FINDINGS: By determining how corticosteroids act to increase production of red blood cell progenitors, Whitehead Institute researchers have identified a class of drugs that may be beneficial in treating some erythropoietin-resistant anemias. One such anemia is Diamond-Blackfan anemia (DBA), which is frequently treated with corticosteroids, despite their severe side-effects. The identified class of drugs may be able to treat other anemias, including those resulting from trauma, sepsis, malaria, kidney dialysis, and chemotherapy. RELEVANCE: Some common anemias can be treated ...

Researchers at Cleveland Clinic's Genomic Medicine Institute have revealed multiple genetic discoveries that may permit easier diagnosis and disease management for Cowden syndrome patients who are predisposed to breast and kidney cancer. The research, which could allow for earlier discovery of cancerous tumors, is published in the Dec. 22 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Charis Eng, M.D., Ph.D, Chair of the Genomic Medicine Institute at Cleveland Clinic, led the research. It revealed KILLIN as a novel predisposition gene for Cowden ...

December 21, 2010 — (BRONX, NY) — Two researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have found that our 98.6° F (37° C) body temperature strikes a perfect balance: warm enough to ward off fungal infection but not so hot that we need to eat nonstop to maintain our metabolism. "One of the mysteries about humans and other advanced mammals has been why they are so hot compared with other animals," said study co—author Arturo Casadevall, M.D., Ph.D., professor and chair of microbiology & immunology at Einstein. "This study helps to explain why mammalian ...

Projectors are getting smaller and smaller. Now that pictures are available in digital format almost everywhere, we need projectors to beam giant photos and films onto walls. Projectors contain lenses that spread the light from the pixelated source in such a way as to illuminate the image area evenly. Until now, this was done using complicated arrays of lenses placed one behind the other. Recently, the same effect has been achieved using flat lens arrays made up of thousands of identical microlenses. This kind of array takes up much less space and does not need to be painstakingly ...

The only way to learn if your water source has hexavalent chromium is to check with your public water supplier and request a water quality report, said NJIT Professor Taha Marhaba, a civil/environmental engineer. Most municipal or city engineers should be able to provide such a report upon request. Additional information specifically about hexavalent chromium levels may also be available. "In general, hexavalent chromium can be found in either surface or groundwater sources and its source can be either natural or man-made industrial operations that have used chromium," ...

About 50 miles from Bethlehem, a drilling project is determining the climate and earthquake activity of the Holy Land. Scientists from eight nations are examining the ground below the Dead Sea, by placing a borehole in this deepest basin in the world. The International Continental Scientific Drilling Program ICDP brings together research teams from Israel, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, the USA and Germany. Particularly noteworthy: Researchers from Jordan and Palestine are also involved. Scientists and technicians of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences have now ...

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Neuroscientists had assumed that a mutation in the progranulin gene, which makes the progranulin protein and supports brain neurons, was sufficient to produce a kind of dementia known as frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD). But now an international team of scientists led by researchers at Mayo Clinic's campus in Florida have found another genetic factor they say appears to protect against the disorder in progranulin mutation carriers. In an article published in the Dec. 22, 2010, issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy ...

JUPITER, FL, December 22, 2010 – A scientist from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute has discovered a molecular switch that controls the synthesis of ribosomes. Ribosomes are the large machineries inside all living cells that produce proteins, the basic working units of any cell. These new findings offer a novel target for potential treatments for a range of diseases, including cancer. The study is published in the December 24, 2010 edition of the Journal of Molecular Biology. The study identified the molecular switch, essentially formed by a small ...

AURORA, Colo. (Dec. 22, 2010)—A class of drugs thought to kill cancer cells may in fact block "cross talk" between the cancer cell and normal immune cells, resulting in reduced cancer growth and spread—a discovery that could significantly alter the way cancer drugs are evaluated in the future. Researchers at the University of Colorado Cancer Center demonstrated the discovery in bladder cancer, the fifth most common cancer in the United States. Bladder cancer will kill about 14,000 Americans this year, most of whom will die as a result of the disease's spread to other ...

University Park, Pa. -- A computer program that automatically analyzes mounds of satellite images and other data could help climate scientists keep track of complex, constantly changing environmental conditions, according to an international team of researchers. "All of the data and information that is continually collected by satellites and sensors can cause tons of problems for scientists, who simply don't have the time to analyze every pixel of every satellite image," said James Wang, professor of information sciences and technology, Penn State. "Our goal has been ...

WASHINGTON, D.C., December 22, 2010 -- What can scientists learn from watching a group of people sitting around, chatting, playing movies, reading, and happily making new friends? Quite a lot, says University of Melbourne, Australia acoustician Adam Vogel, who carefully observed this sort of group in a fatigue management study he and his colleagues describe this month in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Their report shows the effects of sustained wakefulness on speech and describes a novel method to acoustically analyze the effects of fatigue on the central ...

Gaithersburg, MD – On December 14-15, 2010, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) convened an Advisory Panel to discuss several scientific issues that may affect the regulation of dental amalgam. At the conclusion of the hearing, the Panel voted to recommend that the FDA conduct further review of the material's safety. The meeting comes on the heels of a July 2009 Final Rule (http://bit.ly/FDA2009FinalRule) from the FDA that reclassified dental mercury from a class I device to a class II device and designated special controls for dental amalgam, mercury and amalgam ...

PHILADELPHIA – Overexpression or hyperactivation of ErbB cell-surface receptors drives the growth of many breast cancers. Drugs, like Herceptin, that block the receptors' signals halt tumor progression in some patients. However, not all patients' tumors respond, with some becoming resistant over time. Different drugs that interfere with other steps in the signaling pathway may improve the response of patients, yet little is known about these molecules. Now, Marcelo G. Kazanietz, PhD, professor of Pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and colleagues, ...

Researchers at The Wistar Institute announce the release of an online tool that will help scientists find "gene promoters"—regions along a DNA strand that tell a cell's transcription machinery where to start reading in order to create a particular protein. The Mammalian Promoter Database (MPromDb) integrates the genome sequencing data generated at Wistar with publicly available data on human and mouse genomics. MPromDb pinpoints known promoters and predicts where new ones are likely to be found, the researchers say. "Several complete genome sequences are available, including ...

Researchers have discovered evidence of a distinct group of "archaic" humans existing outside of Africa more than 30,000 years ago at a time when Neanderthals are thought to have dominated Europe and Asia. But genetic testing shows that members of this new group were not Neanderthals, and they interbred with the ancestors of some modern humans who are alive today. The journal Nature reported the finding this week. The National Science Foundation's Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences Division partially funded the research. An international team of scientists led by Svante ...

Billfish and tuna, important commercial and recreational fish species, may be more vulnerable to fishing pressure because of shrinking habitat, according to a new study published by scientists from NOAA, The Billfish Foundation, and University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. An expanding zone of low oxygen, known as a hypoxic zone, in the Atlantic Ocean is encroaching upon these species' preferred oxygen-abundant habitat, forcing them into shallower waters where they are more likely to be caught. During the study, published recently in ...

MADISON – To survive in a tumultuous environment, sea urchins literally eat through stone, using their teeth to carve out nooks where the spiny creatures hide from predators and protect themselves from the crashing surf on the rocky shores and tide pools where they live. The rock-boring behavior is astonishing, scientists agree, but what is truly remarkable is that, despite constant grinding and scraping on stone, urchin teeth never, ever get dull. The secret of their ever-sharp qualities has puzzled scientists for decades, but now a new report by scientists from the ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Marine ecologists at Oregon State University have shown for the first time that tiny fish larvae can drift with ocean currents and "re-seed" fish stocks significant distances away – more than 100 miles in a new study from Hawaii. The findings add credibility to what scientists have believed for some time, but until now been unable to directly document. The study also provides a significant demonstration of the ability of marine reserves to rebuild fishery stocks in areas outside the reserves. The research was published this week in PLoS One, a scientific ...

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have discovered how HIV binds to and destroys a specific human antiviral protein called APOBEC3F. The results suggest that a simple chemical change can convert APOBEC3F to a more effective antiviral agent and that shielding of a common feature shared by related proteins may yield a similar outcome. This discovery highlights the potential for a novel approach to combating HIV/AIDS that would seek to stabilize and harness the innate antiviral activity of certain human proteins, according to lead author John Albin, a researcher ...

BUFFALO, NY (December 22, 2010) -- Experiments by a team of researchers in New York and New Jersey have generated evidence that questions the common belief that the pterygotid eurypterids ("sea scorpions") were high-level predators in the Paleozoic oceans. This group, which ranged the seas from about 470 to 370 million years ago (long before the dinosaurs appeared), included the largest and, arguably, scariest-looking arthropods known to have evolved on planet Earth. Reaching lengths of 2 ½ meters with a body supported by well-developed legs, and armed with a pair of forward-facing ...

In a breakthrough that could lead to new treatments for patients with malignant melanoma, researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine have discovered that a particular protein suppresses the progression of melanoma through regulation of an oncogene, or gene responsible for cancer growth. The study is published in the December 23 issue of Nature. Researchers studied the natural progression of melanoma using mouse and human cells, as well as patient samples and determined that the presence of a specific histone variant, which is a protein that helps package DNA, was ...

A protein implicated in the development of vascular diseases may also contribute to the failure of arteriovenous (AV) fistulas created for vascular access in dialysis patients, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN). "Our findings raise the possibility that monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1) may contribute to the relatively poor outcomes regarding the function and longevity of human hemodialysis AV fistulas," comments Karl A. Nath, MB.ChB (Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN). AV fistulas are the ...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Eating a Southern staple, fried fish, could be one reason people in Alabama and across the "stroke belt" states are more likely than other Americans to die of a stroke, according to a study published in the December 22, 2010, online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology (AAN). In the stroke belt states – Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee – the risk of dying from stroke is higher than in other parts of the country. In Alabama, the stroke death rate ...

HOUSTON — People with higher levels of folate in their red blood cells were more likely to have two tumor-suppressing genes shut down by methylation, a chemical off switch for genes, researchers report in the December issue of Cancer Prevention Research. DNA hypermethylation, notes co-author Jean-Pierre Issa, M.D., professor in MD Anderson's Department of Leukemia, is found in a variety of cancers and diseases of aging, such as heart disease. Methyl groups attach to genes at sites called CpG islands and protrude like tags or book marks from the promoter region, preventing ...

Tampa, Fla. (Dec. 23, 2010) – Two studies appearing in the current issue of Cell Transplantation 19(10) discuss stem cells derived from adipose (fat) cells and their potential use in plastic surgery and tissue reconstruction. The studies are now freely available on-line at http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cog/ct/ . Adipose-derived stem cells maintain their "stemness" and could be useful for cell-based therapies A team of researchers from several institutions in Italy isolated and characterized adult fat cell-derived stem cells from patients undergoing lipoaspiration ...