WASHINGTON – Scientists have long suspected that the Sun's 11-year cycle influences climate of certain regions on Earth. Yet records of average, seasonal temperatures do not date back far enough to confirm any patterns. Now, armed with a unique proxy, an international team of researchers show that unusually cold winters in Central Europe are related to low solar activity – when sunspot numbers are minimal. The freezing of Germany's largest river, the Rhine, is the key. Although the Earth's surface overall continues to warm, the new analysis has revealed a correlation ...

When you are hit with the flu, you know it immediately -- fever, chills, sore throat, aching muscles, fatigue. This is your body mounting an immune response to the invading virus. But less is known about what is happening on the molecular level. Now Northwestern University scientists have discovered one of the ways the influenza virus disarms our natural defense system. The virus decreases the production of key immune system-regulating proteins in human cells that help fight the invader. The virus does this by turning on the microRNAs -- little snippets of RNA -- that ...

Cameleon Software (www.cameleon-software.com), today announced it will be a Gold sponsor of salesforce.com's Dreamforce 2012 conference (www.dreamforce.com). The conference will be held September 18-21, 2012, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Cameleon Software provides a multichannel, multi-device CPQ (configure, price, quote) and eCommerce software that tightly integrates with Salesforce CRM. Cameleon CPQ enables sales and marketing teams to quickly design, configure and price offers, and generate accurate quotes and proposals on every sales channel, including tablets ...

PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 22, 2012 — With nearly 55 million students, teachers and school staff about to return to elementary and secondary school classrooms, scientists today described a new hand-held sensor ― practical enough for wide use ― that could keep classroom air fresher and kids more alert for learning. They reported on the device at the 244th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society, being held here this week. The sensor detects the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in classroom air. The average ...

PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 22, 2012 — The corn industry produces almost 4,000 products from every bushel. Oil refineries produce fuels and ingredients for an estimated 6,000 products with a thoroughness that actually squeezes 44 gallons of products from every 42-gallon barrel of crude. Scientists today unveiled new technology intended to move soybeans, second only to corn as the top food crop in the U.S., along that same use-to-all path as a raw material for a wider portfolio of products. They described it ― a new integrated soybean biorefinery ― at the 244th National ...

PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 22, 2012 — Like recruiters pitching military service to a throng of people, scientists are developing drugs to recruit disease-fighting proteins present naturally in everyone's blood in medicine's war on infections, cancer and a range of other diseases. They reported on the latest advances in this new approach here today at the 244th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society. David Spiegel, M.D., Ph.D., who heads one of the major research teams developing "antibody-recruiting molecules" (or ...

August 23, 2012 – Over the last 50 years, the spotting of newborn's blood onto filter paper for disease screening, called Guthrie cards, has become so routine that since 2000, more than 90% of newborns in the United States have had Guthrie cards created. In a study published online in Genome Research, researchers have shown that epigenetic information stored on archived Guthrie cards provides a retrospective view of the epigenome at birth, a powerful new application for the card that could help understand disease and predict future health. DNA methylation, an epigenetic ...

A clinical study led by National Institutes of Health investigators has identified an antibody that compromises the immune systems of HIV-negative people, making them susceptible to infections with opportunistic microbes such as nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM). In this study conducted at hospitals in Thailand and Taiwan, the researchers found that the majority of study participants with opportunistic infections made an antibody against interferon-gamma (IFN-gamma), a cell-signaling molecule thought to play a major role in clearing harmful infections. The study findings ...

Ancient Greek philosophers considered the ability to "know thyself" as the pinnacle of humanity. Now, thousands of years later, neuroscientists are trying to decipher precisely how the human brain constructs our sense of self. Self-awareness is defined as being aware of oneself, including one's traits, feelings, and behaviors. Neuroscientists have believed that three brain regions are critical for self-awareness: the insular cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the medial prefrontal cortex. However, a research team led by the University of Iowa has challenged this ...

Ethical challenges are central to persistent "critical weaknesses" in the national system for ensuring drug safety, according to a commentary by former Institute of Medicine (IOM) committee members published today in the New England Journal of Medicine. With a caution against "reactive policymaking," committee co-chairs Ruth Faden, Ph.D., M.P.H., and Steven Goodman, M.D., M.H.S., Ph.D., with fellow committee member Michelle Mello, J.D., Ph.D., revisit the controversy over the antidiabetic drug Avandia that led to the formation of their IOM committee on monitoring drug ...

For six months last year, a deadly outbreak of antibiotic-resistant bacteria kept infection-control specialists at the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) Clinical Center in a state of high alert. A New York City patient carrying a multi-drug resistant strain of Klebsiella pneumoniae, a microbe frequently associated with hospital-borne infections, introduced the dangerous bacteria into the 243-bed research hospital while participating in a clinical study in the summer of 2011. Despite enhanced infection-control practices, including patient isolation, the K. pneumoniae ...

NEW YORK, August 22, 2012 – Researchers at NYU School of Medicine have made a novel discovery that could have widespread clinical implications, potentially affecting everything from nutrient metabolism to obesity in children. Since the 1950's, low dose antibiotics have been widely used as growth promoters in the agricultural industry. For decades, livestock growers have employed subtherapeutic antibiotic therapy (STAT), not to fight infection or disease, but to increase weight gain in cattle, swine, sheep, chickens and turkey, among other farm animals. First author ...

Irvine, Calif. – Increased capture of natural gas from oil fields probably accounts for up to 70 percent of the dramatic leveling off seen in atmospheric methane at the end of the 20th century, according to new UC Irvine research being published Thursday, Aug. 23, in the journal Nature. "We can now say with confidence that, based on our data, the trend is largely a result of changes in fossil fuel use," said chemistry professor Donald Blake, senior author on the paper. Methane has 20 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide, although CO2 is filling the ...

A low dose of the sedative clonazepam alleviated autistic-like behavior in mice with a mutation that causes Dravet syndrome in humans, University of Washington researchers have shown. Dravet syndrome is an infant seizure disorder accompanied by developmental delays and behavioral symptoms that include autistic features. It usually originates spontaneously from a gene mutation in an affected child not found in either parent. Studies of mice with a similar gene mutation are revealing the overly excited brain circuits behind the autistic traits and cognitive impairments ...

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have found that the worm which causes River Blindness survives by using a bacterium to provide energy, as well as help 'trick' the body's immune system into thinking it is fighting a different kind of infection. River Blindness affects 37 million people, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, causing intense itching of the skin, visual impairment and in severe cases, irreversible blindness. It is caused by a parasitic worm that is transmitted by blood-feeding blackflies, which breed in fast-flowing rivers. The team at Liverpool investigated ...

Results published this week by a team of polar scientists from Britain, Australia and France adds a new dimension to our understanding of Antarctic Peninsula climate change and the likely causes of the break-up of its ice shelves. The first comprehensive reconstruction of a 15,000 year climate history from an ice core collected from James Ross Island in the Antarctic Peninsula region is reported this week in the journal Nature. The scientists reveal that the rapid warming of this region over the last 100 -years has been unprecedented and came on top of a slower natural ...

A new class of organic materials developed at Northwestern University boasts a very attractive but elusive property: ferroelectricity. The crystalline materials also have a great memory, which could be very useful in computer and cellphone memory applications, including cloud computing. A team of organic chemists discovered they could create very long crystals with desirable properties using just two small organic molecules that are extremely attracted to each other. The attraction between the two molecules causes them to self assemble into an ordered network -- order ...

Female sea slugs mate more frequently than required to produce offspring, despite the highly traumatic and biologically costly nature of their copulation, as reported Aug. 22 in the open access journal PLOS ONE. The authors of the study, led by Rolanda Lange of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, investigated the mating behavior of a simultaneously hermaphroditic species of sea slug that mates via an extravagant ritual that involves a syringe-like penile appendage that stabs the partner to inject prostate fluids and sperm. Surprisingly, the researchers found that ...

Managers and non-managers show distinctly different brain activation patterns when making decisions, according to research published Aug. 22 in the open access journal PLOS ONE. The authors of the study, led by Svenja Caspers of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine, Research Centre Jülich in Germany, used functional MR imaging to track the decision making process for managers and non-managers. Subjects were required to perform equally repetitive decisions, one form of decision making occurring in every-day work life. The authors found that manager and non-managers ...

Approximately one in five prescriptions to elderly people is inappropriate, according to a study published Aug. 22 in the open access journal PLOS ONE. The authors of the study, led by Dedan Opondo of the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam, conducted a systematic review of English-language studies of medication use in the elderly and found that the median rate of inappropriate prescriptions was 20.5%. Some of the medications with the highest rates of inappropriate use were the antihistamine diphenhydramine, the antidepressant amitriptyline, and the pain reliever propoxyphene. INFORMATION: Citation: ...

Two parasitic wasp species show similar memory consolidation patterns in response to rewards of different quality, providing evidence that the reward value affects the type of memory that is consolidated. The full results are reported Aug. 22 in the open access journal PLOS ONE. The researchers, led by Marjolein Kruidhof of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, tested how wasps store scents associated with situations of low reward (egg-laying into a inferior-quality host species that lays single eggs) versus high reward (egg-laying into a superior-quality host species ...

Patients with anorexia have trouble accurately judging their own body size, but not others', according to research published Aug. 22 in the open access journal PLOS ONE. In the study, led by Dewi Guardia of the University Hospital of Lille in France, 25 patients with anorexia and 25 controls were shown a door-like aperture and asked to judge whether or not it was wide enough for them to pass through, or for another person present in the room to pass through. In previous similar experiments, anorexic patients felt they could not pass through the door even when it was easily ...

KANSAS CITY, MO—The first step in gene expression is the exact copying of a segment of DNA by the enzyme known as RNA polymerase II, or pol II, into a mirror image RNA. Scientists recognize that pol II does not transcribe RNA via a smooth glide down the DNA highway but instead encounters an obstacle course of DNA tightly wound around barrier proteins called histones. Those proteins must be shoved aside for pol II to trundle through. Previous work from the lab of Jerry Workman, Ph.D., an investigator at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, showed how a protein ...

A study from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, published August 22 online by PLoS ONE, reports that muscle problems reported by patients taking statins were related to the strength or potency of the given cholesterol-lowering drugs. Adverse effects such as muscle pain and weakness, reported to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were related to a statin's potency, or the degree by which it typically lowers cholesterol at commonly prescribed doses. "These findings underscore that stronger statins bear higher risk – and should be used ...

Having healthy gut bacteria could have as much to do with a strategy that insurance companies use to uncover risk as with eating the right foods, according to researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA). Findings published today in Ecology Letters show how researchers applied a strategy used by insurance companies to understand how animals and plants recruit beneficial bacteria. The breakthrough brings scientists closer to understanding the human body's relationship with bacteria, which account for nine cells out of every 10 in our bodies. The research has ...