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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (February 15, 2012) – Prions, the much-maligned proteins most commonly known for causing "mad cow" disease, are commonly used in yeast to produce beneficial traits in the wild. Moreover, such traits can be passed on to subsequent generations and eventually become "hard-wired" into the genome, contributing to evolutionary change. Prions were first found to produce heritable new traits more than a decade ago in laboratory studies of simple baker's yeast. The key discovery then was that some proteins could spontaneously switch from a normal shape into a ...

HOUSTON - Highly elevated platelet levels fuel tumor growth and reduce the survival of ovarian cancer patients, an international team of researchers led by scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer center reports in the New England Journal of Medicine. By pinpointing a powerful cause-and-effect relationship at the heart of a clinical observation that dates back more than 100 years, the team's findings reveal a new factor in cancer progression and new potential approaches for treatment. "We've long known that ovarian cancer patients often have markedly ...

Four new species of miniaturized lizards have been identified in Madagascar. These lizards, just tens of millimeters from head to tail and in some cases small enough to stand on the head of a match, rank among the smallest reptiles in the world. The full report can be found in the Feb. 15 issue of the open access journal PLoS ONE. The researchers, led by Frank Glaw of the Zoological State Collection of Munich in Germany, also conducted a genetic analysis to determine that the mini lizards, though similar in appearance, are in fact distinct species. The smallest of the ...

A recent study finds no statistically significant correlation between urinary mercury levels and autism, according to a Feb. 15 report in the open access journal PLoS ONE. There has been some concern that mercury may play a role in autism development. To investigate one aspect of this link, Barry Wright of North Yorkshire and York Primary Care Trust led a team of researchers in a study of 56 children with autism spectrum disorders, and mainstream, special school and sibling controls. The team found that the group with autism did not have elevated or reduced levels of ...

Organic farms produce strawberries with fewer malformations and a higher proportion of fully pollinated berries relative to conventional forms, according to a Feb. 15 report in the open access journal PLoS ONE. The study, led by Georg Andersson of Lund University in Sweden, investigated the effect of organic farming compared to conventional. They found that the pollination success increased greatly with organic farming, and speculate that this effect may be due to an increase in insect pollinator abundance and/or diversity. They also determined that this effect was apparent ...

BOSTON, MA—Mutations in TTN—the largest gene in the human genome—cause idiopathic (unknown cause) dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), a common form of heart failure, according to a study by Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) researchers. The TTN gene encodes a protein that functions as a scaffold for assembly of contractile proteins in muscle cells and also regulates the production of force in cardiac muscle cells. Because of its enormous size, the TTN gene was, until recently, too difficult to sequence and analyze in large numbers of patients. But with the development of ...

A medication commonly used to help people stop smoking may have an unanticipated positive side effect for an entirely different vice: drinking alcohol. A new study by University of Chicago researchers finds that varenicline, sold as Chantix, increases the negative effects of alcohol and therefore could hold promise as a treatment for alcoholism. A group of heavy-to-moderate social drinkers given a single dose varenicline three hours before an alcoholic beverage reported increased dysphoria and reduced "liking," even when researchers controlled for the effects of nausea ...

A team led by a University of British Columbia professor has developed a new class of drugs that completely suppress absence seizures – a brief, sudden loss of consciousness – in rats, and which are now being tested in humans. Absence seizures, also known as "petit mal seizures," are a symptom of epilepsy, most commonly experienced by children. During such episodes, the person looks awake but dazed. The seizures, arising from a flurry of high-frequency signals put out by the neurons of the thalamus, can be dangerous if they occur while a person is swimming or driving, ...

The ability to change vocal sounds (vocal plasticity) and develop an accent is potentially far more widespread in mammals than previously believed, according to new research on goats from Queen Mary, University of London. Vocal plasticity is the ability of an individual to modify the sound of their voice according to their social environment. Humans benefit from an extreme form of vocal plasticity which allows us to produce a wide range of sounds and accents, but in most other mammals (except, for example, bats and whales) vocalisations were thought to be genetically ...

The study of more than 11,000 pregnant women, in partnership with Mars Petcare, showed that those who owned dogs were approximately 50% more likely to achieve the recommended 30 minutes of exercise a day through high levels of brisk walking than those without dogs. Scientists suggest that as it is a low-risk exercise, walking a dog could form part of a broader strategy to improve the health of pregnant women. Previous studies have shown that maternal obesity and large weight gain during pregnancy has adverse outcomes for mother and child. Studies show, for example, that ...

CINCINNATI -- As part of the first national, randomized clinical trial to study two methods of drug delivery for seizing patients, researchers have shown that using an auto-injector, similar to an EpiPen, to deliver anticonvulsant medication stops prolonged seizures more quickly and effectively than drug delivery through an IV line. The research, which will be published in the Feb. 16 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, was conducted as part of the Rapid Anticonvulsant Medication Prior to Arrival Trial (RAMPART), which included University of Cincinnati (UC) ...

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, the leading multi-technological applied research organisation in Northern Europe, has developed an optical accessory that turns an ordinary camera phone into a high-resolution microscope. The device is accurate to one hundredth of a millimetre. Among those who will benefit from the device are the printing industry, consumers, the security business, and even health care professionals. A new Finnish enterprise called KeepLoop Oy and VTT are already exploring the commercial potential of the invention. The first industrial applications ...

BOSTON, MA (February 15, 2012) — For decades, researchers have sought a genetic explanation for idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), a weakening and enlargement of the heart that puts an estimated 1.6 million Americans at risk of heart failure each year. Because idiopathic DCM occurs as a familial disorder, researchers have long searched for genetic causes, but for most patients the etiology for their heart disease remained unknown. Now, new work from the lab of Christine Seidman, a Howard Hughes Investigator and the Thomas W. Smith Professor of Medicine and Genetics ...

When a person is experiencing a prolonged convulsive seizure, quick medical intervention is critical. With every passing minute, the seizure becomes harder to stop, and can place the patient at risk of brain damage and death. This is why paramedics are trained to administer anticonvulsive medications as soon as possible -- traditionally giving them intravenously before arriving at the hospital. Now a major clinical trial has shown that an even faster method that involves injecting the drugs into the thigh muscle using an autoinjector (similar to a pre-loaded syringe) ...

Like a stream of air shooting out of an airplane's broken window to relieve cabin pressure, scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego say lava formations in eastern Oregon are the result of an outpouring of magma forced out of a breach in a massive slab of Earth. Their new mechanism explaining how such a large volume of magma was generated is published in the Feb. 16 issue of the journal Nature. For years scientists who study the processes underlying the planet's shifting tectonic plates and how they shape the planet have debated the origins of ...

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found a cluster of young, blue stars encircling the first intermediate-mass black hole ever discovered. The presence of the star cluster suggests that the black hole was once at the core of a now-disintegrated dwarf galaxy. The discovery of the black hole and the star cluster has important implications for understanding the evolution of supermassive black holes and galaxies. "For the first time, we have evidence on the environment, and thus the origin, of this middle-weight black hole," said Mathieu Servillat, who worked ...

VIDEO: An argon plasma jet forms a rapidly growing corkscrew, known as a kink instability. This instability causes an even faster-developing behavior called a Rayleigh-Taylor instability, in which ripples grow and... Click here for more information. PASADENA, Calif.—January saw the biggest solar storm since 2005, generating some of the most dazzling northern lights in recent memory. The source of that storm—and others like it—was the sun's magnetic field, described by ...

On the health front, the poor often have at least two things going against them: a lack of insurance and chronic illnesses, of which diabetes is among the most common. The federal Affordable Care Act would expand the capacity of the nation's 8,000 community health centers to provide care for low-income, largely minority patients — from the current 20 million to about 40 million by 2015. The federal government is also trying to ensure that these community health centers deliver high-quality primary care, including diabetes care. A crucial part of this is the implementation ...

Pasadena, CA— Eta Carinae, one of the most massive stars in our Milky Way galaxy, unexpectedly increased in brightness in the 19th century. For ten years in the mid-1800s it was the second-brightest star in the sky. (Now it is not even in the top 100.) The increase in luminosity was so great that it earned the rare title of Great Eruption. New research from a team including Carnegie's Jose Prieto, now at Princeton University, has used a "light echo" technique to demonstrate that this eruption was much different than previously thought. Their work is published Feb. 16 in ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Half of the young adult Latino men and women responding to a survey in rural Oregon acknowledge not using regular effective contraception – despite expressing a desire to avoid pregnancy, according to a new Oregon State University study. Researchers say the low rate of contraception among sexually active 18- to 25-year-olds needs to be addressed – and not just among Latino populations. Research has shown many young adults from all backgrounds eschew contraception for many reasons including the mistaken belief that they or their partners cannot get pregnant. "The ...

Faced with the inevitability of death, we all wish for good caregiving during the final stage of our lives. A new study from Karolinska Institutet and Umeå University shows that non-pharmacological caregiving at the end of life in specialized palliative care is not as basic as one might believe but is based on complex professional decisions that weave physical, psychosocial and existential dimensions into a functional whole. The researchers have found that particularly important aspects of palliative care are an aesthetically pleasing, safe and comfortable environment, ...

Scientists at the University of Illinois, USA have discovered a new species of tiny, grasshopper-like insect in the tropical rainforests of the Toledo District in southern Belize. Dr Sam Heads and Dr Steve Taylor co-authored a paper, published in the open access journal ZooKeys, documenting the discovery and naming the new species Ripipteryx mopana. The name commemorates the Mopan people – a Mayan group, native to the region. "Belize is famous for its biodiversity, although very little is known about the insect fauna of the southern part of the country. This is particularly ...

There is an urgent need to increase the number of organ donors from black and minority ethnic (BME) groups in countries with a strong tradition of immigration, such as the UK, USA, Canada and the Netherlands, in order to tackle inequalities in access and waiting times. That is the key finding of a research paper on ethnicity and transplants, published by the Journal of Renal Care in a free online supplement that includes 15 studies on different aspects of diabetes and kidney disease. "BME groups are disproportionately affected by kidney problems for a number of ...

Stress levels of unemployed people are linked more to their surroundings than their age, gender, disposable income, and degree of deprivation, a study shows. The presence of parks and woodland in economically deprived areas may help people cope better with job losses, post traumatic stress disorder, chronic fatigue and anxiety, researchers say. They found that people's stress levels are directly related to the amount of green space in their area – the more green space, the less stressed a person is likely to be. Researchers measured stress by taking saliva samples ...