The deadliest form of malaria is caused the protozoan Plasmodium falciparum. During its life-cycle in human blood, the parasite P. falciparum expresses unique proteins on the surface on infected blood cells. Antibodies to these proteins are associated with protection from malaria, however, the identity of surface protein(s) that elicit the strongest immune response is unknown. Dr. James Beeson and colleagues at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Victoria, Australia have developed novel assays with transgenic P. falciparum expressing modified surface ...

The galaxy NGC 1187 [1] is seen almost face-on, which gives us a good view of its spiral structure. About half a dozen prominent spiral arms can be seen, each containing large amounts of gas and dust. The bluish features in the spiral arms indicate the presence of young stars born out of clouds of interstellar gas. Looking towards the central regions, we see the bulge of the galaxy glowing yellow. This part of the galaxy is mostly made up of old stars, gas and dust. In the case of NGC 1187, rather than a round bulge, there is a subtle central bar structure. Such bar features ...

Most of the world's population will be subject to degraded air quality in 2050 if man-made emissions continue as usual. In this 'business-as-usual' scenario, the average world citizen 40 years from now will experience similar air pollution to that of today's average East Asian citizen. These conclusions are those of a study published today in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, an Open Access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU). Air pollution is a major health risk that may worsen with increasing industrial activity. At present, urban outdoor air pollution ...

ROCHESTER, Minn.-- Researchers at Mayo Clinic have completed the world's first genome-wide sequencing analysis of peripheral T-cell lymphomas, unlocking the genetic secrets of this poorly understood and highly aggressive cancer of the immune system. Andrew Feldman, M.D., a Mayo Clinic pathologist and Damon Runyon Clinical Investigator, and a team of researchers affiliated with Mayo's Center for Individualized Medicine and Mayo Clinic Cancer Center, found 13 genomic abnormalities that were seen in multiple peripheral T-cell lymphomas. Of particular interest, five of these ...

LA JOLLA, CA ---- Scientists have known for some time that throwing off the body's circadian rhythm can negatively affect body chemistry. In fact, workers whose sleep-wake cycles are disrupted by night shifts are more susceptible to chronic inflammatory diseases such as diabetes, obesity and cancer. Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have now found a possible molecular link between circadian rhythm disturbances and an increased inflammatory response. In a study published July 9 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Salk team found ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A new study finds that fruit flies exposed to methamphetamine drastically reduce their food intake and increase their physical activity, just as humans do. The study, which tracked metabolic and behavioral changes in fruit flies on meth, indicates that starvation is a primary driver of methamphetamine-related death in the insects. The new findings are described in The Journal of Toxicological Sciences. The abuse of methamphetamine can have significant harmful side effects in humans. It burdens the body with toxic metabolic byproducts and weakens the ...

SAN FRANCISCO – August 1, 2012 – A major study of Medicare beneficiaries shows that the risk of hip fractures was significantly reduced in patients who had had cataract surgery, compared to patients who did not undergo the procedure. Published in the August edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) the researchers believe their study is the first to demonstrate that cataract surgery reduces the rate of fractures in older patients with vision loss. This suggests that cataract surgery could be an effective intervention to help prevent fractures and ...

Medical staff struggle to spot problem drinking in their patients unless they are already intoxicated, according to research by the University of Leicester. The work led by Dr Alex J Mitchell, consultant at Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust and honorary senior lecturer at the University, reveals that clinical staff often overlook alcohol problems in their patients when they do not present intoxicated. In a new study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry today (1 August) involving 20,000 patients assessed for alcohol problems by medical staff, all clinicians ...

The German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) published the results of a literature search for evidence-based clinical practice guidelines on the treatment of people with heart failure. The aim of the report is to identify those recommendations from current guidelines of high methodological quality that may be relevant for the planned revision of the module "heart failure" in the disease management programme (DMP) for coronary heart disease (CHD). According to the results of the report, there is no compelling need for revision of any part of the ...

Moving from sixth form, or college, into higher education (HE) can be a challenge for many students, especially those who start mathematically demanding courses. Life prior to university focuses on achieving maximum examination success to be sure of a place. Faced with this pressure, school and college maths courses pay little attention to preparing students to use maths in other areas of study according to a project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). A student's ability to apply mathematical reasoning is critical to their success, especially in ...

You're on the bus, and one of the only free seats is next to you. How, and why, do you stop another passenger sitting there? New research reveals the tactics commuters use to avoid each other, a practice the paper, published in Symbolic Interaction describes as 'nonsocial transient behavior.' The study was carried out by Esther Kim, from Yale University, who chalked up thousands of miles of bus travel to examine the unspoken rules and behaviors of commuters. Over three years Kim took coach trips across the United States. Kim's first trip, between Connecticut and New ...

Levels of sleep problems in the developing world are approaching those seen in developed nations, linked to an increase in problems like depression and anxiety. According to the first ever pan-African and Asian analysis of sleep problems, led by Warwick Medical School at the University of Warwick, an estimated 150 million adults are suffering from sleep-related problems across the developing world. The results are published in a study in the journal Sleep. Warwick Medical School researchers have found a rate of 16.6 per cent of the population reporting insomnia and ...

So-called glass-formers are a class of highly viscous liquid materials that have the consistency of honey and turn into brittle glass once cooled to sufficiently low temperatures. Zhen Chen and his colleagues from Arizona State University, USA, have elucidated the behaviour of these materials as they are on the verge of turning into glass in an article about to be published in EPJ E¹. Although scientists do not yet thoroughly understand their behaviour when approaching the glassy state, this new study, which relies on an additional type of dynamic measurements, clearly ...

Butterflies learn faster when a flower is rewarding than when it is not, and females have the edge over males when it comes to speed of learning with rewards. These are the findings of a new study, by Dr. Ikuo Kandori and Takafumi Yamaki from Kinki University in Japan. Their work, published online in Springer's journal Naturwissenschaften - The Science of Nature, is the first to investigate and compare the speed at which insects learn from both rewarding and non-rewarding experiences. Learning is a fundamental mechanism for adjusting behavior to environmental change. ...

Hydrogen peroxide doesn't just come in bottles from the drugstore – the human body makes it as well. Now researchers from North Carolina State University have found a way to use naturally occurring hydrogen peroxide inside cells to switch on gene expression. Their method also serves as a highly sensitive hydrogen peroxide detector, which may help scientists determine the molecule's role in cellular health and disease. In a normally functioning cell, hydrogen peroxide serves as a messenger, carrying signals through a cell in order to allow the cell to respond to external ...

PHILADELPHIA -- A new risk management plan from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to help clinicians properly prescribe drugs with addiction potential aims to help reduce the growing epidemic of opioid abuse in the United States. With deaths associated with these drugs, often sold illegally, now reaching toward 14,000 each year – including the fatal shootings of two Philadelphia teenagers last week in a house where police found large quantities of Percocet and morphine, prescription drug pads, and more than $100,000 in cash -- the authors of a Viewpoint piece in the ...

With headlines proclaiming the discovery of the Higgs boson—the so-called God particle—particle physics has captured the imagination of the world, particularly among those who dwell on the nature of the cosmos. But this is only one puzzle seemingly solved in a universe of mysteries. In a recent paper in Physical Review Letters, Dartmouth physicists delve into another enigmatic particle. Majorana is a name whose very mention evokes a veil of mystery. On one level, it refers to a mysterious particle that may exist on the boundary of matter and antimatter. Curiously, it ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – An analysis of jailhouse phone calls between men charged with felony domestic violence and their victims allowed researchers for the first time to see exactly what triggered episodes of violent abuse. The findings showed that violence often immediately followed accusations of sexual infidelity made by one or both of the partners. Drug or alcohol use was often involved. Researchers have long known that sexual jealousy played a general role in abuse, but this is the first time it was shown that it was a specific form of jealousy – infidelity concerns ...

SEATTLE – Despite the increasing awareness of the problem of obesity in the United States, most Americans don't know whether they are gaining or losing weight, according to new research from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. Obesity increased in the US between 2008 and 2009, but in response to the questions about year-to-year changes in weight that were included in the most widespread public health survey in the country, on average, people said that they lost weight. Men did a worse job estimating their own weight changes ...

More children experience complications or unintended injuries, especially related to surgery, in academic hospitals compared with community hospitals, but adverse events in the former are less likely to be preventable, according to the Canadian Paediatric Adverse Events Study published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) (pre-embargo link only) http://www.cmaj.ca/site/press/cmaj112153.pdf. Children are especially vulnerable to harms associated with medical care, such as medication errors, surgical complications and diagnostic errors. A team of Canadian researchers ...

Among most women in Pakistan, there is limited awareness of breast cancer occurrence, detection, and screening practices, or the importance of self-breast exams and clinical breast exams, according to a study in the August issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology. In Pakistan, breast cancer is the most common cancer affecting women and the incidence is rising. It is usually diagnosed in later stages and often at a younger age compared with populations in the West. "Breast cancer care in limited-resource countries generally suffers because of multiple ...

When combined with standard diagnostic tests, functional imaging procedures have been shown to reduce the rate of misdiagnosed cases of infectious endocarditis. According to new research published in the August issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine, single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT)/computed tomography (CT) with 99mTc-hexamethylpropleneamine oxime-labeled white blood cells (99mTc-HMPAO-WBC) can improve the diagnosis of infectious endocarditis in hard-to-diagnose cases. Infectious endocarditis is an infection of the lining of the heart chambers and ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- The wrinkles on a raisin result from a simple effect: As the pulp inside dries, the skin grows stiff and buckles to accommodate its shrinking size. Now, a team of researchers at MIT has discovered a way to harness that same principle in a controlled and orderly way, creating wrinkled surfaces with precise sizes and patterns. This basic method, they say, could be harnessed for a wide variety of useful structures: microfluidic systems for biological research, sensing and diagnostics; new photonic devices that can control light waves; controllable adhesive ...

This press release is available in French.MONTREAL, Canada, August 1, 2012 – Children who exhibit oppositional behavior run the risk of becoming addicted to nicotine, cannabis and cocaine whilst Inattention symptoms represent a specific additional risk of nicotine addiction. Nevertheless, hyperactivity in itself does not seem to be associated with any specific risk of substance abuse or dependence. This is what researchers at the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Center's (UHC) Research Center and the University of Montreal concluded following a 15-year population-based ...

Scientists are reporting development of a new transparent solar cell, an advance toward giving windows in homes and other buildings the ability to generate electricity while still allowing people to see outside. Their report appears in the journal ACS Nano. Yang Yang, Rui Zhu, Paul S. Weiss and colleagues explain that there has been intense world-wide interest in so-called polymer solar cells (PSCs), which are made from plastic-like materials. PSCs are lightweight and flexible and can be produced in high volume at low cost. That interest extends to producing transparent ...