Radiation therapy is one of the most widely used cancer treatments, but it often damages normal tissue and can lead to debilitating conditions. A class of drugs known as mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) inhibitors can prevent radiation-induced tissue damage in mice by protecting normal stem cells that are crucial for tissue repair, according to a preclinical study published by Cell Press in the September issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell. "We can exploit the emerging findings for the development of new preventive strategies and more effective treatment options ...

Researchers at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute have discovered that a pair of molecules work together to kill so-called 'self-reactive' immune cells that are programmed to attack the body's own organs. The finding is helping to explain how autoimmune diseases develop. Dr Daniel Gray and colleagues from the institute's Molecular Genetics of Cancer division and the University of Ballarat discovered that the absence of two related proteins, called Puma and Bim, led to self-reactive immune cells accumulating and attacking many different body organs, causing illness. The ...

6 September 2012: Two very different galaxies feature in this family portrait taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, together forming a peculiar galaxy pair called Arp 116. The image shows the dramatic differences in size, structure and colour between spiral and elliptical galaxies. Arp 116 is composed of a giant elliptical galaxy known as Messier 60, and a much smaller spiral galaxy, NGC 4647. Being a typical elliptical galaxy, Messier 60 on its own may not be very exciting to look at, but together with its adjacent spiral friend, the pair becomes a rather interesting ...

PHILADELPHIA — Newly discovered molecular differences between small cell lung cancer and nonsmall cell lung cancer have revealed PARP1 and EZH2 as potential therapeutic targets for patients with small cell lung cancer, according to the results of a study published in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. Currently, small cell lung cancer accounts for about 15 percent of lung cancer diagnoses in the United States. Patients with the disease will initially respond to chemotherapy, but almost all will have disease recurrence within a ...

HOUSTON - (Sept. 7, 2012) – When mice are born lacking the master gene Atoh1, none breathe well and all die in the newborn period. Why and how this occurs could provide new answers about sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), but the solution has remained elusive until now. Research led by Baylor College of Medicine and the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children's Hospital demonstrates that when the gene is lacking in a special population of neurons called RTN (retrotrapezoid nucleus), roughly half the young mice die at birth. Those who survive ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (September 6, 2012) – Using a stepwise trans-differentiation process, Whitehead Institute researchers have turned skin cells into embryonic Sertoli-like cells. The main role of mature Sertoli cells is to provide support and nutrition to the developing sperm cells. Furthermore, Sertoli cells have been demonstrated to possess trophic properties, which have been utilized for the protection of non-testicular cellular grafts in transplantations. However, mature Sertoli cells are mitotically inactive, and the primary immature Sertoli cells during prolonged ...

Pollinating insects contribute to agricultural production in 150 (84%) European crops. These crops depend partly or entirely upon insects for their pollination and yield. The value of insect pollinators is estimated to be €22 billion a year in Europe. Declines in managed pollinators, such as honeybees, and wild pollinator such bumblebees, solitary bees and hoverflies, are therefore of growing concern as we need to protect food production and the maintain wildflower diversity. Scientists involved in STEP, a large-scale project funded by the 7th Framework Program (FP7) ...

CHICAGO – Sept. 6, 2012. Married patients with locally advanced lung cancer are likely to survive longer after treatment than patients who are single, according to a study by researchers at the University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Cancer Center in Baltimore. The results of the retrospective study are being presented at the 2012 Chicago Multidisciplinary Symposium in Thoracic Oncology. The University of Maryland researchers studied 168 patients with Stage III non-small cell lung cancer, the most common type of lung cancer, who were treated with chemotherapy ...

Chicago – (Sept. 6, 2012) – Savvy consumers and health professionals know that fibre is an essential nutrient associated with important health benefits, yet barriers such as overall poor tolerance to higher-fibre diets may be why average intake is far less than experts recommend (1). Two new research studies supported by Tate & Lyle, the global provider of specialty food ingredients and solutions, provide further evidence that certain higher-fibre diets can in fact be well-tolerated, and that fibre may play an important role in supporting a healthy gut as well as promoting ...

The study, published today in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention is the largest of its kind in Australia and one of the largest in the world. It followed about 4,000 women in a study of the BreastScreen program in Western Australia. University of Melbourne Research Fellow Dr Carolyn Nickson and colleagues from the Melbourne School of Population Health said the findings reaffirmed the importance and efficacy of mammography. The study focused on women aged 50-69 years, who are in the target age range for screening. It included 427 cases where women had died ...

Off Hachinohe, Japan—Scientific deep sea drilling vessel Chikyu sets a world new record by drilling down and obtains rock samples from deeper than 2,111 meters below the seafloor off Shimokita Peninsula of Japan in the northwest Pacific Ocean. The Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), the implementing organization for scientific expedition aboard the Chikyu, announced this achievement on 6th September, 2012. Chikyu made this achievement during the Deep Coalbed Biosphere expedition, Expedition 337, conducted within the framework of an international ...

People who suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder relive their traumatic experiences in the form of flashbacks and nightmares – and in childhood, also in traumatic plays during which they re-enact the experience over and over again. They avoid stimuli that remind them of the trauma or suffer from vegetative hyperarousal such as insomnia, hypervigilance or concentration problems. For the first time, researchers from the University of Zurich and the University Children's Hospital Zurich now show that infants and toddlers can also develop posttraumatic stress disorder in ...

Sophia Antipolis, 6 September 2012: The European Association for Cardiovascular Prevention and Rehabilitation (EACPR), a registered branch of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), and the American Heart Association (AHA) have today issued a joint scientific statement http://eurheartj.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/08/24/eurheartj.ehs221.short?rss=1 that sets out to produce easy-to-follow guidance on Clinical Cardiopulmonary Exercise (CPX) testing based on current scientific evidence. The document, which has been published simultaneously online in the European ...

A unique approach to early literacy work with families where children develop their language skills and their ability to read and write from an early age has had a huge success. Researchers from the University of Sheffield funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) initially planned to use the approach with around 60 families, but discovered that around 6,000 had actually benefited from their work. Professor Cathy Nutbrown of the University of Sheffield, who led the project, shared her approach to family literacy with Early Years practitioners including ...

This press release is available in German. It had been thought that mothers delivering later in life have children that are less healthy as adults, because the body of the mother had already degenerated due to physiological effects like decreasing oocyte quality or a weakened placenta. In fact, what affects the health of the grown-up children is not the age of their mother but her education and the number of years she survives after giving birth and thus spends with her offspring. This is the conclusion of a new study by Mikko Myrskylä from the Max Planck Institute for ...

Jerusalem, Sept. 6, 2012 – A synthetic, anti-inflammatory and anti-allergic family of drugs to combat a variety of illnesses while avoiding detrimental side effects has been developed by a Hebrew University of Jerusalem researcher. The researcher is Saul Yedgar, who is the Walter and Greta Stiel Professor of Heart Studies at the Institute for Medical Research Israel-Canada at the Hebrew University Faculty of Medicine. Inflammatory/allergic diseases affect billions of people worldwide, and treatments for these conditions are a major focus of the pharmaceutical industry. ...

Scientists from A*STAR's Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences (SICS), together with clinical collaborators from London , discovered for the first time that children and young patients with chronic Hepatitis B Virus infection (HBV carriers) do have a protective immune response, contrary to current belief, and hence can be more suitable treatment candidates than previously considered. This discovery by the team of scientists led by Professor Antonio Bertoletti, programme director and research director of the infection and immunity programme at SICS, could lead to ...

On Mars's poles there are ice caps of ice and dust with layers that reflect to past climate variations on Mars. Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute have related the layers in the ice cap on Mars's north pole to variations in solar insolation on Mars, thus established the first dated climate history for Mars, where ice and dust accumulation has been driven by variations in insolation. The results are published in the scientific journal, Icarus. The ice caps on Mars's poles are kilometres thick and composed of ice and dust. There are layers in the ice caps, which ...

This press release is available in German. Stefan Remy and colleagues at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) and the University of Bonn have illuminated how this system works. "The system acts like a filter, only letting the most important impulses pass," explains Remy. "This produces the targeted neuronal patterns that are indispensible for long-term memory storage." How does this refined control system work? How can inhibitory signals produce precise output signals? This was the question investigated by Remy and his colleagues. Scientists have known ...

The GENCODE Consortium expects the human genome has twice as many genes than previously thought, many of which might have a role in cellular control and could be important in human disease. This remarkable discovery comes from the GENCODE Consortium, which has done a painstaking and skilled review of available data on gene activity. Among their discoveries, the team describe more than 10,000 novel genes, identify genes that have 'died' and others that are being resurrected. The GENCODE Consortium reference gene catalogue has been one of the underpinnings of the larger ...

Patients in Japan who underwent living donor liver transplantation (LDLT) for acute liver failure (ALF) were classified as having excellent outcomes, with ten-year survival at 73%. The findings, published in the September issue of Liver Transplantation, a journal of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD), suggest that the type of liver disease or treatment plan does not affect long-term patient survival following LDLT. Donor and patient age, however, does impact long-term outcome post-transplant. According to the AASLD, roughly 2,000 Americans ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Destruction of coastal habitats may release as much as 1 billion tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere each year, 10 times higher than previously reported, according to a new Duke led study. Published online this week in PLOS ONE, the analysis provides the most comprehensive estimate of global carbon emissions from the loss of these coastal habitats to date: 0.15 to 1.2 billion tons. It suggests there is a high value associated with keeping these coastal-marine ecosystems intact as the release of their stored carbon costs roughly $6-$42 billion ...

Cold Spring Harbor, NY – A team of neuroscientists and informatics experts at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) reports important progress in an effort to understand the relationship between transposons – sequences of DNA that can jump around within the genome, potentially causing great damage – and mechanisms involved in serious neurodegenerative disorders including ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease), FTLD (frontotemporal lobar degeneration) and Alzheimer's disease. A close analysis of previously unanalyzed genome data has led ...

TORONTO, ON – Men who experienced childhood sexual abuse are three times more likely to have a heart attack than men who were not sexually abused as children, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Toronto. The researchers found no association between childhood sexual abuse and heart attacks among women. In a paper published online this week in the journal Child Abuse & Neglect, investigators examined gender-specific differences in a representative sample of 5095 men and 7768 women aged 18 and over, drawn from the Center for Disease Control's 2010 ...

New Rochelle, NY, September 6, 2012—The naturally occurring cytokine interleukin-18, or IL-18, plays a key role in inflammation and has been implicated in serious inflammatory diseases for which the prognosis is poor and there are currently limited treatment options. Therapies targeting IL-18 could prove effective against inflammatory diseases of the lung including bronchial asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), as described in a review article published in Journal of Interferon & Cytokine Research (http://www.liebertpub.com/jir), a peer-reviewed publication ...