Researchers have identified an elusive gene responsible for Thrombocytopenia with Absent Radii (TAR), a rare inherited blood and skeletal disorder. As a result, this research is now being transformed into a medical test that allows prenatal diagnosis and genetic counselling in affected families. The team used genetic sequencing to discover that TAR results from low levels of the protein called Y14. They found that the syndrome occurs by a unique inherited mechanism. Platelets are the second most abundant cell in the blood. Their main task is to survey the blood vessel ...

Ancient manuscripts written by Arabic scholars can provide valuable meteorological information to help modern scientists reconstruct the climate of the past, a new study has revealed. The research, published in Weather, analyses the writings of scholars, historians and diarists in Iraq during the Islamic Golden Age between 816-1009 AD for evidence of abnormal weather patterns. Reconstructing climates from the past provides historical comparison to modern weather events and valuable context for climate change. In the natural world trees, ice cores and coral provide evidence ...

Japanese scientists have found that the odorous compound responsible for halitosis – otherwise known as bad breath – is ideal for harvesting stem cells taken from human dental pulp. In a study published today, Monday 27 February, in IOP Publishing's Journal of Breath Research, researchers showed that hydrogen sulphide (H2S) increased the ability of adult stem cells to differentiate into hepatic (liver) cells, furthering their reputation as a reliable source for future liver-cell therapy. This is the first time that liver cells have been produced from human dental ...

Washington, D.C.— Seawater circulation pumps hydrogen and boron into the oceanic plates that make up the seafloor, and some of this seawater remains trapped as the plates descend into the mantle at areas called subduction zones. By analyzing samples of submarine volcanic glass near one of these areas, scientists found unexpected changes in isotopes of hydrogen and boron from the deep mantle. They expected to see the isotope "fingerprint" of seawater. But in volcanoes from the Manus Basin they also discovered evidence of seawater distilled long ago from a more ancient plate ...

STANFORD, Calif. — Humans aren't the only species that like to get busy with a glass of bubbly, according to researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Turns out, the common baker's yeast has indulged in a frenzy of amorous frolicking in the fermentation vats of winemakers for hundreds, possibly thousands, of years, with interesting results. The unexpected promiscuity has made the lineage of many commercial and wild yeast strains difficult to trace. But there are also indications that such willy-nilly sharing of genetic information is precisely what gives ...

MAYWOOD, Ill. – In a study published in Nature Medicine, Loyola researchers report on a promising new technique that potentially could turn immune system killer T cells into more effective weapons against infections and possibly cancer. The technique involves delivering DNA into the immune system's instructor cells. The DNA directs these cells to overproduce a specific protein that jumpstarts important killer T cells. These killer cells are typically repressed in patients who have HIV or cancer, said José A. Guevara-Patino, MD, PhD, senior author of the study. Guevara ...

Most people attempt to reduce the little uncertainties of life by carrying umbrellas on cloudy days, purchasing automobile insurance or hiring inspectors to evaluate homes they might consider purchasing. For scientists, reducing uncertainty is a no less important goal, though in the weird realm of quantum physics, the term has a more specific meaning. For scientists working in quantum physics, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says that measurements of properties such as the momentum of an object and its exact position cannot be simultaneously specified with arbitrary ...

SALT LAKE CITY, Feb. 27, 2012 – University of Utah mathematicians developed a set of calculus equations to make it easier for doctors to save Tylenol overdose patients by quickly estimating how much painkiller they took, when they consumed it and whether they will require a liver transplant to survive. "It's an opportunity to use mathematical methods to improve medical practice and save lives," says Fred Adler, a professor of mathematics and biology and coauthor of a study that developed and tested the new method. The study of acetaminophen – the generic pain and ...

For the past decade, scientists have been pursuing cancer treatments based on RNA interference — a phenomenon that offers a way to shut off malfunctioning genes with short snippets of RNA. However, one huge challenge remains: finding a way to efficiently deliver the RNA. Most of the time, short interfering RNA (siRNA) — the type used for RNA interference — is quickly broken down inside the body by enzymes that defend against infection by RNA viruses. "It's been a real struggle to try to design a delivery system that allows us to administer siRNA, especially if you ...

PASADENA, Calif.—Bacteria have evolved different systems for secreting proteins into the fluid around them or into other cells. Some, for example, have syringe-like exterior structures that can pierce other cells and inject proteins. Another system, called a type VI secretion system, is found in about a quarter of all bacteria with two membranes. Despite being common, researchers have not understood how it works. Now a team, co-led by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), has figured out the structure of the type VI secretion system apparatus ...

ZyLAB, a leading provider of eDiscovery and information management solutions, today announced that it has been named to KMWorld Magazine's prestigious list of the "100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management." Published annually and in its 12th year, this list recognizes organizations that play a role in the creation and evolution of the knowledge management market through consistent innovation of technologies, products and services. Companies chosen for this list are compiled by KM practitioners, theorists, analysts, vendors and their customers and colleagues. ...

People who take Ritalin are far more aware of their mistakes, a University of Melbourne study has found. The study, by Dr Rob Hester from the Department of Psychological Sciences and colleagues at the Queensland Brain Institute, investigated how the brain monitors ongoing behaviour for performance errors – specifically failures of impulse control. It found that a single dose of methylphenidate (Ritalin) results in significantly greater activity in the brain's error monitoring network and improved volunteers' awareness of their mistakes. Diminished awareness of performance ...

An irregular heartbeat — atrial fibrillation — is a strong predictor of cognitive decline and the loss of independence in daily activities in older people at risk of cardiovascular disease, according to a study in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). Researchers sought to understand whether there was an association between an irregular heartbeat and the loss of mental and physical functions in people at risk of cardiovascular disease. They looked at data from two randomized controlled trials: the ONTARGET and TRANSCEND trials, which involved 31 506 patients from ...

A new study has found that patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) who have not responded to interferon treatments experience long-term benefits when they switch to the targeted drug imatinib. Published early online in Cancer, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the study indicates that imatinib is the treatment of choice for these patients. Imatinib, a drug that blocks the protein made by a particular cancer-causing gene, has revolutionized the treatment and prognosis of patients with CML. Now up to 93 percent of patients who take the drug as ...

PASADENA, Calif., (February 27, 2012) – Children and adolescents who are overweight or obese are more likely to have asthma than their healthy weight counterparts, according to a new Kaiser Permanente Southern California study published in the online edition of Obesity. The study, which included more than 681,000 children between ages 6 and 19, found that the association between asthma and body mass index varied by race and ethnicity. The study found that the association between BMI and asthma was weaker for African Americans, a group that was previously known to have ...

Millions of adults suffer from the incurable disease multiple sclerosis (MS). It is relatively certain that MS is an autoimmune disease in which the body's own defense cells attack the myelin in the brain and spinal cord. Myelin enwraps the nerve cells and is important for their function of transmitting stimuli as electrical signals. There are numerous unconfirmed hypotheses on the development of MS, one of which has now been refuted by the neuroimmunologists in their current research: The death of oligodendrocytes, as the cells that produce the myelin sheath are called, ...

Mathematically, is it possible to continuously deform a rough sphere into a perfect sphere? Under what situations can we solve the differential equations? Professor Xu Xingwang of the Department of Mathematics at National University of Singapore (NUS), along with Dr Chen Xuezhang from Nanjing University of China, has established a new method to tackle this long-standing problem. What it used to be Of the various different ways to measure the roughness of the sphere, the scalar curvature measurement has proven to be the weakest one, resulting in a problem commonly known ...

Web applications such as Google Mail, Facebook and Amazon are used every day. However, so far there are no methods to test them systematically and at low cost for malfunctions and security vulnerabilities. Therefore, computer scientists from Saarland University are working on automatic methods of testing, which check complex web applications autonomously. For the first time, they will present this work at exhibition booth F34 in hall 26 at the computer fair Cebit. The trade show will take place from March 6 to 10 in Hannover. "Ineffective and inefficient" is Valentin ...

People like to keep a safe distance from explosive substances, but in order to analyze them, close contact is usually inevitable. At the Vienna University of Technology, a new method has now been developed to detect chemicals inside a container over a distance of more than a hundred meters. Laser light is scattered in a very specific way by different substances. Using this light, the contents of a nontransparent container can be analyzed without opening it. Scattered Light as a "Chemical Fingerprint" "The method we are using is Raman-spectroscopy", says Professor Bernhard ...

This study is part of broader research that these scientists are carrying out on the imbalance of the sexes in China and its potential consequences. This phenomenon started to be noticed during the nineteen eighties and can currently be seen in the birth rate of approximately 120 boys for every 100 girls born in the People's Republic of China. The objective of this research is precisely to analyze the effects that this disproportion can have on this society and to attempt to prevent the possible negative results it may produce. The researchers estimate that approximately ...

New research has shown that visual alerting methods are still considered to be the most trustworthy, as compared to auditory or tactile alerts. This is shown by research conducted by a team of scientists at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA, USA. The research Alert Characteristics and Identification of Avatars on a Virtual Battlefield by James P. Bliss, Rachel Liebman and J. Christopher Brill is published in the current issue (6:2) of the journal Intelligent Decision Technologies. Most research to date has been limited to the visual or auditory signal modality. ...

Why is it that Mycobacterium tuberculosis can cause tuberculosis with as little as 10 cells, whereas Vibrio cholerae requires the host to ingest up to tens of millions of cells to cause cholera? This is the question that two research teams, from the Pasteur Institute, in France, and the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia and the University of Lisbon, in Portugal, answer in the latest issue of the journal PLoS Pathogens. The researchers show that bacteria that are able to invade and/or destroy cells of the host's immune system have higher infectivity, whereas those that are ...

Washington D.C., February 27, 2012 – In a study published in the March 2012 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Katherine Rice and colleagues, from the Marcus Autism Center, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, and Emory University School of Medicine, used eye-tracking technology to measure the relationship between cognitive and social disability in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and the ability of children with ASD to pay attention to social interactions. The study is the largest to date to observe children with ...

A collaboration between scientists in Trinity College Dublin and the United Kingdom has identified new processes that lead to the development of a novel cell implicated in allergies. The discovery has the potential for new strategies to treat asthma and other allergic diseases. The research findings have just been published in the leading international journal Nature Immunology. The work was performed by Professor Padraic Fallon, Science Foundation Ireland Stokes Professor of Translational Immunology of TCD's School of Medicine and Dr Andrew McKenzie of the Medical ...

PHILADELPHIA (February 24, 2012)— A new report from researchers at the Drexel University School of Public Health identifies patterns in the misuse of illicit drugs among young adults who also misuse prescription drugs. The report, "Misuse of Prescription and Illicit Drugs among High-Risk Adults" in Los Angeles and New York, was recently published in the first issue of the Journal of Public Health Research. This is the first report to compare patterns of prescription and illicit drug misuse among high-risk young adults who are already misusing prescription drugs. Dr. ...