Berkeley — A research team led by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and San Francisco State University has unlocked the genetic code of the highly invasive Argentine ant, providing clues as to why this species has been so successful. The draft genome of the Argentine ant (Linepithema humile) – the tiny brown insect that homeowners so frequently find marching en masse through their kitchens – is among a trio of ant genomes being published the week of Jan. 31 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The other two ant species are ...

Widespread screening or routine ultrasound for blocked neck arteries to determine stroke risk isn't necessary, according to new guidelines from the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association, American College of Cardiology and other groups. Carotid stenting and carotid endarterectomy are reasonable and effective ways to treat blocked neck arteries, though some patients may be a better candidate for one procedure over the other, the guidelines also state. When the carotid arteries on the side of the neck or vertebral arteries alongside the spinal column ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- A study from MIT neuroscientists reveals that high-functioning autistic adults appear to have trouble using theory of mind to make moral judgments in certain situations. Specifically, the researchers found that autistic adults were more likely than non-autistic subjects to blame someone for accidentally causing harm to another person. This shows that their judgments rely more on the outcome of the incident than on an understanding of the person's intentions, says Liane Young, an MIT postdoctoral associate and one of the lead authors of the study, which ...

The wilful neglect of any patient should become a criminal offence for doctors and nurses in England, as it is in France, suggest ethicists in a leading article published online in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Normally, healthcare professionals in England can only face prosecution if a serious error results in the death of a patient, say the authors from the University of Manchester's Centre for Social Ethics and Policy. But under current mental health legislation, nurses, doctors, and managers can be charged with the criminal offence of wilful neglect, which is ...

A head injury can blight the chances of survival up to 13 years after the event, especially among younger adults, finds research published online in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery and Psychiatry. Injury severity seems to make little difference over the longer term, the findings show. The research team tracked over 2,000 people, 757 of whom had sustained a head injury that required admission to one of five hospitals in Glasgow between 1995 and 1996. The rest of the group were split between those who had been admitted to hospital for other reasons, but for the ...

Dogs can sniff out bowel cancer in breath and stool samples, with a very high degree of accuracy - even in the early stages of the disease - reveals research published online in the journal Gut. The findings prompt the authors to suggest that chemical compounds for specific cancers circulate throughout the body, which opens up the prospect of developing tests to pick up the disease before it has had the chance to spread elsewhere. A specially trained Labrador retriever completed 74 sniff tests, each comprising five breath (100 to 200 ml) or stool samples (50 ml) at ...

DURHAM, N.C. – Scientists at Duke Cancer Institute have discovered that genetic mutations found in brain tumors can alter tumor metabolism. This work could help lead to new designs for anti-cancer drugs based on the unique properties of these tumors. "Malignant glioma appears to be at least two large subclasses of diseases – one that involves mutations in the IDH1 and IDH2 genes and one that doesn't," said Hai Yan, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor in the Duke Department of Pathology who led a collaborative group of researchers to conduct the study. "The IDH mutation ...

The process we use to store memories is more complex than previously thought, New York University neuroscientists have found. Their research, which appears in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, underscores the challenges in addressing memory-related ailments, such as post-traumatic stress disorder. The researchers looked at memory consolidation and reconsolidation. Memory consolidation is the neurological process we undergo to store memories after an experience. However, memory is dynamic and changes when new experiences bring to mind old ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Are some children genetically tuned to be overweight, or is lifestyle to blame for childhood obesity? Check-ups of 1,003 Michigan 6th graders in a school-based health program showed children who are obese were more likely to consume school lunch instead of a packed lunch from home and spend two hours a day watching TV or playing a video game. The results were compiled by the University of Michigan Cardiovascular Center and suggests unhealthy habits are feeding the childhood obesity trend. "For the extremely overweight child, genetic screening may ...

When the body can't distinguish its right side from its left during development, a child can develop a condition called heterotaxy in which the heart is severely malformed, leading to congenital heart disease. To improve survival in these children, researchers at Yale School of Medicine sought to identify the genes that cause heterotaxy. They have shown in a new study that patients with heterotaxy have considerably more copy number variations (CNVs) on their genomes than do control patients. The findings are published January 31 in Proceedings of the National Academy ...

The presence of introns in genes requires cells to process "messenger RNA" molecules before synthesizing proteins, a process that is costly and often error-prone. It was long believed that this was simply part of the price organisms paid for the flexibility to create new types of protein but recent work has made it clear that introns themselves have a number of important functions. And so attention is gradually shifting to asking why some organisms have so few introns and others so many. It seems likely that new introns are added to DNA when double-stranded DNA breaks ...

The next big thing in medical diagnostics could be minutes particles of rust, iron oxide, coated with the material from which sand is formed, silicon dioxide. These magnetic nanoparticles, a mere 29 to 230 nanometers across, can be used to trap antibodies to the virus that causes cervical cancer and to the bacteria that causes potentially lethal diarrhea. According to scientists in Vietnam, it is relatively straightforward to immobilize on nanoparticles, synthetic or monoclonal antibodies that respond to the human papilloma virus, HPV18, and the toxic gut microbe Escherichia ...

Bulky present generation satellite dishes and ground terminals could become relics of the past thanks to research currently being conducted for the European Space Agency (ESA) by Queen's University Belfast's Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology (ECIT) aimed at developing discrete self-aligning flat antennas. It is hoped the work could lead to a one-size-fits all solution that could be optimised for a variety of technologies presently used to deliver satellite broadband and television to travellers as well as customers in broadband 'not spots'. ECIT ...

Research by the University of Exeter has revealed that ants have a big impact on their local environment as a result of their activity as 'ecosystem engineers' and predators. The study, published in the Journal of Animal Ecology, found that ants have two distinct effects on their local environment. Firstly, through moving of soil by nest building activity and by collecting food they affect the level of nutrients in the soil. This can indirectly impact the local populations of many animal groups, from decomposers such as Collembola, to species much higher up the food ...

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the fifth most common malignancy in the world and is estimated to cause approximately half a million deaths annually. Undoubtedly, the best available treatment for all liver tumors is complete surgical resection. However, the synthetic somatostatin analogue octreotide has been found effective in inhibiting tumor growth in a variety of experimental models. It has been reported that octreotide inhibits the proliferation and induces apoptosis of different HCC cell lines in vitro. The mechanisms of apoptosis induction however are not well understood. A ...

T-regulatory lymphocytes (Tregs) are a subset of T lymphocytes that are involved in the mechanism of immunotolerance to self- and allo-antigens. Activity of these cells is one of the mechanisms of immune evasion of tumors, which inhibits the antitumor activity of effector cells. Tregs are among the tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes and circulate in the peripheral blood. In various cancer types, increased prevalence of Tregs has been observed, and in some studies, this has been reported as a prognostic factor. A research article published on January 21, 2011 in the World ...

Sphincter of Oddi dysfunction (SOD) is a pathological syndrome that is usually classified into the biliary type or the pancreatic type according to the Milwaukee criteria. However, this classification has some drawbacks in clinical practice, some of which result in flawed classification and failure to properly guide diagnosis and treatment. A research article published on January 21, 2011 in the World Journal of Gastroenterology addresses this question. The authors proposed a new classification system for SOD according to anatomy, symptoms, endoscope tests and radiological ...

Patients undergoing liver surgery have long been considered to be at low risk of venous thromboembolism. However, pulmonary embolism has recently emerged as an increasingly frequent and potentially fatal complication following liver resections. A research article published on January 21, 2011 in the World Journal of Gastroenterology addresses this question. The authors shed a new light on this discrepancy by reporting two patients who developed thrombi in their hepatic veins following hepatectomy. The report indicated that thrombosis may occur in hepatic veins after ...

E2F5 is a member of the E2F transcription factor family, and plays a key role in cell growth and proliferation. Overexpression of E2F5 has been reported in various human cancers, but not in liver cancer, and its biological implication is largely unknown. It is not known whether E2F5 plays a tumor suppressor role or an oncogenic role. Furthermore, there has been no report on the expression profile of E2F5 in HCC and its biological implications on hepatocarcinogenesis. A research article published on January 28, 2011 in the World Journal of Gastroenterology addresses this ...

Iron overload is a common and serious problem in thalassemic major patients. As iron accumulation is toxic in the body's tissues, accurate estimation of iron stores is of great importance in these patients to prevent iron overload by an appropriate iron chelating therapy. Liver biopsy is the gold standard for evaluating iron stores but it is an invasive method which is not easily repeatable in patients. Introduction of other more applicable methods seems to be necessary. A research article published on January 28, 2011 in the World Journal of Gastroenterology addresses ...

Failure to tackle rising greenhouse gas emissions effectively has led to intensifying debate on geoengineering - deliberate large-scale schemes to slow the rate at which Earth is heating up. The public debate often mixes opinion with fact so scientists have now released the first summary for policymakers on ocean fertilization, one of the earliest geoengineering proposals. The authors report that the chances of success of using ocean fertilization to deal with climate change is low. Ocean fertilization involves adding iron or other nutrients to the surface of the ocean ...

Nearly ten percent of all cases of depression are so severe that the patients do not respond to any established treatment method. Targeted stimulation of areas in the brain using a type of "brain pacemaker" has recently raised hopes: According to initial studies, half of patients with the most severe depression treated in this manner see a significant improvement in mood. Physicians from the University of Bonn, together with colleagues from the US, have suggested a new target structure for deep brain stimulation (as it is technically called). They hope to achieve an even ...

Computer engineers at North Carolina State University have developed hardware that allows programs to operate more efficiently by significantly boosting the speed at which the "cores" on a computer chip communicate with each other. The core, or central processing unit, is the brain of a computer chip; most chips currently contain between four and eight cores. In order to perform a task more quickly using multiple cores on a single chip, those cores need to communicate with each other. But there are no direct ways for cores to communicate. Instead, one core sends data ...

In order to arrive at this result the researchers calculated the price with a model that measures the number of medals according to government expenditure in sport, along with other variables. "This model allows accurate measurement of how much extra expense is necessary to win each medal," the UC3M professors Juan de Dios Tena and Ramón J. Flores explained, who carried out this study within the Sports Economics Research Group, headed by professor David Forrest, of the University of Salford (England) and which also includes Ismael Sanz from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos ...

If you think histamines are your nemesis during allergy season, here's something that might change your perspective. New research published in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology (http://www.jleukbio.org) shows that histamine could be an important molecule to developing new treatments for multiple sclerosis (MS). In the study, the scientists analyzed the role of histamine in an animal model of multiple sclerosis and found that histamine plays a critical role in preventing MS or lessening its effects. "We hope that our study will help design new therapies for autoimmune ...