A new gene expression technique adapted for single molecule sequencing has enabled researchers at the RIKEN Omics Science Center (OSC) to accurately and quantitatively measure gene expression levels using only 100 nanograms of total RNA. The technique, which pairs RIKEN's Cap Analysis of Gene Expression (CAGE) protocol with the Helicos® Genetic Analysis System developed by Helicos BioSciences Corporation, opens the door to the detailed analysis of gene expression networks and rare cell populations. In recent years, next-generation DNA sequencers have produced an increasingly ...

Penile enlargement is one of the most controversial topics today. Many physicians claim that there is no medical proof that the non-surgical methods for increasing the penile size actually work. In addition to that, there are many people online abusing this topic, which is one of the main reasons why everyone is so skeptic about it. With the growing popularity of the penile extenders, one of the most reputable medical journals BJUI (British Journal of Urology International), which is issued as the official journal of the British Association of Urological Surgeons, have ...

Many of the prescriptions issued by GPs for paracetamol either give less than recommended doses to older children or exceed recommended doses in young children. Under-dosing may result in insufficient pain relief and over-dosing can damage a person's liver. "Getting the dose right can become even more complicated when parents also give their children additional paracetamol that they have bought over the counter," says James McLay, a senior member of the research team who studied this issue. The findings are published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology. Paracetamol ...

The ability to image single biological molecules in a living cell is something that has long eluded researchers; however, a novel technique, using the structure of diamond, may well be able to do this and potentially provide a tool for diagnosing, and eventually developing a treatment for, hard-to-cure diseases such as cancer. In a study published today, Thursday, 19 May, in the Institute of Physics and the German Physical Society's New Journal of Physics, researchers have developed a technique, exploiting a specific defect in the lattice structure of diamond, to externally ...

Free bingo site City Bingo has gone yet further in order to reward customers at the site. With existing promotions sending members to locations such as New York City and Barcelona and daily games of free bingo no deposit required, the Break the Bank deal is specifically for those logging on to City Bingo on a daily basis. As the site has been claiming on the website - "Regular Players Can Always Feel a Buzz in the City - and our Break the Bank Promotion is the Talk of the Town!" With the site quickly becoming one of the premier free bingo brands with its distinctive ...

Until a recent discovery, theories about the origins and evolutionary relationships of snakes barely had a leg to stand on. Genetic studies suggest that snakes are related to monitor lizards and iguanas, while their anatomy points to amphisbaenians ("worm lizards"), a group of burrowing lizards with snake-like bodies. The debate has been unresolved--until now. The recent discovery by researchers from the University of Toronto Mississauga and the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Germany of a tiny, 47 million-year-old fossil of a lizard called Cryptolacerta hassiaca provides ...

Genetic Variant Raises Risk of Fatal Pulmonary Fibrosis Max Seibold, PhD, will extend findings recently reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, which identified a common genetic variant associated with a 7 to 22 fold increased risk for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and familial interstitial pneumonia. The discovery not only identifies a major risk factor for pulmonary fibrosis, but also points scientists in an entirely new direction for research into the causes and potential treatments for this difficult and deadly disease. Muc5b is the Predominant Mucin Expressed ...

With time, your facial skin begins to lose its structure and volume. The result is unpleasant wrinkles that can make you feel old and unattractive. There are three injectable gel forms of hyaluronic acid, a natural complex sugar found in all living cells that can help mask the effects of aging: Juvederm, Restylane and Elevess. The complex sugar in the hyaluronic acid gel is one of the major components of your skin. This gel makes wrinkle correction possible by retaining water much like a sponge. In fact, it can absorb more than 1,000 times its weight, helping to attract ...

In the United States, older patients with advanced lung cancer make much less use of hospital and emergency room services at the end of life than their counterparts in Ontario but use far more chemotherapy, according to a study published May 18th online in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Government-financed health care covers elderly patients in both Canada and the U.S., but coverage at the end of life differs. In the U.S., Medicare covers hospice care for qualified patients. Ontario, the most populous Canadian province, has no hospice program comparable ...

University of Notre Dame astronomer David Bennett is co-author of a new paper describing the discovery of a new class of planets — dark, isolated Jupiter-mass bodies floating alone in space, far from any host star. Bennett and the team of astronomers involved in the discovery believe that the planets were most likely ejected from developing planetary systems. The study is described in a paper appearing in the May 19th issue of the journal Nature. The discovery stems from an analysis of observations of the central bulge of the Milky Way galaxy taken in 2006 and 2007 by ...

Over four billion years of evolution, plants and animals grew far more complex than their single-celled ancestors. But a new comparison of proteins shared across species finds that complex organisms, including humans, have accumulated structural weaknesses that may have actually launched the long journey from microbe to man. The study, published in Nature, suggests that the random introduction of errors into proteins, rather than traditional natural selection, may have boosted the evolution of biological complexity. Flaws in the "packing" of proteins that make them more ...

Does the mere thought of going to the dentist make you uneasy? Do you routinely put off important dental work because of an irrational fear about the entire process? You are not alone. While dental anxiety often stems from a bad experience, sometimes just the sound of dental equipment or the prospect of a certain procedure can set patients on edge, even if they have no bad memories to draw from. Dental anxiety is more common than you might think. To help patients relax and safely receive the dental treatment(s) they need, many dentists now offer sedation dentistry (also ...

Researchers at King's College London have used cells found naturally in the body, to re-educate the immune system to prevent rejection of an organ transplant while remaining capable of fighting infections and cancer. Currently, patients must take immunosuppressant drugs to prevent a new organ from being rejected after transplantation. However, these drugs suppress the entire immune system, leaving the patient susceptible to infections and tumours. Scientists say this new approach using immune cells, called regulatory T cells (Tregs), from the body could eliminate ...

HOUSTON — For women with breast cancer undergoing radiation therapy, yoga offers unique benefits beyond fighting fatigue, according to new research from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. While simple stretching exercises improved fatigue, patients who participated in yoga that incorporated yogic breathing, postures, meditation and relaxation techniques into their treatment plan experienced improved physical functioning, better general health and lower cortisol (stress hormone) levels. They also were better able to find meaning in their cancer experience. ...

Breast implants may obstruct some mammogram imaging, but this does not mean breast implants render mammograms ineffective as a means of screening for breast cancer. Breast augmentation surgery remained the most popular cosmetic surgery procedure in 2010, with 296,000 procedures performed last year alone, according the annual statistics report from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. With that number continuing an upward trend over the past decade, more mammogram technicians and radiologists have experience conducting and reading the results of mammograms of women ...

If you and your spouse have decided to split, you know that there are many practical considerations that must be dealt with. You need to work out living arrangements, ensure that bills are paid on time and divvy up household expenses. If you are a parent, however, the most important thing you have to do is break the news of the divorce to your children in a way that is both informative and compassionate. Oftentimes, parents forget that they are not the only ones suffering; they either don't want to see that their decisions are hurting their children or they just get ...

ITHACA, N.Y. - Victims of third-degree burns and other traumatic injuries endure pain, disfigurement, invasive surgeries and a long time waiting for skin to grow back. Improved tissue grafts designed by Cornell scientists that promote vascular growth could hasten healing, encourage healthy skin to invade the wounded area and reduce the need for surgeries. These so-called dermal templates were engineered in the lab of Abraham Stroock, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Cornell and member of the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science, ...

An estimated four in 10 hospital websites in the United States publicize the use of robotic surgery, with the lion's share touting its clinical superiority despite a lack of scientific evidence that robotic surgery is any better than conventional operations, a new Johns Hopkins study finds. The promotional materials, researchers report online in the Journal for Healthcare Quality, overestimate the benefits of surgical robots, largely ignore the risks and are strongly influenced by the product's manufacturer. "The public regards a hospital's official website as an authoritative ...

A new paper by University of Calgary psychologist Dr. David Hodgins says the proliferation of gambling opportunities around the world, particularly online, is increasing the visibility of gambling disorders and giving access to people who previously had no exposure to gambling opportunities. Hodgins, head of the university's Addictive Behaviours Laboratory, says gambling disorders are often found in conjunction with other mental health and substance-abuse disorders. In an online version of the medical journal, The Lancet, Hodgins says the study of problem gambling is ...

The common view of a nursing home is a building full of old people, in walkers and wheelchairs, white hair and bingo games. A recent story from the Associated Press notes that there is a growing population of young (less than 65 years-old) people in nursing homes and long-term care facilities. While those 30 and younger only number one percent of the nursing home population, the number of those younger than 65 have increased 22 percent in the last eight years. A report from NPR notes that ages 31-65 now make up 14 percent of nursing home populations. This is up from ...

The most widely used methods for calculating species extinction rates are "fundamentally flawed" and overestimate extinction rates by as much as 160 percent, life scientists report May 19 in the journal Nature. However, while the problem of species extinction caused by habitat loss is not as dire as many conservationists and scientists had believed, the global extinction crisis is real, says Stephen Hubbell, a distinguished professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA and co-author of the Nature paper. "The methods currently in use to estimate extinction ...

Gaining more than the recommended weight during pregnancy can put women at increased risk of becoming obese and developing related health problems, including high blood pressure, later in life. These are the latest findings from researchers at the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC)/Children of the 90s at the University of Bristol. Weight gain during pregnancy is necessary for the growth and development of the fetus but the study, which looked at the health of 3,877 women 16 years after they gave birth, found that those who gained more than the ...

In the opening editorial to the latest edition of the Journal of Radiological Protection, published today, Wednesday 18 May, radiological protection expert Professor Richard Wakeford of the Dalton Nuclear Institute, The University of Manchester, gives a detailed account of events at Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station, and poses several questions that remain unanswered, several weeks on from the earthquake and tsunami on 11 March. Taking a close look at information disclosed by Japanese government ministries, the World Health Organisation, the International Atomic ...

The Emergency Nurses Association (ENA) recently released its third annual scorecard on the safety of each state's roads. When it comes to laws meant to prevent car accidents, the news for Florida is not so good. Out of 14 categories, Florida received a mediocre score of seven. While the score is not the worst received - North Dakota scored lowest at four - it certainly was not one of the top scores. The scorecard ranked the safety of each state's roads based on the presence or absence of 14 different motor vehicle safety laws. The laws included those for mandatory seatbelt ...

Can people truly feel the future? Researchers remain skeptical, according to a new study by Jeffrey Rouder and Richard Morey from the University of Missouri in the US, and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, respectively. Their work (1) appears online in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (2), published by Springer. Although extra-sensory perception (ESP) seems impossible given our current scientific knowledge, and certainly runs counter to our everyday experience, a leading psychologist, Daryl Bem of Cornell University, is claiming evidence for ESP. Rouder ...