AURORA, Colo. (Jan. 5, 2011) – The number of women who die from complications of anesthesia during childbirth has plummeted 59 percent over the last two decades thanks to improved monitoring and better medical techniques, according to a recent study. The report's lead researcher, Joy Hawkins, MD, professor of anesthesiology and director of Obstetric Anesthesia at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, said the risks have been dramatically reduced due to a greater focus on eliminating complications of general anesthesia. Hawkins examined 12 years of anesthesia-related ...

Scientists have discovered direct evidence of the diet of one of the most important group of ammonites, distant relatives of squids, octopuses and cuttlefishes. The discovery may bring a new insight on why they became extinct 65.5 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous. Ammonites are among the world's most well known fossils but until now, there has been no experimental evidence of their place in the food chain. Using synchrotron X-rays, a Franco-American team of scientists led by Isabelle Kruta has discovered exceptionally preserved mouth organs of ammonites, ...

Powerful synchrotron scans of Baculites fossils found on American Museum of Natural History expeditions to the Great Plains suggests that the extinct group of marine invertebrates to which they belong, the ammonites, had jaws and teeth adapted for eating small prey floating in the water. One ammonite also provided direct evidence of a planktonic diet because it died with its last meal in its mouth—tiny larval snails and crustacean bits. The detailed description of internal structure of ammonites, published by a Franco-American research team this week in Science, also provides ...

Nanotechnologists at The University of Texas at Dallas have invented a broadly deployable technology for producing weavable, knittable, sewable, and knottable yarns containing up to 95 weight percent of otherwise unspinnable guest powders and nanofibers. A minute amount of host carbon nanotube web, which can be lighter than air and stronger pound-per-pound than steel, confines guest particulates in the corridors of highly conducting scrolls without interfering with guest functionality for such applications as energy storage, energy conversion, and energy harvesting. Using ...

If you want to be surrounded by females on the prowl, it pays to be cool, at least if you are a male butterfly. In an unusual example of sex role reversals, females actively court males after being exposed to cool, dry temperatures as caterpillars, Yale University researchers report in the Jan. 7 issue of the journal Science. Raised in the moist and warmer season as larvae, males take up the traditional roles of suitor, displaying their wing designs to females who do the choosing. "Behavior in these butterflies is changed by the temperatures experienced during development," ...

Most of the time cancer seems to creep up gradually over time; cells become premalignant, then increasingly abnormal before they become cancerous. But sometimes cancers seem to pop up as if out of nowhere. Now, researchers reporting in the January 7th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication, have new evidence to explain how that can happen. Based on the DNA sequences of multiple cancer samples of various types, they show that cancer can arise suddenly in the aftermath of one-off cellular crises involving tens to hundreds of genomic rearrangements. "We think ...

Using a new technology that relies on thousands of synthetic molecules to fish for disease-specific antibodies, researchers have developed a potential method for detecting Alzheimer's disease with a simple blood test. The same methodology might lead to blood tests for many important diseases, according to the report in the January 7th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication. "If this works in Alzheimer's disease, it suggests it is a pretty general platform that may work for a lot of different diseases," said Thomas Kodadek of The Scripps Research Institute. ...

Most primary care physicians (PCPs) and kidney specialists favor collaborative care for a patient with progressive chronic kidney disease (CKD), but their preferences on how and when to collaborate differ, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society Nephrology (CJASN). PCPs and kidney specialists need to partner more effectively to optimize care for patients with CKD. Prompt referral of patients to kidney specialists can slow CKD progression or help patients prepare for dialysis or kidney transplantation in a timely ...

BOULDER—One of the most enduring mysteries in solar physics is why the Sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, is millions of degrees hotter than its surface. Now scientists believe they have discovered a major source of hot gas that replenishes the corona: narrow jets of plasma, known as spicules, shooting up from just above the Sun's surface. The finding addresses a fundamental question in astrophysics: how energy moves from the Sun's interior to create its hot outer atmosphere. "It's always been quite a puzzle to figure out why the Sun's atmosphere is hotter than its surface," ...

LA JOLLA, CA-In making your pro-longevity resolutions, like drinking more red wine and maintaining a vibrant social network, here's one you likely forgot: dialing down your mitochondria. It turns out that slowing the engines of these tiny cellular factories could extend your life-an observation relevant not only to aging research but to our understanding of how cells communicate with each another. So report researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in the Jan. 7, 2011, issue of Cell. Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Andrew Dillin, Ph.D., and ...

For the first time, researchers have developed a 3D picture of a herpes virus protein interacting with a key part of the human cellular machinery, enhancing our understanding of how it hijacks human cells to spread infection and opening up new possibilities for stepping in to prevent or treat infection. This discovery uncovers one of the many tactical manoeuvres employed by the virus. The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)-funded team, led by The University of Manchester, have used NMR - a technique related to the one used in MRI body scanners ...

SANTA CRUZ, CA--Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have identified a key molecule for establishing blood stem cells in their niche within the bone marrow. The findings, reported in the January issue of Cell Stem Cell, may lead to improvements in the safety and efficiency of bone marrow transplants. Bone marrow transplants are a type of stem cell therapy used to treat cancers such as lymphoma and leukemia and other blood-related diseases. In a bone marrow transplant, the "active ingredients" are hematopoietic stem cells, which live in the bone marrow ...

Most cancer tissues are invaded by inflammatory cells that either stimulate or inhibit the growth of the tumor, depending on what immune cells are involved. Now a Swedish-Belgian research team has shown that a protein that naturally occurs in the body, HRG, inhibits tumor growth and metastasis into secondary organs by activating specific immune cells. The study is being published today in the Net edition of the prestigious journal Cancer Cell. - Our study shows that the regulation of tumor-associated inflammation can be utilized to treat cancer and that there is a great ...

Work published today shows that brain cells need to create links early on in their existence, when they are physically close together, to ensure successful connections across the brain throughout life. In people, these long-distance connections enable the left and right side of the brain to communicate and integrate different kinds of information such as sound and vision. A change in the number of these connections has been found in many developmental brain disorders including autism, epilepsy and schizophrenia. The Newcastle University researchers Dr Marcus Kaiser ...

Remarkable new research overthrows the conventional view that cancer always develops in a steady, stepwise progression. It shows that in some cancers, the genome can be shattered into hundreds of fragments in a single cellular catastrophe, wreaking mutation on a massive scale. The scars of this chromosomal crisis are seen in cases from across all the common cancer types, accounting for at least one in forty of all cancers. The phenomenon is particularly common in bone cancers, where the distinctively ravaged genome is seen in up to one in four cases. The team looked ...

Scientists in Connecticut have carried out one of the first psychological studies into eating disorders in Native American (NA) populations. The research, published in The International Journal of Eating Disorders, provides new insights into the extent to which Native American populations experience eating disorders, revealing that women are more likely to report behavioral symptoms then men, while challenging views that NA men and ethnically white men will experience different psychological symptoms. The team, led by Professor Ruth Striegel-Moore from Wesleyan University ...

JUPITER, FL, January 5, 2011 – Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute, have developed a novel technology that is able to detect the presence of immune molecules specific to Alzheimer's disease in patients' blood samples. While still preliminary, the findings offer clear proof that this breakthrough technology could be used in the development of biomarkers for a range of human diseases. The study, led by Scripps Research Professor Thomas Kodadek, Ph.D., was published in the January 7, 2011 edition of the journal Cell. Traditionally, antigens—a ...

A multinational team of researchers led by stem cell scientists at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Scripps Research Institute has documented specific genetic abnormalities that occur in human embryonic (hESC) and induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) lines. Their study, "Dynamic changes in the copy number of pluripotency and cell proliferation genes in human ESCs and iPSCs during reprogramming and time in culture" will be published in the January 7 issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell. The published findings highlight the need for frequent ...

For years, the majority of research on reactive oxygen species (ROS) – ions or very small molecules that include free radicals – has focused on how they damage cell structure and their potential link to stroke, cardiovascular disease and other illnesses. However, researchers at the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research have shown for the first time that neural stem cells, the cells that give rise to neurons, maintain high levels of ROS to help regulate normal self-renewal and differentiation. The findings, published in the Jan. ...

Emotional crying is a universal, uniquely human behavior. When we cry, we clearly send all sorts of emotional signals. In a paper published online today in Science Express, scientists at the Weizmann Institute have demonstrated that some of these signals are chemically encoded in the tears themselves. Specifically, they found that merely sniffing a woman's tears – even when the crying woman is not present -- reduces sexual arousal in men. Humans, like most animals, expel various compounds in body fluids that give off subtle messages to other members of the species. ...

Women who underwent gastric band surgery to lose weight reported significant improvements in urinary function and quality of life after the operation, according to research published in the January issue of the urology journal BJUI. However, men undergoing the procedure did not enjoy the same significant urinary function improvements as the women. They also reported that erectile function was slightly worse after surgery, unlike studies following non-surgical weight loss where sexual function actually improved. Researchers surveyed 176 patients - 142 women and 34 ...

They are the most widely produced fruit in the world and now scientists in Japan have discovered that tomatoes contain a nutrient which could tackle the onset of vascular diseases. The research, published in the journal Molecular Nutrition & Food Research, reveals that an extracted compound, 9-oxo-octadecadienoic, has anti-dyslipidemic affects. The team led by Dr Teruo Kawada, from Kyoto University and supported by the Research and Development Program for New Bio-industry Initiatives, Japan, focused their research on extracts which tackle dyslipidemia, a condition which ...

Australian researchers have suggested that nations should abandon the concept of carbon emissions trading in favor of a carbon swap bank that might lead to genuine reductions in the amount of carbon dioxide greenhouse gas entering the atmosphere and so provide a mechanism for reducing climate change. Details of the carbon swap bank are outlined in the journal Interdisciplinary Environmental Review. Carbon emissions trading was to be the economic environmental solution to climate change. The original impetus of the Copenhagen Treaty in 2010 was to mitigate rising global ...

Researchers from Israel have determined that more than half of liver transplant recipients develop post-transplantation metabolic syndrome (PTMS), placing them at greater risk for cardiovascular disease. Prior to transplantation only 5% of the patients were diagnosed with metabolic syndrome, but rates of obesity, hypertriglyceridemia, hypertension, and diabetes were significantly higher post transplantation. Full details of this retrospective-prevalence study are available in the January 2011 issue of Liver Transplantation, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf ...

The use of combined treatments for severe acute pancreatitis is safe and effective in managing the disease, resulting in shorter hospitalizations and fewer radiological procedures than standard therapy, according to a study in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Institute. In a related study, doctors found that patients with infected pancreatic necrosis were able to avoid surgery through primary conservative treatment, which is in-patient medical treatment. Pancreatitis refers to the inflammation ...