for young people in certain classroom situations and with individual teachers. "In such cases, young people deem it ...

The journal Nature has published a study analysing the lines of arrested growth (LAG) in the bones of around a hundred ruminants, representative of the specific and ecological diversity of that group of mammals. The results show that the presence of these lines is not an indicator of an ectothermic physiology (does not generate internal heat), as had previously been thought, since all warm-blooded mammals have them. The study therefore dismantles the key argument of the hypothesis that dinosaurs could have been cold-blooded reptiles. The work was carried out by researchers ...

A characteristic feature of most animals is their ability to move quickly with the help of their musculature. Animals that can move are able to flee, hunt for prey, travel long distances or conquer new habitats. The evolution of muscles was thus a fundamental step during animal evolution. While the structure and function of muscles, especially of vertebrates, have been intensively studied, the evolutionary origin of smooth and striated muscles has so far been enigmatic. Comparative genome and gene expression studies, performed by researchers Patrick Steinmetz, Johanna Kraus ...

Genetic diversity arises through the interplay of mutation, selection and genetic drift. In most scientific models, mutants have a fitness value which remains constant throughout. Based on this value, they compete with other types in the population and either die out or become established. However, evolutionary game theory considers constant fitness values to be a special case. It holds that the fitness of a mutation also depends on the frequency of the mutation. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön and the University of British Columbia ...

RUB biologists have deliberately transformed stem cells from the spinal cord of mice into immature nerve cells. This was achieved by changing the cellular environment, known as the extracellular matrix, using the substance sodium chlorate. Via sugar side chains, the extracellular matrix determines which cell type a stem cell can generate. "Influencing precursor cells pharmacologically so that they transform into a particular type of cell can help in cell replacement therapies in future" says Prof. Dr. Stefan Wiese, head of the Molecular Cell Biology work group. "Therapies, ...

Scientists at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research at the University of Copenhagen have used a new method to assemble a massive catalogue of data on proteins. This gives them unprecedented insight into a process called protein phosphorylation. The research was recently published in the scientific journal Nature Communications. Postdoc Alicia Lundby, from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research, says: "Phosphorylation changes are really important to our understanding of cancer and other diseases. Although the study of phosphorylation ...

Over the last decade, an average of 60,000 km2 of the Baltic Sea bottom has suffered from hypoxia without enough oxygen to support its normal ecosystem. Several large-scale geo-engineering interventions are currently on the table as proposed solutions to this problem. Researchers from Lund University are calling for geo-engineering efforts that mix oxygen into the Deep Baltic to be abandoned. In the June 28 edition of Nature, researchers warn of the unforeseen effects of geo-engineering to relieve the lack of oxygen in bottom waters. "Such radical remediation measures ...

Research carried out at the University of Southampton has concluded that participants in drug trials should be better informed about the potential significant benefits and possible side-effects of placebos. Placebos are traditionally thought of as 'inert' pills, given in trials to act as a yardstick or constant by which to measure the effects of new 'active' drugs, known in clinical trials as the 'target treatment'. However, placebos themselves have been shown to create substantial health changes in patients. "We believe the health changes associated with placebos ...

Scientists have discovered a new gene in the influenza virus that helps the virus control the body's response to infection. Although this control is exerted by the virus, surprisingly it reduces the impact of the infection. The findings will help researchers better understand how flu can cause severe infections, as well as inform research into new treatments. Researchers found when the virus gene – called PA-X – was active, mice infected with flu subsequently recovered. When the PA-X gene did not work properly, the immune system was found to overreact. This made ...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – June 28, 2012 – Taser shots to the chest are no more dangerous than those delivered to other body locations, according to a new study by one of the country's leading experts on the devices. William P. Bozeman, M.D., an associate professor of emergency medicine at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, and colleagues reviewed 1,201 cases of real-life Taser uses by law enforcement agencies but found none in which the devices could be linked to cardiac complications, even when the Taser probes landed on the upper chest area and may have delivered a shock ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The Secure Shell, or SSH, is a popular program that lets computer users log onto remote machines. Software developers use it for large collaborative projects, students use it to work from university servers, customers of commercial cloud-computing services use it access their accounts, and system administrators use it to manage computers on their networks. First released in 1995, SSH was designed for an Internet consisting of stationary machines, and it hasn't evolved with the mobile Internet. Among other problems, it can't handle roaming: If you close ...

If popular karaoke bars and the long audition lines for American Idol demonstrate anything, it's that people like to express themselves through song — and the bigger the audience, the better. Now researchers at Tel Aviv University have found the same trait in small, rodent-like mammals called hyraxes, indigenous to Africa and the Middle East. According to Prof. Eli Geffen and PhD candidate Amiyaal Ilany of TAU's Department of Zoology, hyrax vocalizations or "songs" go a long way towards communicating the singer's unique identity. Each one has unique songs that communicate ...

Bethesda, MD—Not only does the type of flu virus affect a patient's outcome, but a new research report appearing in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology suggests that the number of viruses involved in the initial infection may be important too. Scientists from Canada found that when mice were infected by relatively high concentrations of the flu virus, they not only developed immunity against the virus that infected them, but this also promoted the generation of a type of immune cell in the lungs poised to rapidly react against infections with other strains of the flu, as well. ...

In searching for better flame retardants for home furnishings—a large source of fuel in house fires—National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers defied the conventional wisdom and literally hit a wall, one made of clay. It wasn't a dead end, but rather a surprising result that may lead to a new generation of nonhalogenated, sustainable flame retardant technology for polyurethane foam. The thick, fast-forming coating that the NIST team created has a uniformly high concentration of flame-inhibiting clay particles, and it adheres strongly to the Swiss ...