SAN ANTONIO, Texas, U.S.A. (Feb. 25, 2011) — The death of insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas is a core defect in diabetes. Scientists in Italy and Texas now have discovered a new way that these cells die — by toxic imbalance of a molecule secreted by other pancreatic cells. "Our study shows that neighboring cells called alpha cells can behave like adversaries for beta cells. This was an unexpected finding," said Franco Folli, M.D., Ph.D., professor of medicine/diabetes at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. He is co-lead author on the ...

Scientists are unravelling the environmental changes that took place around the Arctic during an exceptional episode of ancient global warming. Newly published results from a high-resolution study of sediments collected on Spitsbergen represent a significant contribution to this endeavour. The study was led by Dr Ian Harding and Prof John Marshall of the University of Southampton's School of Ocean and Earth Science (SOES), based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton. Around 56 million years ago there was a period of global warming called the Paleocene–Eocene ...

Researching animals in the wild can be challenging, especially if it involves a rare or elusive species like the giant panda or the clouded leopard. To remedy this, scientists rely heavily on camera traps—automated cameras with motion sensors. Left to photograph what passes in front of them, the cameras record the diversity and very often the behavior of animals around the world. The Smithsonian has brought together more than 202,000 wildlife photos from seven projects conducted by Smithsonian researchers and their colleagues into one searchable website, siwild.si.edu. ...

Botulism is a rare disease and recurrent botulism even more rare. However, in California, recurrent wound botulism among injection drug users has been on the rise and makes up three-quarters of reported cases in the United States. A new study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases and currently available online (http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/02/07/cid.cir005.full) examines this problem. From 1993 through 2006, 17 injection drug users were identified within the surveillance system of the California Department of Public Health for having recurrent ...

COLUMBIA, Mo. - Nearly 16 million Americans will be diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease or another type of dementia by 2050, according to the Alzheimer's Association. Symptoms include mood and behavior changes, disorientation, memory loss and difficulty walking and speaking. The effects of anti-dementia drugs on patients' emotions and behaviors are inconsistent. Now, University of Missouri researchers have found that participation in TimeSlips, a drug-free, creative storytelling intervention, improves communication skills and positive affect in persons with dementia. TimeSlips ...

February 25, 2011 -- Nearly one in eleven (8.6%) preschool children in the U.S. has been diagnosed with asthma and in some inner city neighborhoods, the figure is closer to one in seven. But, few asthma management programs are designed for parents of preschool children. The Asthma Basics for Children (ABC) program, established by Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and a coalition of community service organizations, educators, parenting programs, and community pediatric providers, addressed this need with a multi-layered approach that offers educational ...

Literature and films have left us with vivid images of the grasshopper plagues that devastated the Great Plains in the 1870s. Although commonly referred to as grasshoppers, the infestations were actually by Rocky Mountain locusts. The Rocky Mountain locust became extinct in 1902, but their cousins, grasshoppers and Mormon crickets, today still cause an estimated $1.5 billion (2005 U.S. dollars) in damage to grazing lands in the American West. A long-running research project directed by University of Notre Dame biologist Gary Belovsky, who also is director of the Notre ...

ARLINGTON, Va.-Successfully taking a small radio receiver intended for space applications and creating a full-featured radio frequency system, initially designed for a Marine Corps unmanned aircraft, would not have been possible without the integrated effort of three naval entities. The Software Reprogrammable Payload (SRP), a collaborative effort between the Office of Naval Research, the Naval Research Laboratory and Marine Corps aviation, is currently targeted for the Shadow unmanned aircraft system (UAS). Based on the successful development of SRP, Marine Corps ...

HOUSTON - Like a bounty hunter returning escapees to custody, a cancer-fighting gene converts organ cells that change into highly mobile stem cells back to their original, stationary state, researchers report online at Nature Cell Biology. This newly discovered activity of the p53 gene offers a potential avenue of attack on breast cancer stem cells thought to play a central role in progression and spread of the disease, according to scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Long known for monitoring DNA damage and forcing defective cells to kill ...

Rice University scientists and their colleagues have found that when growing corn crops for ethanol, more means less. A new paper in today's online edition of the American Chemical Society's journal Environmental Science and Technology shows how farmers can save money on fertilizer while they improve their production of feedstock for ethanol and alleviate damage to the environment. The research has implications for an industry that has grown dramatically in recent years to satisfy America's need for energy while trying to cut the nation's reliance on fossil fuels. The ...

Hawaii growers can now export more fruits and vegetables to the U.S. mainland, thanks to technology advanced by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists and cooperators. Delicious tropical fruits and vegetables such as papaya, rambutan, longan, dragon fruit and purple-fleshed sweet potato are gaining popularity in the continental United States. But just five years ago, it would have been difficult to find these tropical delicacies in grocery stores. That's because strict quarantine restrictions and phytosanitary measures are in place to ensure agricultural pests ...

In a finding that once again displays the power of the female, UCSF neuroscientists have discovered that teenage male songbirds, still working to perfect their song, improve their performance in the presence of a female bird. The finding sheds light on how social cues can impact the process of learning, the researchers said, and, specifically, could offer insights into the way humans learn speech and other motor skills. It also could inform strategies for rehabilitating people with motor disorders or brain injuries. The study was reported in a recent early online edition ...

Using tiny spheres of radioactive liquid to guide surgeons as they remove potentially cancerous material in the lungs is safe and more effective than other techniques, Italian researchers report at the European Multidisciplinary Conference in Thoracic Oncology (EMCTO), 24-26 February 2011, Lugano, Switzerland. Dr Luca Bertolaccini, Dr Alberto Terzi and colleagues from Santa Croce e Carle Hospital in Cuneo, Italy, studied a technique known as radio-guided surgery in 19 patients. Each of the patients had been found to have 'single pulmonary nodules' in their lungs. Single ...

The targeted cancer drug erlotinib has comparable efficacy to chemotherapy, and is better tolerated, in hard-to-treat cases where a patient's cancer has progressed quickly after treatment with first-line therapy, the results of a new phase III trial show. Dr Tudor Ciuleanu from the Institute of Oncology Ion Chiricuta, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, reported this finding from the international TITAN study at the European Multidisciplinary Conference in Thoracic Oncology (EMCTO), 24-26 February 2011, Lugano, Switzerland. "The TITAN study is the first trial to evaluate whether ...

Famed especially for the excellence of its peacekeepers and ice hockey players, Canada's water experts are now increasingly needed to help countries elsewhere brace for drought, flood and unsafe water problems looming on a 15 to 20 year horizon. Within a single generation, recent studies show, water demand in many countries will exceed supply by an estimated 40%, with one-third of humanity having half the water required for life's basics. In flood-prone places, meanwhile, catastrophic flood events normally expected once a century - similar to those recently witnessed ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Freshmen on the eve of finals and graduate students staring down a thesis committee may not feel this way, but the privilege of obtaining an advanced education correlates with decades of lower blood pressure, according to a study led by a public health researcher at Brown University. The benefit appears to be greater for women than for men. Eric Loucks, assistant professor of community health, says the analysis of nearly 4,000 patient records from the 30-year Framingham Offspring Study may help explain a widely documented association ...

The number of connections between nerve cells in the brain can be regulated by an immune system molecule, according to a new study from UC Davis. The research, published Feb. 27 in the journal Nature Neuroscience, reveals a potential link between immunity, infectious disease and conditions such as schizophrenia or autism. Schizophrenia, autism and other disorders are associated with changes in connectivity in the brain, said Kimberley McAllister, associate professor in the Center for Neuroscience and Departments of Neurology and Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior ...

One of the reasons often given by people for not attempting first aid in emergency situations is a lack of confidence and a fear of doing more harm than good. Yet a Norwegian study on four and five year olds published in BioMed Central's open access journal Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine shows that even young children are able to learn and perform basic first aid. Pre-school children at a kindergarten in Bergen, Norway, were taught first aid using the 'five-finger-rule' system: look at the person, talk to them, touch them to try ...

It is known that education decreases the incidence of cardiovascular disease. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Public Health demonstrates that education is also correlated with lower blood pressure and a decrease in other factors which influence health such as alcohol, smoking and weight gain. Taking their data from The Framingham Offspring Study researchers followed 3890 people, for 30 years, monitoring their medical history, how long they stayed in education, and their levels of coronary heart disease. Educated men (greater than 17 ...

In a world first, pluripotent stem cells have been generated from horses by a team of researchers led by Dr. Andras Nagy at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute of Mount Sinai Hospital and Dr. Lawrence Smith at the University of Montreal's Faculty of Veterinary Science. The findings will help enable new stem-cell based regenerative therapies in veterinary medicine, and because horses' muscle and tendon systems are similar to our own, aid the development of preclinical models leading to human applications. The study was published in the February 28 issue of the leading ...

A new analysis has found that supplementing the diet with fish oil may prevent muscle and weight loss that commonly occurs in cancer patients who undergo chemotherapy. Published early online in Cancer, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the study indicates that fish oil may help combat cancer-related malnutrition. Chemotherapy can cause cancer patients to lose muscle mass and become malnourished, leading to fatigue, a decreased quality of life, an inability to receive necessary treatments, and shorter survival. Researchers suspect that supplementing ...

Scientists at Queen's University Belfast have shown that they can deliver a gene directly into breast cancer cells causing them to self-destruct, using an innovative, miniscule gene transport system, according to research published today (28 February) in the International Journal of Pharmaceutics. Using a transport system called a Designer Biomimetic Vector (DBV), Dr Helen McCarthy, from Queen's School of Pharmacy, funded by Breast Cancer Campaign, packaged a gene into a nanoparticle 400 times smaller than the width of a human hair, allowing it to be delivered straight ...

Nearly two-thirds of Americans age 70 and older have hearing loss, but those who are of black race seem to have a protective effect against this loss, according to a new study led by Johns Hopkins and National Institute on Aging researchers. These findings, published online Feb. 28 in the Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences, provide what is believed to be the first nationally representative survey in older adults on this often ignored and underreported condition. Contrary to the view that hearing loss is of only minor importance in old age, study leader Frank Lin, ...

MIAMI – Feb 28, 2011 – A study led by scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science details the first scientific research to successfully track a great hammerhead shark using satellite tag technology. Rosenstiel Schhol Research Assistant Professor Neil Hammershlag and colleagues tracked one of the nomadic sharks for 62 days to uncover its northeast journey from the coast of South Florida to the middle of the Atlantic off the coast of New Jersey. The straight line point-to-point distance of 1,200 kilometers (745 miles) represents ...

Researchers at The Forsyth Institute have made a significant discovery about the nature of childhood dental disease. The scientific studies led by Anne Tanner, BDS, Ph.D., identified a new pathogen connected to severe early childhood caries (cavities). This bacterium, Scardovia wiggsiae, was present in the mouths of children with severe early childhood caries when other known pathogens such as Streptococcus mutans were not detected. This research may offer the potential to intervene and halt the progression of disease. Early childhood caries, ECC, is the most common chronic ...