New research by UCLA life scientists could lead to predictions of which plant species will escape extinction from climate change. Droughts are worsening around the world, posing a great challenge to plants in all ecosystems, said Lawren Sack, a UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and senior author of the research. Scientists have debated for more than a century how to predict which species are most vulnerable. Sack and two members of his laboratory have made a fundamental discovery that resolves this debate and allows for the prediction of how diverse ...

Ecosystems are changing worldwide as a result of shrinking sea ice, snow, and glaciers, especially in high-latitude regions where water is frozen for at least a month each year—the cryosphere. Scientists have already recorded how some larger animals, such as penguins and polar bears, are responding to loss of their habitat, but research is only now starting to uncover less-obvious effects of the shrinking cryosphere on organisms. An article in the April issue of BioScience describes some impacts that are being identified through studies that track the ecology of affected ...

WASHINGTON, D.C., APRIL 6, 2012—As global temperatures rise, the most threatened ecosystems are those that depend on a season of snow and ice, scientists from the nation's Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network say."The vulnerability of cool, wet areas to climate change is striking," says Julia Jones, a lead author in a special issue of the journal BioScience released today featuring results from more than 30 years of LTER, a program of the National Science Foundation (NSF). In semi-arid regions like the southwestern United States, mountain snowpacks are the dominant ...

Cognitive and psychiatric impairments are common among long-term survivors of acute lung injury (ALI), and these impairments can be assessed using a telephone-based test battery, according to a new study. "Neuropsychological impairment is increasingly being recognized as an important outcome among survivors of critical illness, but neuropsychological function in long-term ALI survivors has not been assessed in a multi-center trial, and evidence on the etiology of these impairments in ALI survivors is limited," said lead author Mark E. Mikkelsen, MD, MSCE, assistant professor ...

When most people look at a forest, they see walking trails, deer yards, or firewood for next winter. But scientists at the Harvard Forest and Smithsonian Institution take note of changes imperceptible to the naked eye -- the uptake and storage of carbon. What they've learned in a recent study is that an immense amount of carbon is stored in growing trees, but if current trends in Massachusetts continue, development would reduce that storage by 18 percent over the next half century. Forest harvesting would have a much smaller impact. Jonathan Thompson is Research Ecologist ...

PHILADELPHIA — The 24-hour internal clock controls many aspects of human behavior and physiology, including sleep, blood pressure, and metabolism. Disruption in circadian rhythms leads to increased incidence of many diseases, including metabolic disease and cancer. Each cell of the body has its own internal timing mechanism, which is controlled by proteins that keep one another in check. One of these proteins, called Rev-erb alpha, was thought to have a subordinate role because the clock runs fairly normally in its absence. New work, published in Genes and Development ...

It may seem like a game of tag, but it's an innovative tool for teaching the fundamentals of epidemiology, the science of how infectious diseases move through a population. An international team of scientists--including researchers who teach an annual clinic at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Muizenberg, South Africa--is helping epidemiologists improve the mathematical models they use to study outbreaks of diseases like cholera, AIDS and malaria. In 2011, attendees at the clinic were treated to a game of "Muizenberg Mathematical Fever," where ...

Both radiation and many forms of chemotherapy try to kill tumors by causing oxidative stress in cancer cells. New research from USC on a protein that protects cancer and other cells from these stresses could one day help doctors to break down cancer cells' defenses, making them more susceptible to treatment. In the March 23 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, scientists led by USC Professor Kelvin J. A. Davies demonstrated that a protein known as Nrf2 governs a cell's ability to cope with oxidative stress by increasing the expression of key genes for removing ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – An analysis of 35 headwater basins in the United States and Canada found that the impact of warmer air temperatures on streamflow rates was less than expected in many locations, suggesting that some ecosystems may be resilient to certain aspects of climate change. The study was just published in a special issue of the journal BioScience, in which the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network of 26 sites around the country funded by the National Science Foundation is featured. Lead author Julia Jones, an Oregon State University geoscientist, said ...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego and Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System have shown that elevated pulse pressure may increase the risk of cerebrovascular disease (CVD) in older adults with Alzheimer's disease (AD). Their study has been published in the early online edition of Journal of Alzheimer's Disease in advance of the June 5 print publication. The findings may have treatment implications, since some antihypertensive medications specifically address the pulsatile component of blood pressure. Pulse pressure (PP) – the difference between ...

GALVESTON, April 6, 2012 – Stroke patients receiving in-patient rehabilitation are more likely to land back in the hospital within three months if they are functioning poorly, show signs of depression and lack social support according to researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston. Hospital readmission for older adults within 30 days of discharge costs Medicare roughly $18 billion annually. Among the first of such research to explore the risk of re-hospitalization among this patient segment, the study is available online at The Journals ...

STANFORD, Calif. — An invasive heart test used routinely to measure heart function is being dramatically overused, especially among patients who recently underwent similar, more effective tests, according to a new study from the Stanford University School of Medicine. "This adds both risk to the patient and significant extra cost," said first author of the study Ronald Witteles, MD, assistant professor of cardiovascular medicine and program director of Stanford's internal medicine residency training program, who called the rates of unnecessary use "shockingly high." The ...

VIDEO: Richard Ryan, professor of clinical and social psychology at the University of Rochester, discusses research on the psychological roots of homophobia. A new study shows that individuals who reported themselves... Click here for more information. Homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires, a series of psychology studies demonstrates. The study is ...

SINGAPORE, April 8, 2012 – An international team of scientists, led by researchers from the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School (Duke-NUS) in Singapore and National Cancer Centre of Singapore, has identified hundreds of novel genes that are mutated in stomach cancer, the second-most lethal cancer worldwide. The study, which appears online on April 8, 2012 in Nature Genetics, paves the way for treatments tailored to the genetic make-up of individual stomach tumors. Stomach cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death globally with more than 700,000 deaths each year, ...

Genetics researchers have identified at least two new gene variants that increase the risk of common childhood obesity. "This is the largest-ever genome-wide study of common childhood obesity, in contrast to previous studies that have focused on more extreme forms of obesity primarily connected with rare disease syndromes," said lead investigator Struan F.A. Grant, Ph.D., associate director of the Center for Applied Genomics at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "As a consequence, we have definitively identified and characterized a genetic predisposition to common ...

Researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine have developed a method to derive enough DNA information from non-DNA sources—such as RNA—to clearly identify individuals whose biological data are stored in massive research repositories. The approach may raise questions regarding the ability to protect individual identity when high-dimensional data are collected for research purposes. A paper introducing the technique appears in the April 8 online edition of Nature Genetics. DNA contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of every living cell. ...

Scientists at Trinity College Dublin have discovered that a part of the immune system called the inflammasome is involved in regulating the development of one of the most common forms of blindness, called Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD). They have discovered that controlling an inflammatory component IL-18, in cases of Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) could prevent the development of the disease. The disease AMD involves loss of central vision, people with advanced disease being unable to read, watch TV, enjoy the cinema, drive, or use a computer − ...

VIDEO: In their extraordinary quest to decode human metabolism, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have discovered a pair of molecules that regulates the liver's production of glucose --... Click here for more information. In their extraordinary quest to decode human metabolism, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have discovered a pair of molecules that regulates the liver's production of glucose---- the simple sugar that is the ...

A major study of the relationships between maternal metabolic conditions and the risk that a child will be born with a neurodevelopmental disorder has found strong links between maternal diabetes and obesity and the likelihood of having a child with autism or another developmental disability. Conducted by researchers affiliated with the UC Davis MIND Institute, the study found that mothers who were obese were 1-2/3 times more likely to have a child with autism as normal-weight mothers without diabetes or hypertension, and were more than twice as likely to have a child ...

KANSAS CITY, MO—Cells on the move reach forward with lamellipodia and filopodia, cytoplasmic sheets and rods supported by branched networks or tight bundles of actin filaments. Cells without functional lamellipodia are still highly motile but lose their ability to stay on track, report researchers at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in the April 9, 2012, online issue of the Journal of Cell Biology. Their study provides new insight into cell motility, a complex and integrated process, which, when gone awry, can lead to various disease conditions such as cancer ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Using computational methods, Stanford University School of Medicine investigators have strongly implicated a novel gene in the triggering of type-2 diabetes. Their experiments in lab mice and in human blood and tissue samples further showed that this gene not only is associated with the disease, as predicted computationally, but is also likely to play a major causal role. In a study to be published online April 9 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers combed through freely accessible public databases storing huge troves ...

Insulin is required for the regulation of blood sugar levels. In type I diabetes, the cells that produce insulin are destroyed by the immune system. Chantal Mathieu and colleagues at the University of Leuven have attempted to circumvent this response by taking advantage of the fact that the immune system accepts foreign gut bacteria. The Mathieu group engineered gut bacteria so that they produce a form of insulin, and asked if these bacteria could retrain the immune system in mice with type I diabetes to accept insulin-producing cells. They found that these special bacteria ...

EDITOR'S PICK Moving toward a better treatment for autoimmune diabetes Insulin is required for the regulation of blood sugar levels. In type I diabetes, the cells that produce insulin are destroyed by the immune system. Chantal Mathieu and colleagues at the University of Leuven have attempted to circumvent this response by taking advantage of the fact that the immune system accepts foreign gut bacteria. The Mathieu group engineered gut bacteria so that they produce a form of insulin, and asked if these bacteria could retrain the immune system in mice with type I diabetes ...

People with a history of high cholesterol who come from higher income countries or countries with lower out-of-pocket healthcare expenses, as well as those from countries with high performing healthcare systems, defined using World Health Organization (WHO) indices, tend to have lower subsequent cholesterol rates, according to new research in the American Heart Association journal Circulation. "We found that patients living in countries in the highest third of gross national income or WHO health system achievement and performance/efficiency indices had a significantly ...

CHICAGO – Patients for whom colonoscopy was recommended were less likely to complete colorectal cancer screening than those patients for whom fecal occult blood testing (FOBT) was recommended or those patients who were given a choice between FOBT or colonoscopy, according to a study published in the April 9 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication. Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a prevalent condition that can be diagnosed through screening and treated during an asymptomatic phase to prevent the morbidity and mortality associated with the unscreened ...