Expanding on previous research providing proof-of-principal that human stem cells can be genetically engineered into HIV-fighting cells, a team of UCLA researchers have now demonstrated that these cells can actually attack HIV-infected cells in a living organism. The study, published April 12 in the journal PLoS Pathogens, demonstrates for the first time that engineering stem cells to form immune cells that target HIV is effective in suppressing the virus in living tissues in an animal model, said lead investigator Scott G. Kitchen, an assistant professor of medicine ...

Imagine a world where the rooftops and pavements of every urban area are resurfaced to increase the reflection of the Sun's light rays. Well, this is exactly what a group of Canadian researchers have done in an attempt to measure the potential effects against global warming. In a study published today, 13 April, in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, researchers from Concordia University created this scenario to see what effect a global increase in surface reflectance would have on global temperature and our own carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. They ...

The UK health insurance brand Health-on-Line offers a fresh approach to medical insurance - with low cost, simple to understand policies that customers can easily tailor to their needs with a selection of add-ons that boost cover where needed. Bournemouth based Health-on-Line -which was recently acquired by AXA PPP healthcare - provides affordable private medical insurance for individuals, with a special Business Priority Health package for enterprise customers - from sole traders right up to large group schemes. Health-on-Line have taken a fresh look at medical cover, ...

Researchers at the University of California, Davis have discovered a key tool that helps sperm and eggs develop exactly 23 chromosomes each. The work, which could lead to insights into fertility, spontaneous miscarriages, cancer and developmental disorders, is published April 13 in the journal Cell. Healthy humans have 46 chromosomes, 23 from the sperm and 23 from the egg. An embryo with the wrong number of chromosomes is usually miscarried, or develops disorders such as Down's syndrome, which is caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21. During meiosis, the cell division ...

Who will win the big prize? Fans of the new reality series "Fashion Star" on NBC can hardly wait to find out. This unique design show offers merchandizing contracts to each week's winners, with a $6,000,000 contract as the grand prize. The winning designs are available the next day in stores, using the Lilitab iPad kiosk at select Macy's. Supermodel Elle Macpherson hosts the program with a panel of fashion mentors: Jessica Simpson, Nicole Richie and John Varvatos. Viewers get instant gratification, and the hottest new styles, by being able to purchase their ...

Two Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)-based research teams, along with a group from the University of California at San Diego, have discovered that animals have a previously unknown system for detecting and responding to pathogens and toxins. In three papers published in the journals Cell and Cell Host & Microbe, the investigators describe finding evidence that disruptions to the core functions of animal cells trigger immune and detoxification responses, along with behavioral changes. "Viewing many diseases through the prism of this newly discovered system will eventually ...

Chapel Hill, NC – In a paper published today in the journal Cell, a team from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill unveils the first broad-based test for activation of protein kinases "en masse", enabling measurement of the mechanism behind drug-resistant cancer and rational prediction of successful combination therapies. Kinases are proteins expressed in human tissues that play a key role in cell growth, particularly in cancer. Of the 518 known human kinases, about 400 are expressed in cancers, but which ones and how many are actually active in tumors has ...

There is a connection between phthalates found in cosmetics and plastics and the risk of developing diabetes among seniors. Even at a modest increase in circulating phthalate levels, the risk of diabetes is doubled. This conclusion is drawn by researchers at Uppsala University in a study published in the journal Diabetes Care. "Although our results need to be confirmed in more studies, they do support the hypothesis that certain environmental chemicals can contribute to the development of diabetes," says Monica Lind, associate professor of environmental medicine at the ...

Meat consumption in the developed world needs to be cut by 50 per cent per person by 2050 if we are to meet the most aggressive strategy, set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to reduce one of the most important greenhouse gases, nitrous oxide (N2O). This is the finding from a new study, published today, 13 April, in IOP Publishing's Environmental Research Letters, which also claims that N2O emissions from the industrial and agricultural sectors will also need to be cut by 50 per cent if targets are to be met. The findings have been made ...

A team of researchers at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have identified a new mechanism by which colon cancer develops. By focusing on segments of DNA located between genes, or so-called "junk DNA," the team has discovered a set of master switches, i.e., gene enhancer elements, that turn "on and off" key genes whose altered expression is defining for colon cancers. They have coined the term Variant Enhancer Loci or "VELs," to describe these master switches. Importantly, VELs are not mutations in the actual DNA sequence, but rather are changes in proteins ...

Inadequate knowledge about the effects of deepwater oil well blowouts such as the Deepwater Horizon event of 2010 threatens scientists' ability to help manage and assess comparable events in future, according to an article that a multi-author group of specialists will publish in the May issue of BioScience. Even federal "rapid response" grants awarded to study the Deepwater Horizon event were far more focused on near-surface effects than on the deepwater processes that the BioScience authors judge to be most in need of more research. The article, by a team led by Charles ...

A new University of British Columbia study finds that the way individuals experience the universal emotion of pride directly impacts how racist and homophobic their attitudes toward other people are. The study, published in the April issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, offers new inroads in the fight against harmful prejudices such as racism and homophobia, and sheds important new light on human psychology. "These studies show that how we feel about ourselves directly influences how we feel about people who are different from us," says Claire Ashton-James, ...

PASADENA, Calif.—What happens to a stem cell at the molecular level that causes it to become one type of cell rather than another? At what point is it committed to that cell fate, and how does it become committed? The answers to these questions have been largely unknown. But now, in studies that mark a major step forward in our understanding of stem cells' fates, a team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has traced the stepwise developmental process that ensures certain stem cells will become T cells—cells of the immune system that help ...

San Francisco, April 12, 2012 -- Scientists will convene in San Diego to present the latest seismological research at the annual conference of the Seismological Society of America (SSA), April 17-19. This year's meeting is expected to draw a record number of registrants, with more than 630 scientists in attendance, and will feature 292 oral presentations and 239 poster presentations. "For over 100 years the Annual Meeting of SSA has been the forum of excellence for presenting and discussing exciting new developments in seismology research and operations in the U.S. ...

The roads are the main cause of fragmenting the habitats of many species, especially amphibians, as they cause them to be run over and a loss of genetic diversity. Furthermore, traffic harms two abundant species that represent the amphibious Asturian fauna and have been declared vulnerable in Spain: the midwife toad (Alytes obstetricans) and the palmate newt (Lissotriton helveticus). "But midwife toad and palmate newt populations have very different sensitivities to the effects of roads" Claudia García-González, researcher at the University of Oviedo, told SINC. "These ...

In order to survive, plants should take up neither too many nor too few minerals from the soil. New insights into how they operate this critical balance have now been published by biologists at the Ruhr-Universität in a series of three papers in the journal The Plant Cell. The researchers discovered novel functions of the metal-binding molecule nicotianamine. "The results are important for sustainable agriculture and also for people – to prevent health problems caused by deficiencies of vital nutrients in our diet" says Prof. Dr. Ute Krämer of the RUB Department of Plant ...

Astronomers using ESA's Herschel Space Observatory have studied a ring of dust around the nearby star Fomalhaut and have deduced that it is created by the collision of thousands of comets every day. Fomalhaut, a star twice as massive as our Sun and around 25 light years away, has been of keen interest to astronomers for many years. With an age of only a few hundred million years it is a fairly young star, and in the 1980s was shown to be surrounded by relatively large amounts of dust by the IRAS infrared satellite. Now Herschel, with its unprecedented resolution, has ...

Researchers at the University of Liverpool have resolved the debate over the mechanisms involved in the shut-down process during cell division in the body. Research findings, published in the journal PNAS, may contribute to future studies on how scientists could manipulate this shut-down process to ensure that viruses and other pathogens do not enter the cells of the body and cause harm. Previous research has shown that when cells divide, they cannot perform any other task apart from this one. They cannot, for example, take in food and fluids at the same time as ...

Our obsession with multiple forms of media is not necessarily all bad news, according to a new study by Kelvin Lui and Alan Wong from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Their work shows that those who frequently use different types of media at the same time appear to be better at integrating information from multiple senses - vision and hearing in this instance - when asked to perform a specific task. This may be due to their experience of spreading their attention to different sources of information while media multitasking. Their study is published online in Springer's ...

Researchers at the Hospital de Mar Research Institute (IMIM) have discovered that the protein LOXL2 has a function within the cell nucleus thus far unknown. They have also described a new chemical reaction of this protein on histone H3 that would be involved in gene silencing, one of which would be involved in the progression of breast, larynx, lung and skin tumours. Led by Dr Sandra Peiró and published in Molecular Cell journal, the study is a significant advance in describing the evolution of tumours and opens the door to researching new treatments that block their ...

About 300 000 years ago humans adapted genetically to be able to produce larger amounts of Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids. This adaptation may have been crucial to the development of the unique brain capacity in modern humans. In today's life situation, this genetic adaptation contributes instead to a higher risk of developing disorders like cardiovascular disease. The human nervous system and brain contain large amounts of polyunsaturated fatty acids, and these are essential for the development and function of the brain. These Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids occur ...

Casanova's notion is that stem cells emerge not because of the presence of factors that confer capacity to the stem cell but because of factors that repress the cellular signals for differentiation and specialization. Casanova believes that somehow all non-differentiated cells intrinsically carry the qualities of the stem cell by default and that there are factors at work that remove these capacities. Said another way: a stem cell is a stem cell because it has evaded differentiation. According to Casanova, if the idea of "a stem cell by default" is considered, research ...

DURHAM, N.H. -- University of New Hampshire researchers have found that residents of Louisiana and Florida most acutely and directly affected by the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster -- the largest marine oil spill in U.S. history -- said they have changed their views on other environmental issues as a result of the spill. "If disasters teach any lessons, then experience with the Gulf oil spill might be expected to alter opinions about the need for environmental protection. About one-fourth of our respondents said that as a result of the spill, their views on other environmental ...

Biomarkers which could help to predict resistance to chemotherapy in breast cancer patients have been identified by researchers from the University of Hull, UK. The researchers found a family of proteins to be twice as prevalent in clinical samples obtained from breast cancer patients who were resistant to chemotherapy than those who were successfully treated. Chemotherapy resistance is a major problem for some types of breast cancer and many patients undergo treatment that does not work, delaying other more suitable treatments and subjecting the patient to adverse ...

The discovery was made possible by exceptionally sharp ALMA images of a disc, or ring, of dust orbiting Fomalhaut, which lies about 25 light-years from Earth. It helps resolve a controversy among earlier observers of the system. The ALMA images show that both the inner and outer edges of the thin, dusty disc have very sharp edges. That fact, combined with computer simulations, led the scientists to conclude that the dust particles in the disc are kept within the disc by the gravitational effect of two planets — one closer to the star than the disc and one more distant [1]. Their ...