A team of UCSF researchers has engineered E. coli with the key molecular circuitry that will enable genetic engineers to program cells to communicate and perform computations. The work builds into cells the same logic gates found in electronic computers and creates a method to create circuits by "rewiring" communications between cells. This system can be harnessed to turn cells into miniature computers, according to findings that will be reported in an upcoming issue of Nature and appear today in the advanced online edition at www.nature.com. That, in turn, will enable ...

Raimund Muscheler is a researcher at the Department of Earth and Ecosystem Sciences at Lund University in Sweden. In the latest issue of the journal Science, he and his colleagues have described how the surface water temperature in the tropical parts of the eastern Pacific varied with the sun's activity between 7 000 and 11 000 years ago (early Holocene). Contrary to what one might intuitively believe, high solar activity had a cooling effect in this region. "It is perhaps a similar phenomenon that we are seeing here today", says Raimund Muscheler. "Last year's cold winter ...

Results from a large European study suggest that poorly educated people are more likely to be admitted to hospital with chronic heart failure than the better educated, even after differences in lifestyle have been taken into account. The study is published online today (Thursday 9 December) in the European Heart Journal [1]. Researchers followed 18,616 people for as long as 31 years (range 0-31 years, average follow-up was 21 years) between 1976 and 2007 and found that better educated men and women had nearly half the risk of hospital admission for heart failure than ...

VIDEO: This is a 3-D representation of the HR 8799 planetary system and the solar system in the Milky Way. The orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are shown with... Click here for more information. An international team of astronomers has discovered a fourth giant planet, HR 8799e, outside our solar system. The new planet joins the three planets that were the subjects of the first-ever images of a planetary family orbiting a star other than our Sun. The planets ...

A once fertile landmass now submerged beneath the Persian Gulf may have been home to some of the earliest human populations outside Africa, according to an article published today in Current Anthropology. Jeffrey Rose, an archaeologist and researcher with the University of Birmingham in the U.K., says that the area in and around this "Persian Gulf Oasis" may have been host to humans for over 100,000 years before it was swallowed up by the Indian Ocean around 8,000 years ago. Rose's hypothesis introduces a "new and substantial cast of characters" to the human history ...

Using stem cell technology, reproductive scientists in Texas, led by Dr. Richard R. Berhringer at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, have produced male and female mice from two fathers. The study was posted today (Wednesday, December 8) at the online site of the journal Biology of Reproduction. The achievement of two-father offspring in a species of mammal could be a step toward preserving endangered species, improving livestock breeds, and advancing human assisted reproductive technology (ART). It also opens the provocative possibility of same-sex couples having their ...

LIVERMORE, Calif. – Astronomers have discovered a fourth giant planet, joining three others that, in 2008, were the subject of the first-ever pictures of a planetary system orbiting another star other than our sun. The solar system, discovered by a team from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics with collaborators at University of California, Los Angeles and Lowell Observatory, orbits around a dusty young star named HR8799, which is 129 light years away. All four planets are roughly ...

(New York, December 8, 2010) – A school-based intervention program helped New York City high school students with moderate to severe asthma better manage their symptoms, dramatically reducing the need for urgent care, including hospitalizations and emergency room visits, according to a study published online in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. Students in the eight-week program reported a 28% reduction in acute medical visits, a 49% reduction in emergency department visits, and a 76% reduction in hospitalizations compared with asthmatic ...

Patients aged 65 and older who survive an episode of mechanical ventilation during a hospitalization are more likely to suffer from long-term disabilities after leaving the hospital than those who survive hospitalization without mechanical ventilation, according to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh. These results were borne out even though the levels of functional disability prior to hospitalization were similar in both groups. The study was published online ahead of the print edition of the American Thoracic Society's American Journal of Respiratory and Critical ...

NORFOLK, Va. – Eastern Virginia Medical School researchers have identified a potential novel treatment strategy for the social impairment of people with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), an aspect of the condition that has a profound impact on quality of life. "Persons with Autism Spectrum Disorders are either disinterested in social interactions or find them unpleasant. They often don't understand what other people are thinking or feeling and misinterpret social cues," said Stephen I. Deutsch, MD, PhD, the Ann Robinson Chair and professor of psychiatry and behavioral ...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 – Versatile electronic gadgets should employ a number of important criteria: small in size, quick in operation, inexpensive to fabricate, and deliver high precision output. A new microlaser, developed at the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia embodies all these qualities. It is small, tunable, cheap, and is essentially the world's first practical three-dimensional laser. As described in Optics Express, an open-access journal published by the Optical Society (OSA), Slovenian scientists Matjaž Humar and Igor Muševič have developed a microdroplet ...

A peculiar gas-giant planet orbiting a sun-like star 1200 light-years away is the first carbon-rich world ever observed. The implications are big for planetary chemistry, because without much oxygen, common rocks throughout the planet would be made of pure carbon, in forms such as diamonds or graphite. "On most planets, oxygen is abundant. It makes rocks such as quartz and gases such as carbon dioxide," said University of Central Florida professor Joseph Harrington, one of the study's lead researchers. "With more carbon than oxygen, you would get rocks of pure carbon, ...

Sudden changes in the volume of meltwater contribute more to the acceleration – and eventual loss – of the Greenland ice sheet than the gradual increase of temperature, according to a University of British Columbia study. The ice sheet consists of layers of compressed snow and covers roughly 80 per cent of the surface of Greenland. Since the 1990s, it has been documented to be losing approximately 100 billion tonnes of ice per year – a process that most scientists agree is accelerating, but has been poorly understood. Some of the loss has been attributed to accelerated ...

An international team of astronomers has discovered and imaged a fourth giant planet outside our solar system, a discovery that further strengthens the remarkable resemblances between a distant planetary system and our own. The research is published Dec. 8 in the advance online version of the journal Nature. The astronomers say the planetary system resembles a supersized version of our solar system. "Besides having four giant planets, both systems also contain two 'debris belts' composed of small rocky or icy objects, along with lots of tiny dust particles," ...

LOS ANGELES (December 8, 2010) – Jeffrey S. Upperman, MD, director of the Trauma Program at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, has co-authored a call to action for filling a significant gap in pediatric public health care and seeks federal oversight to establish the framework for a pediatric applied trauma research network (PATRN). This call to action was published simultaneously in the Journal of Pediatric Surgery and the Journal of Trauma. "The establishment of a pediatric trauma research network will be an important advance in trauma care in the U.S.," said Dr. Upperman. ...

Drinking cranberry juice has been recommended to decrease the incidence of urinary tract infections, based on observational studies and a few small clinical trials. However, a new study published in the January 1 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, and now available online (http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/52/1/23.full), suggests otherwise. College-aged women who tested positive for having a urinary tract infection were assigned to drink eight ounces of cranberry juice or a placebo twice a day for either six months or until a recurrence of a urinary tract infection, ...

Diving blue whales can dive for anything up to 15 minutes. However, Bob Shadwick from the University of British Columbia, Canada, explains that blue whales may be able to dive for longer, because of the colossal oxygen supplies they could carry in their blood and muscles, so why don't they? 'The theory was that what they are doing under water must use a lot of energy,' says Shadwick. Explaining that the whales feed by lunging repeatedly through deep shoals of krill, engulfing their own body weight in water before filtering out the nutritious crustaceans, Shadwick says, ...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- A new study by sexual health researchers at Indiana University found that women who used lubricant during sex reported significantly higher levels of satisfaction and pleasure. The study, involving 2,453 women, is the largest systematic study of this kind, despite the widespread commercial availability of lubricant and the gaps in knowledge concerning its role in alleviating pain or contributing to other health issues. "In spite of the widespread availability of lubricants in stores and on the Internet, it is striking how little research addresses ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec. 9, 2010 -- The centuries-old "one-drop rule" assigning minority status to mixed-race individuals appears to live on in our modern-day perception and categorization of people like Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, and Halle Berry. So say Harvard University psychologists, who've found that we still tend to see biracials not as equal members of both parent groups, but as belonging more to their minority parent group. Their research appears in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. "Many commentators have argued that the election of Barack Obama, ...

SAN DIEGO – (December 9, 2010) – A La Jolla Institute team, led by leading type 1 diabetes researcher Matthias von Herrath, M.D., has demonstrated the effectiveness of a recently developed computer model in predicting key information about nasal insulin treatment regimens in type 1 (juvenile) diabetes. Development of the software, the Type 1 Diabetes PhysioLab® Platform, was funded through the peer-reviewed grant program of the American Diabetes Association. The findings, which also showed the platform's ability to predict critical type 1 diabetes molecular "biomarkers," ...

States, not the federal government, now fund the majority of human embryonic stem cell research conducted in the United States, according to a recent study in the journal Nature Biotechnology. In addition, states varied substantially in the extent to which they prioritized human embryonic stem cell research, and much of the research performed in the states could likely have been funded by the National Institutes of Health under federal guidelines established by President Bush in 2001. "While the federal government still contributes more to stem cell research overall, ...

It goes without saying that conservatives and liberals don't see the world in the same way. Now, research from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln suggests that is exactly, and quite literally, the case. In a new study, UNL researchers measured both liberals' and conservatives' reaction to "gaze cues" – a person's tendency to shift attention in a direction consistent with another person's eye movements, even if it's irrelevant to their current task – and found big differences between the two groups. Liberals responded strongly to the prompts, consistently moving their ...

The Fix is the story of Eddie Parker, a con man on the run who is looking for his identity, although he doesn't know it. Eddie comes to America in 1949 from Bergen Belsen, a German displacement camp, at the age of eight. He lands on the streets of New York with his family and he quickly learns the rules of the street. He convinces his son, a high school star basketball player, to fix games for the mob. When the plan goes horribly wrong, Eddie is on the run, taking an adventure to save his life. Mr. Shaw is best known for his most recent work in 2001, the Broadway production ...

Murphy, Pearson, Bradley & Feeney, P.C. announces the elevations of San Francisco attorneys Thomas "Tip" Mazzucco, Thomas D'Amato and Janet Everson to shareholders, effective Jan. 1. The elevations bring the total number of firmwide shareholders to 14. "We are excited to be elevating one of the largest shareholder classes in firm history. Tom, Janet and Tip are superb trial lawyers and have played an integral role in our firm's continued success," said Michael Bradley, managing director of Murphy, Pearson, Bradley & Feeney. "Their litigation expertise, industry knowledge ...

In a time when young couples are trying to make the most out of their wedding day and the budget is more limited than ever, strapped fiances are finding themselves dancing from the alter to the reception floor. Today's brides are finding creative ways to spice up their wedding day, and salsa dancing has just the right amount of heat. COSTA MESA, CA, DECEMBER 8, 2010 - Hunting for ways to make their wedding reception both entertaining and affordable, couples have been turning back to the pages of tradition in droves. This holiday season, a record number of brides and ...