(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Studies of the small sea squirt may ultimately help solve the problem of rejection of organ and bone marrow transplants in humans, according to scientists at UC Santa Barbara. An average of 20 registered patients die every day waiting for transplants, due to the shortage of matching donor organs. More than 110,000 people are currently waiting for organ transplants in the U.S. alone. Currently, only one in 20,000 donors are a match for a patient waiting for a transplant. These grim statistics drive scientists like Anthony W. De Tomaso, assistant ...

Older workers benefit most from a modest health behavior program when it combines a web-based risk assessment with personal coaching. University of Illinois at Chicago researchers conducted a randomized trial to evaluate two worksite wellness interventions assessing older workers' health behaviors and outcomes. The findings are available online and will be published in an upcoming issue of the American Journal of Public Health. The health behaviors that were examined were physical activity, diet, stress reduction and smoking cessation, says Susan Hughes, professor of ...

In a novel approach that works around the gene defect in Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome, an inherited immune deficiency disorder, researchers used an alternative cell signaling pathway to significantly improve immune function in a 13-year-old boy with the disease. The study, at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, provides a proof-of-principle that immunotherapy, which harnesses elements of the body's immune system, may be used to treat this rare but often deadly disorder. "If this encouraging initial result holds up in further ...

By asking a group of older adults to analyze videos of other people conversing -- some talking truthfully, some insincerely -- a group of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco has determined which areas of the brain govern a person's ability to detect sarcasm and lies. Some of the adults in the group were healthy, but many of the test subjects had neurodegenerative diseases that cause certain parts of the brain to deteriorate. The UCSF team mapped their brains using magnetic resonance imaging, MRI, which showed associations between the deteriorations ...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Easy-to-follow recipes for radioactive compounds like those found in nuclear fuel storage pools, liquid waste containment areas and other contaminated aqueous environments have been developed by researchers at Sandia National Laboratories. "The need to understand the chemistry of these compounds has never been more urgent, and these recipes facilitate their study," principal investigator May Nyman said of her group's success in encouraging significant amounts of relevant compounds to self-assemble. The trick to the recipes is choosing the right templates. ...

LIVERMORE, Calif. -- A new computational study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals how hydrocarbons may be formed from methane in deep Earth at extreme pressures and temperatures. The thermodynamic and kinetic properties of hydrocarbons at high pressures and temperature are important for understanding carbon reservoirs and fluxes in Earth. The work provides a basis for understanding experiments that demonstrated polymerization of methane to form high hydrocarbons and earlier methane forming reactions under pressure. Hydrocarbons ...

PASADENA, Calif.—For many people, Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite technology is little more than a high-tech version of a traditional paper map. Used in automobile navigation systems and smart phones, GPS helps folks find their way around a new neighborhood or locate a nearby restaurant. But GPS is doing much, much more for researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech): it's helping them find their way to a more complete understanding of Earth's interior structure. Up until now, the best way to explore Earth's internal structures—to measure ...

Los Angeles, CA (April 7, 2011) While breastfeeding babies has numerous health advantages to both mother and child, mothers who breastfeed may find that other people look down on them and do not want to work with them. A recent study released by Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (published by SAGE) found that mothers who breastfeed are viewed as less competent than other women. Researchers conducted three varying double blind studies to determine the views of others towards breastfeeding moms. One study, for example, asked participants to measure the competence, ...

First impressions are important, and they usually contain a healthy dose both of accuracy and misperception. But do people know when their first impressions are correct? They do reasonably well, according to a study in the current Social Psychological and Personality Science (published by SAGE). Researchers had two separate groups of more than100 people meet in a "getting-acquainted" session much like speed-dating, until the people had spoken with everyone else in the group for three minutes each. At the end of each 3-minute chat, they rated each other's personalities, ...

Dark matter, the mysterious substance that may account for nearly 25 percent of the universe, has so far evaded direct observation. But researchers from UCLA, Columbia University and other institutions participating in the international XENON collaboration say they are now closer than ever before. Their new results, announced today at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, where the XENON experiment is housed deep beneath a mountain 70 miles west of Rome, represent the highest-sensitivity search for dark matter yet, with background noise 100 times lower than competing ...

An experimental drug that blocks two points of a crucial cancer cell signaling pathway inhibits the growth of ovarian cancer cells and significantly increases survival in an ovarian cancer mouse model, a study at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center has found. The drug, called NVP-BEZ235, also inhibits growth of ovarian cancer cells that have become resistant to the conventional treatment with platinum chemotherapy, and helps to re-sensitize the cancer cells to the therapy. It also enhances the effect of platinum chemotherapy on ovarian cancer cells that are still ...

In light of recent studies that suggest the use of stored blood during transfusions may cause adverse effects in patients, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) funded a number of research projects to examine the safety of transfusing older red cells and the impact of stored blood on respiratory gases. These papers discussing potential adverse effects of stored blood and related concerns for oxygen delivery by transfusion are now available online in TRANSFUSION, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of AABB. Blood banks are responsible for ...

BOSTON, Mass. (April 15, 2011) — Strains of genital herpes in Africa are far more virulent than those in the United States, researchers at Harvard Medical School report, a striking insight into a common disease with important implications for preventing HIV transmission in a region staggered by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The researchers arrived at this finding by testing mouse model strains of the disease against vaccine candidates. All vaccines were far more efficacious in abating the U.S. strain. The researchers say identification of the properties of the African viruses ...

PHILADELPHIA—Identifying gene mutations in cancer patients to predict clinical outcome has been the cornerstone of cancer research for nearly three decades, but now researchers at the Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson have invented a new approach that instead links cancer cell metabolism with poor clinical outcome. This approach can now be applied to virtually any type of human cancer cell. The researchers demonstrate that recurrence, metastasis, and poor clinical outcome in breast cancer patients can be identified by simply gene profiling cancer cells that are using ...

VIDEO: Much of the FEN1 structure was solved by Sakurai et al, but how FEN1 works was not apparent in the DNA-free structure. The presence of DNA appears to induce the... Click here for more information. DNA replication is critical to the life of all organisms, insuring that each new cell, as well as each new offspring, gets an accurate copy of the genome. Among the legions of proteins that do the work so essential to a cell's survival, the DNA-slicing "flap endonuclease" ...

The Colorado Supreme Court recently decided to review a 2010 Colorado Court of Appeals decision involving the collateral source rule. The central issue is whether a Colorado personal injury defendant can introduce evidence of the actual amount a health provider received for a plaintiff's injuries. Under common law, compensation or indemnity paid to an injured party by a collateral source (that is, not the alleged wrongdoer in the lawsuit) does not reduce the damages that could otherwise be recovered from the wrongdoer. In Crossgrove v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., a delivery ...

DARIEN, IL – A study in the April 15 issue of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine shows increased automobile crash rates among teen drivers who start school earlier in the morning. Results indicate that in 2008 the weekday crash rate for 16- to 18-year-olds was about 41 percent higher in Virginia Beach, Va., where high school classes began at 7:20 - 7:25 a.m., than in adjacent Chesapeake, Va., where classes started at 8:40 - 8:45 a.m. There were 65.8 automobile crashes for every 1,000 teen drivers in Virginia Beach, and 46.6 crashes for every 1,000 teen drivers in ...

A safer and more effective treatment for 10 million people in developing countries who suffer from infections caused by trypanosome parasites could become a reality thanks to new research from Queen Mary, University of London published today (15 April). Scientists have uncovered the mechanisms behind a drug used to treat African sleeping sickness and Chagas disease, infections caused by trypanosome parasites which result in 60,000 deaths each year. The study, appearing in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, investigated how the drug nifurtimox works to kill off the ...

An editorial in the New York Post gave City Councilman Eric Ulrich a "Knucklehead Award" for his proposal to license all bicycles in New York City. Ulrich, from Queens (and the youngest serving member of the council at age 24), proposed the licensing system after receiving complaints from senior citizens who said, according to Ulrich, that bicyclists "scare the hell out of them." While some rogue cyclists may tarnish the reputation of all riders, cycling is up across the city, with Department of Transportation figures showing the number of everyday bicycle commuters ...

PHILADELPHIA — Scientists at Yale University have identified a set of plasma biomarkers that could reasonably predict the risk of metastasis among patients with melanoma, according to findings published in Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. "The rate at which melanoma is increasing is dramatic, and there is a huge number of patients under surveillance," said Harriet Kluger, M.D., associate professor of medicine at Yale University School of Medicine. "Our current method of surveillance includes periodic imaging, which creates ...

[EMBARGOED FOR APRIL 15, 2011] Urinary tract infections are common in women, costing an estimated $2.5 billion per year to treat in 2000 in the United States alone. These infections frequently recur, affecting 2 to 3 percent of all women. A depletion of vaginal lactobacilli, a type of bacteria, is associated with urinary tract infection risk, which suggests that replenishing these bacteria may be beneficial. Researchers conducted a double-blind placebo-controlled trial to investigate this theory. Their results are published in Clinical Infectious Diseases and now available ...

The U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has issued a regulatory proposal requiring interstate commercial truck and bus companies to install electronic on-board recorders (EOBRs) to monitor the number of hours their drivers are on the road. FMCSA proposes mandatory installation and use of EOBRs in all commercial motor vehicles (CMV) for which the use of Record of Duty Status (RODS) is currently required. EOBRs are devices attached to commercial vehicles that automatically record the number of hours drivers spend operating ...

Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) who are hospitalized for pneumonia and treated with inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) have decreased mortality when compared to those who are not treated with ICS, according to a retrospective analysis of almost 16,000 COPD patients admitted to VA hospitals. The results were published online ahead of the print edition of the American Thoracic Society's American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. Read the original study here. The use of ICS in COPD patients reduces exacerbations, but increases ...

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — April 15, 2011 — Drug-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus, a bacteria linked to a wide range of human diseases, are present in meat and poultry from U.S. grocery stores at unexpectedly high rates, according to a nationwide study by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen). Nearly half of the meat and poultry samples — 47 percent — were contaminated with S. aureus, and more than half of those bacteria — 52 percent — were resistant to at least three classes of antibiotics, according to the study published today in the journal Clinical ...

For many people, pets contribute greatly to emotional well-being. But dogs, cats, and many other types of pets have the potential to injure or kill unsuspecting humans. Dog attacks and bites are particularly common and can cause lasting damage to victims -- many of whom are children. When an animal attack occurs, however, owners are often liable for any injuries or deaths. Some home insurance policies may even cover medical and other costs. Pets with Potential to do Harm Many pets have the potential to be loving companions, but some have the potential to be ...