Tampa, FL (Dec. 3, 2010) -- Dynamic regulation of the chaperone protein Hsp27 was required to get rid of abnormally accumulating tau in the brains of mice genetically modified to develop the memory-choking tau tangles associated with Alzheimer's disease, a University of South Florida-led study found. Researchers at the USF Health Byrd Alzheimer's Institute demonstrated that the effective switching of Hsp27 between its active and deactivated states was critical on two fronts -- to promote the recycling of the tau protein in healthy nerve cells and to clear abnormal tau ...

Could information technology and data mining techniques be used to improve the diagnosis and treatment of depression? That's the question scientists in Australia hope to have answered in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Functional Informatics and Personalised Medicine. Maja Hadzic, Fedja Hadzic and Tharam Dillon of the Digital Ecosystems and Business Intelligence Institute, at Curtin University of Technology, in Perth, explain how depression is rapidly emerging as one of the major health problems now facing society. They add that the World Health Organization ...

YANG Nan, MAO ZongWan and SUN HongZhe et al., at the Department of Chemistry, University of Hong Kong and Sun Yat-sen University have characterized a series of bismuth citrate complexes by X-ray crystallography and modeled the structure of ranitidine bismuth citrate, a medicine used widely for the treatment of peptic ulcer and gastric reflux disease. The polymeric framework of bismuth citrate may serve as a "drug carrier" for delivery of other drugs in the human body. This significant contribution is reported in SCIENCE CHINA Chemistry 2010, 53(10). Elements that possess ...

Scientists have discovered that the alteration of a single gene could cause some male embryos to develop as females. The breakthrough will improve diagnosis and clinical management of patients with disorders of sex development (DSD). These conditions occur when the testis or ovary does not develop properly in the embryo, causing genital abnormalities in one in 4500 babies. An international team including researchers from the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute and the University of Melbourne identified the gene alteration in a group of patients including two families ...

The Web surfing history saved in your Web browser can be accessed without your permission. JavaScript code deployed by real websites and online advertising providers use browser vulnerabilities to determine which sites you have and have not visited, according to new research from computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego. The researchers documented JavaScript code secretly collecting browsing histories of Web users through "history sniffing" and sending that information across the network. While history sniffing and its potential implications for ...

Our research at the State Key Laboratory of Palaeobiology and Stratigraphy, Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, has shown, based on a refined division and correlation of the graptolite-bearing strata in southern Jiangxi, China, that the Kwangsian Orogeny commenced in the early Katian Age of the Late Ordovician. Because of its significant research value, this study is published in Issue 11 of Science China Earth Sciences. An angular unconformity separating the Lower-Middle Devonian and underlying strata is widespread in the Zhujiang region of South China, and ...

Mumbai, India – The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the Asia Society launched a new food security report for Asia in Mumbai today, calling for increased investment in rice research. The report, Never an empty bowl: sustaining food security in Asia, emphasizes the importance of rice as the primary staple food in Asia and a major source of income for Asian farmers. Existing global efforts to combat hunger and achieve food security are evaluated in the report, which also recommends more research on: climate change mitigation for farming, farming infrastructure, ...

VIDEO: Hit it hard and it will fracture like a solid, but tilt it slowly and it will flow like a fluid. This is the intriguing property of a type of... Click here for more information. The new findings will be highly useful to the manufacturing industry because the processing and dispensing of everyday products like toothpaste, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and foodstuffs depends on an understanding of the physical properties and behaviours of these fluids. The research ...

Scientists studying a column of Antarctic ice spanning 650 years have found evidence for fluctuations in biomass burning--the consumption of wood, peat and other materials in wildfires, cooking fires and communal fires--in the Southern Hemisphere. The record, focused primarily on carbon monoxide (CO), differs substantially from the record in the Northern Hemisphere, suggesting changes may be necessary for several leading climate models. The research appears in Science on Dec. 2, 2010, in an early online release. The scientists studied variations in stable (non-radioactive, ...

A new report recently released by the National Science Foundation, titled "Doctorate Recipients from U.S. Universities: 2009," presents a statistical overview of the U.S. doctoral education system in snapshots and long-term trends. It notes the American system of doctoral education is widely considered the world's best, as evidenced by the large number of international students who choose to pursue a doctorate at U.S. universities. But this status is subject to the many factors that shape U.S. doctoral education. "Given the increased global engagement and economic prosperity ...

Researchers at Northwestern University have created a new infrared camera based on Type-II InAs/GaSb superlattices that produces much higher resolution images than previous infrared cameras. Created by Manijeh Razeghi, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and researchers in the Center for Quantum Devices in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, the long wavelength infrared focal plane array camera provides a 16-fold increase in the number of pixels in the image and can provide infrared images in the dark. Their ...

Researchers at Northwestern University have nanoengineered a new kind of fiber that could be tougher than Kevlar. Working in a multidisciplinary team that includes groups from other universities and the MER Corporation, Horacio Espinosa, James N. and Nancy J. Farley Professor in Manufacturing & Entrepreneurship at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, and his group have created a high performance fiber from carbon nanotubes and a polymer that is remarkably tough, strong, and resistant to failure. Using state-of-the-art in-situ electron microscopy testing ...

Personalized medicine centers on being able to predict the risk of disease or response to a drug based on a person's genetic makeup. But a study by scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis suggests that, for most common diseases, genes alone only tell part of the story. That's because the environment interacts with DNA in ways that are difficult to predict, even in simple organisms like single-celled yeast, their research shows. "The effects of a person's genes – and, therefore, their risk of disease – are greatly influenced by their environment," ...

INDIANAPOLIS – The most frequent contributors to medication errors and adverse drug events in busy primary care practice offices are communication problems and lack of knowledge, according to a study of a prototype web-based medication error and adverse drug event reporting system. Research on the use of MEADERS (Medication Error and Adverse Drug Event Reporting System), developed by investigators from the Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School of Medicine led by Atif Zafar, M.D., appears in the November/December 2010 issue of the Annals of Family Medicine. "We ...

December 2, 2010 – (BRONX, NY) – Nearly a quarter of Americans live in rural areas, which consistently report higher cancer mortality rates than urban and suburban areas. Among the complex causes for this disparity is that only 10 percent of physicians practice in rural areas and almost 4 out of 10 rural residents live at least an hour from an urban area. Finding the time, transportation, and financial resources for travel to urban academic medical centers, the standard bearers for quality cancer care, often proves difficult. Most rural residents have their cancer treated ...

NEW YORK (Dec. 2, 2010) -- There is new hope for people with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML), a fast-growing cancer of the blood and bone marrow. Research led by Weill Cornell Medical College and published today in the online edition of the journal Cancer Cell reveals a surprising and unexpected cancer-causing mechanism. The investigators discovered that newly identified mutant enzymes in AML create a chemical poison to cause leukemia. Their findings should prove useful in treating patients by providing a molecular target against which to develop new drugs against one ...

The interest in the biological effects of non-ionizing Electro Magnetic Fields (EMFs) and Static Magnetic Fields (SMFs) on the whole organism, as well on cellular systems, has noticeably increased in recent years in consideration of their increased production (from the generation and transmission of electricity, to domestic appliances and industrial equipment, to telecommunications and broadcasting) and the possible health risk for humans. About one century ago, associated with the wide use of electricity, artificial electric and magnetic fields became a part of our living ...

Richmond, Va. (Dec. 3, 2010) – Research at Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center led by Charles E. Chalfant, Ph.D., associate professor of biochemistry and molecular Biology, discovered a previously unknown mechanism in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) cells that contributes to their ability to maintain and grow tumors. Narrowing in on this mechanism could provide a breakthrough for the development of effective therapies for NSCLC and other cancers. The findings, recently published in Journal of Clinical Investigation, provide the first example of a ...

It's nice to have success—but it can also make you worry that the jealous people will try to bring you down. New research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, has found that the fear of being the target of malicious envy makes people act more helpfully toward people who they think might be jealous of them. In previous research, Niels van de Ven of Tilburg University and his colleagues Marcel Zeelenberg and Rik Pieters had figured out that envy actually comes in two flavors: benign envy and malicious envy. They studied people ...

DALLAS – Dec. 3, 2010 – Thanks to findings by UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers, individuals with a potentially life-threatening condition predisposing them to blood clots, or thrombosis, might someday receive therapy to prevent the condition. The findings, available online and in a future issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation, offer new clues into the mechanisms underlying antiphospholipid syndrome (APS). "Patients with APS have circulating antibodies that cause exaggerated thrombosis. The longstanding mystery has been how these antibodies initiate ...

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Exposure to nicotine during pregnancy leads to a decrease in adult stem cells and a change in synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus of the offspring, according to new research from the University of Alabama at Birmingham presented at Neuroscience 2010, the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego in November. Researchers say this could be a possible cause for behavioral problems such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) seen in children whose mothers smoked. Adult stem cells in the hippocampus, the area of the brain most connected ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Electronic cigarettes (or e-cigarettes), also called "electronic nicotine delivery systems," are increasingly used worldwide even though only sparse information is available on their health effects. In the United States, e-cigarettes are readily available in shopping malls in most states and on the Internet. But how safe are e-cigarettes? To address this question, researchers at the University of California, Riverside evaluated five e-cigarette brands and found design flaws, lack of adequate labeling, and several concerns about quality control and ...

Earth observation scientists at the University of Leicester have recorded stunning images of the UK's winter landscape by orbiting satellites. European Space Agency satellite instruments have been observing the icy blast in the UK from their vantage points in space. Leicester scientists have used two instruments, MERIS and AATSR, which have returned stunning images of a snow-bound UK from observations on November 29th and December 1st. In the MERIS images, the colour scale runs from white snow and clouds to green vegetation. In the AATSR images, the non-snow areas ...

They might just be the smallest Christmas tree decorations ever. Tiny spherical particles of gold and silver that are more than 100 million times smaller than the gold and silver baubles used to decorate seasonal fir trees have been synthesized by researchers in Mexico and the US. Writing in the December issue of the International Journal of Nanoparticles, materials engineer Xavier E. Guerrero-Dib, of the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León and colleagues there and at The University of Texas at Austin, describe the formation of gold, silver and alloyed, bimetallic nanoparticles ...

The following highlights summarize research papers that have been recently published in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). In this release: Population trends, not climate, causing increased flood fatalities in Africa Earth's lakes warming in response to climate change Ozone hole affects upper-atmosphere temperature and circulation Solar wind contains more oxygen than previously thought Predicting variability in radiation belt dynamics Iron oxide observed in Earth's airglow Anyone may read the scientific abstract for any already-published paper by clicking ...