BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – In the first head-to-head comparison of the three most common drugs used at the time of a kidney transplant to prevent organ rejection, researchers found that the least expensive drug – at one-half to one-fifth the price – is as safe and effective as the other two, according to a paper published by University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers in the May 19, 2011, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. Based at UAB, researchers in the INTAC trial spent three years following 474 patients who had undergone kidney transplants at 30 U.S. transplant ...

Alexandria, Va. – The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) today highlighted several studies in a press briefing from among more than 4,000 abstracts publicly posted online at www.asco.org in advance of ASCO's 47th Annual Meeting. An additional 17 plenary, late-breaking and other major studies will be released in on-site press conferences at the Annual Meeting. The meeting, which is expected to draw approximately 30,000 cancer specialists, will be held June 3-7, 2011, at McCormick Place in Chicago, Ill. The theme of this year's meeting is "Patients. Pathways. ...

Philadelphia, PA, May 18, 2011 – Abnormal uterine bleeding (AUB) in women of reproductive age may be due to a wide range of disorders or pathologies. Until now, there has been no universally accepted method for classifying such patients, which has impeded basic science and clinical investigation, as well as the practical, rational, and consistent application of medical and surgical therapy. As the result of a stringent 5-year review process, a multinational group of clinician–investigators with broad experience in the investigation of AUB has now agreed on a classification ...

A human genetic variant associated with an almost 30 percent reduced risk of developing severe malaria has been identified. Scientists from the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine (BNITM), Hamburg, and Kumasi University, Ghana, reveal that a variant at the FAS locus can prevent an excessive and potentially hazardous immune response in infected children. The study appears in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics on May 19. Severe malaria is a major public health burden in Sub-Saharan Africa, where approximately one million individuals die each year as a result ...

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet; the saying is perhaps a testament to the acute sense of smell that is unique to mammals. Paleontologists have now discovered that an improved sense of smell jumpstarted brain evolution in the ancestral cousins of present-day mammals. The research will appear in the 20 May 2011 issue of the journal Science, which is published by AAAS, the international, nonprofit science society. The findings may help explain why mammals evolved such large and complex brains, which in some cases ballooned 10 times larger than relative body ...

Mammals first evolved their characteristic large brains to enable a stronger sense of smell, according to a new study published this week in the journal Science by paleontologists from The University of Texas at Austin, Carnegie Museum of Natural History and St. Mary's University in San Antonio. This latest study is the first to use CT technology, similar to medical scanners, to reconstruct the brains of two of the earliest known mammal species, both from the Jurassic fossil beds of China. The 3D scans revealed that even these tiny, 190-million-year-old animals had developed ...

PHILADELPHIA – Discovering the step-by-step details of the path embryonic cells take to develop into their final tissue type is the clinical goal of many stem cell biologists. To that end, Kenneth S. Zaret, PhD, professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and associate director of the Penn Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and Cheng-Ran Xu, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the Zaret laboratory, looked at immature cells called progenitors and found a way to potentially predict their fate. They base ...

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania… Paleontologists have often wondered why mammals—including humans—evolved to have larger brains than other animals. A team of paleontologists now believe that large brains may have developed in mammals to facilitate an acute sense of smell, according to a new paper published today in the prestigious journal Science. The team also noticed enlargement in the areas of the brain that correspond to the ability to sense touch through fur; this sense is acutely developed in mammals. Scientists used high-resolution CT scans to study rare 190-million-year-old ...

After the death of Osama bin Laden, New York personal injury lawyer David Perecman reaffirmed his commitment to help the heroes who are still battling illnesses connected to 9/11. For many individuals, the death of bin Laden brought closure. The death also served to rekindle memories of those who volunteered to assist at the World Trade Center site after the 9/11 attacks. The lives of many Ground Zero volunteers were changed in challenging ways. Rescue and recovery workers and others are still suffering from health consequences related to the World Trade Center disaster. "People ...

SEATTLE – Researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have discovered a new drug target for squamous cell carcinoma – the second most common form of skin cancer. Scientists in the laboratory of Valeri Vasioukhin, Ph.D., have found that a protein called alpha-catenin acts as a tumor suppressor and they also have unlocked the mechanism by which this protein controls cell proliferation. The findings by Vasioukhin and colleagues will be published May 24 in Science Signaling. For the study, the researchers studied mice that were bred to lack a copy of the gene that ...

Scientists at Penn State University have achieved a major milestone in the attempt to assemble, in a test tube, entire chromosomes from their component parts. The achievement reveals the process a cell uses to package the basic building blocks of an organism's entire genetic code -- its genome. The evidence provided by early research with the new procedure overturns three previous theories of the genome-packaging process and opens the door to a new era of genome-wide biochemistry research. A paper describing the team's achievement will be published in the journal Science ...

In March, four Democratic U.S. Senators, Harry Reid, D-Utah, Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., and Tom Udall, D-N.M., drafted a letter requesting that Apple, Google and Research in Motion (or RIM) eliminate the applications (user-friendly computer programs for specific tasks) on mobile communication devices that warn drivers of the locations of drunk-driving checkpoints. The next day, RIM, the manufacturer of the BlackBerry agreed to the removal of driving-under-the-influence (DUI/DWI) checkpoint functionality on its BlackBerry devices. Google later ...

On Friday, April 1, 2011, a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737-300 experienced a rapid decompression when the metal fuselage skin tore apart, leaving a 5X1 foot hole. This kind of event is rare, but can, and has been, catastrophic when it does occur. In 1988, another Boeing 737, a 200 model, experienced a similar, but much worse, event over Hawaii. In that case, the skin on the entire front section of the aircraft cabin was denuded, leaving the passengers sitting in the first several rows completely exposed, with the aircraft being held together by two metal spars running ...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have uncovered new details of an unusual biological mechanism in the brains of diverse species that not only helps regulate how their brains develop, but also how they function later in life. The discovery could lead to new biomarkers for specific neurological diseases in humans and, possibly, the development of drugs to cure them. The research, by Miles F. Wilkinson, PhD, professor of reproductive medicine and a member of the UCSD Institute for Genomic Medicine, and colleagues, is published in ...

Thinking about, let alone preparing for, divorce before you are even married is not what most of us want to do. Whether we believe that divorce will never happen to us or whether we just choose to ignore the possibility, the fact remains that almost half of all marriages in the United States end in divorce. One way to enter into a marriage prepared for all outcomes is to create a prenuptial agreement. Creating this agreement doesn't mean that your marriage will eventually come to an end. Rather, creating a prenuptial agreement is just a way for you and your spouse to ...

The atmosphere of the planet Saturn normally appears placid and calm. But about once per Saturn year (about thirty Earth years), as spring comes to the northern hemisphere of the giant planet, something stirs deep below the clouds that leads to a dramatic planet-wide disturbance (eso9014 - http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso9014/). The latest such storm was first detected by the radio and plasma wave science instrument on NASA's Cassini spacecraft [1], in orbit around the planet, and also tracked by amateur astronomers in December 2010. It has now been studied in detail ...

A recent opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court in Connick v. Thompson seems to give prosecutors a free pass to win at all costs. The opinion overlooks a pattern of misconduct by prosecutors in cases against John Thompson, who was almost executed before he was exonerated and set free. Thompson's experience demonstrates the need for capable legal counsel to fight against any prosecutorial misconduct when facing criminal charges. Connick v. Thompson In 1984, John Thompson was convicted of armed robbery in Louisiana. In 1985, Thompson was also tried and found guilty of ...

If you and your child's mother are not married when the child is born, you may feel like a second-class citizen. You probably think that your rights are completely contingent upon the whims of your child's mother. You may be afraid that you could lose the ability to live with or visit your child. Fortunately, though, Michigan laws recognize that you have rights when it comes to your children. The laws make it possible for you to be legally listed as the child's father, to make a claim for custody or visitation and to have the ability to make decisions about how your child ...

LA JOLLA, CA—In principle, genetic engineering is simple, but in practice, replacing a faulty gene with a healthy copy is anything but. Using mutated versions of the lamin A gene as an example to demonstrate the versatility of their virus-based approach, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies successfully edited a diseased gene in patient-specific induced pluripotent stem cells as well as adult stem cells. The study, which will be published in the June 3, 2011 issue of Cell Stem Cell but are already available online, demonstrates that the gene-editing ...

A detailed comparison of DNA and RNA in human cells has uncovered a surprising number of cases where the corresponding sequences are not, as has long been assumed, identical. The RNA-DNA differences generate proteins that do not precisely match the genes that encode them. The finding, published May 19, 2011, in Science Express, suggests that unknown cellular processes are acting on RNA to generate a sequence that is not an exact replica of the DNA from which it is copied. Vivian Cheung, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator who led the study, says the RNA-DNA ...

Colorectal cancer patients with defects in mismatch repair--one of the body's systems for repairing DNA damage--have lower recurrence rates and better survival rates than patients without such defects, according to a study published online May 19th in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. About 15% of colorectal cancers are associated with mismatch repair defects. Some defects are caused by the inherited gene mutations found in Lynch syndrome and others occur by chance, or "sporadically." But it has never been clear whether mismatch repair defects are linked to ...

Cruise Amour has shown its commitment to customer security by being the first UK agency to adopt site-wide security measures. Barely a week goes by without a report that another "big-name" company has had its on-line security compromised or has failed to properly protect its customer's data. Although the travel industry has by chance managed to avoid such pitfalls, Cruise Amour has taken the pro-active step of introducing additional industry leading security measures. Managing director Tim Hurrell, commented on the new security measures: "Let's be clear, ...

Cancer treatments often have the side effect of impairing the patient's immune system. This can result in life-threatening secondary infections from bacteria and fungi, especially since bacteria, like Staphylococcus aureus, are becoming multi-drug resistant (MRSA). New research published by BioMed Central's open access journal Annals of Clinical Microbiology and Antimicrobials investigates the potency of Indian wild plants against bacterial and fungal infections in the mouths of oral cancer patients. Researchers from Rohtak, India, tested extracts from several plants ...

Bitter cumin is used extensively in traditional medicine to treat a range of diseases from vitiligo to hyperglycemia. It is considered to be antiparasitic and antimicrobial and science has backed up claims of its use to reduce fever or as a painkiller. New research published in BioMedCentral's open access journal BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine shows that this humble spice also contains high levels of antioxidants. Reactive oxygen species (ROS), also known as free radicals, are produced as part of the metabolic processes necessary for life. Oxidative stress, ...

Standard Life research* has revealed the most popular retirement top-up plans for people who have saved into a pension. Alongside using other investments (43%), nearly a quarter (24%) are expecting inheritance will help fund their retirement, while others are planning equity release on their main home (10%), using rental income / sale of a property (23%) or using a partner or spouse's income (16%). The research found that 7% of over-55s don't plan to retire or have a pension plan, even though they had been saving into a pension. Using the state pension or other state ...