Women with dense breasts and no lobular involution were at a higher risk for developing breast cancer than those with non-dense breasts and complete involution, according to a study published online in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Apart from age, family history, and age at menarche, two additional factors associated with breast cancer risk include mammographic breast density and extent of lobular involution. Lobular involution is the physiological atrophy of the breast epithelium and is known to increase with increasing age. To determine whether ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Two University of Florida researchers and their international colleagues have used mathematical models and maps to estimate the feasibility of eliminating malaria from countries that have the deadliest form of the disease. Andrew Tatem led a study that appears online today and in the November print edition of the British medical journal The Lancet Malaria Elimination Series. "People need to know that the money they are spending is having an effect," said Tatem, an assistant professor with joint appointments in UF's geography department, Emerging ...

What's old is new again. That's the lesson that can be taken from the University of Cincinnati-based journal, "Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists," due out Nov. 1. The annually produced journal, edited since 2006 by Peter van Minnen, UC associate professor of classics, features the most prestigious global research on papyri, a field of study known as papyrology. (Papyrology is formally known as the study of texts on papyrus and other materials, mainly from ancient Egypt and mainly from the period of Greek and Roman rule.) It's an area of research that ...

Republican claims of political corruption in North Carolina's Democratic Party have made little impact on public opinion among potential voters in the state, according to new polling data analyzed by North Carolina State University researchers. The findings show that highlighting actual corruption is not necessarily an effective electoral strategy. "The North Carolina Republican party has tried to brand state Democrats as corrupt, but we don't know whether voters respond to this strategy," says Dr. Michael Cobb, an associate professor of political science at NC State. ...

Few fish are famed for their parenting skills. Most species leave their freshly hatched fry to fend for themselves, but not discus fish. Jonathan Buckley from the University of Plymouth, UK, explains that discus fish young feed on the mucus that their parents secrete over their bodies until they are big enough to forage. 'The parental care that they exhibit is very unusual,' says Buckley. Intrigued by the fish's lifestyle, Buckley's PhD advisor, Katherine Sloman, established a collaboration with Adalberto Val from the Laboratory of Ecophysiology and Molecular Evolution ...

28 October 2010 (Geneva, Switzerland) - A report issued today by the International AIDS Society, Universal Access: Right Here, Right Now documents the principal debates around universal access during the XVIII International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2010). The report also takes stock of progress to date and reveals the scale of the future challenge for HIV treatment and prevention at a time when new infections are outstripping those receiving treatment by five to two. While significant progress has been made towards achieving universal access to HIV prevention, treatment ...

Scientists of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch and the Experimental and Clinical Research Center (ECRC) of MDC and Charité in Berlin-Buch have gained new insights into the development of epithelial cells and their molecular repertoire. Dr. Max Werth, Katharina Walentin and Professor Kai Schmidt-Ott have identified a transcription factor (grainyhead-like 2, Grhl2), which regulates the composition of the molecular "bridges" that link adjacent epithelial cells. The authors were able to demonstrate that Grhl2, via DNA-binding, directly regulates ...

An international team of Mycologists and Ecologists studying Atlantic sea turtles at Cape Verde have discovered that the species is under threat from a fungal infection which targets eggs. The research, published in FEMS Microbiology Letters , reveals how the fungus Fusarium solani may have played a key role in the 30-year decline in turtle numbers. "In the past 30 years we have witnessed an abrupt decline in the number of nesting beaches of sea turtles worldwide," said Drs. Javier Diéguez-Uribeondo and Adolfo Marco from Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas- ...

The change in the ice mass covering Antarctica is a critical factor in global climate events. Scientists at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences have now found that the year by year mass variations in the western Antarctic are mainly attributable to fluctuations in precipitation, which are controlled significantly by the climate phenomenon El Nino. They examined the GFZ data of the German-American satellite mission GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment). The investigation showed significant regional differences in the western coastal area of the South ...

DETROIT – For pancreatic cancer patients unable to undergo surgery – the only known cure for this form of cancer – a highly targeted cancer radiation therapy may help slow cancer progression and lessen disease symptoms, according to researchers at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. Called stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT), the study found it was able to delay pancreatic cancer progression locally, on average, by almost six months. While, on average, the patients in the study lived about 10 months, one-third lived more than a year. Without any treatment – surgery, ...

New Rochelle, NY, October 29, 2010—Women experience and interact with their natural surroundings in ways that differ from men. The way in which those differences affect a woman's sense of self, body image, and drive to protect and preserve the environment are explored in a thought-provoking special issue of Ecopsychology, a peer-reviewed, online journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. (www.liebertpub.com). The entire issue is available free online at www.liebertpub.com/eco Guest Editors Britain Scott, PhD, from the University of St. Thomas (St. Paul, MN) and Lisa ...

A new study by researchers at the University of Leicester and University of Leeds has concluded that parents' efforts towards their child's educational achievement is crucial – playing a more significant role than that of the school or child. This research by Professor Gianni De Fraja and Tania Oliveira, both in the Economics Department at the University of Leicester and Luisa Zanchi, at the Leeds University Business School, has been published in the latest issue of the MIT based Review of Economics and Statistics. The researchers found that parents' effort is more ...

AUGUSTA, Ga. – Saving a soldier's life takes precedence over treating traumatic urologic injuries on the battlefield, a Medical College of Georgia researcher says. Injuries to the bladder, ureters, kidneys and external genitalia often require complex surgical treatment, said Dr. Arthur Smith, an MCG urologist. But during wartime, when those wounds are often combined with other life-threatening injuries, their treatment becomes secondary to lifesaving tactics. Smith made his comments at a lecture, Revised Management Strategies for Urologic Injuries During Wartime, at ...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – A new study by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Norwegian researchers has found that women with anorexia nervosa are much more likely to have both unplanned pregnancies and induced abortions than women who don't have the serious eating disorder. These results may be driven by a mistaken belief among women with anorexia that they can't get pregnant because they are either not having menstrual periods at all or are having irregular periods, said Cynthia M. Bulik, PhD, the study's lead author and director of the UNC Eating Disorders Program. "Anorexia ...

If there is one thing that recent advances in genomics have revealed, it is that our genes are interrelated, "chattering" to each other across separate chromosomes and vast stretches of DNA. According to researchers at The Wistar Institute, many of these complex associations may be explained in part by the three-dimensional structure of the entire genome. A given cell's DNA spends most of its active lifetime in a tangled clump of chromosomes, which positions groups of related genes near to each other and exposes them to the cell's gene-controlling machinery. This structure, ...

Urgently-needed new treatment for a parasitic disease is being investigated in research led at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. Human African Trypanosomiasis, also known as sleeping sickness, affects between 50,000 and 70,000 people in Africa and South America. It is transmitted through the bite of the tsetse fly and attacks the nervous system and brain, leading to fever, headaches and disturbed sleep patterns. Without treatment, the disease is fatal but a new drug to tackle it is being developed in a project led at Strathclyde, with partners from ...

Boulder, CO, USA - The giant dragonflies of ancient Earth with wingspans of up to 70 centimeters (28 inches) are generally attributed to higher oxygen atmospheric levels in the atmosphere in the past. New experiments in raising modern insects in various oxygen-enriched atmospheres have confirmed that dragonflies grow bigger with more oxygen, or hyperoxia. However, not all insects were larger when oxygen was higher in the past. For instance, the largest cockroaches ever are skittering around today. The question becomes how and why do different groups respond to changes ...

Boulder, CO, USA - The islands flanking the outlet of the Mississippi River are not only facing losses due to sea level rise and local subsidence, according to one study, but new unknown impacts from oil recovery operations, say researchers working on another project. Both will be presenting their work on Nov. 1 and 2 at the meeting of the Geological Society of American in Denver. Some islands could disappear entirely in coming decades, exposing huge swaths of marshland to the waves of the open sea. On one side of the Mississippi River outlet, to the east of the river ...

Researchers led by Vanderbilt's Roger Cone, Ph.D., have discovered a new member of a gene family that has powerful influences on pigmentation and the regulation of body weight. The gene is the third member of the agouti family. Two agouti genes have been identified previously in humans. One helps determine skin and hair color, and the other may play an important role in obesity and diabetes. The new gene, called agrp2, has been found exclusively in bony fish, including zebrafish, trout and salmon. The protein it encodes enables fish to change color dramatically to match ...

Biogeochemists have found new evidence linking "Snowball Earth" glacial events to the rise of early animals. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Study results appear in this week's issue of the journal Nature. The controversial Snowball Earth hypothesis posits that, on several occasions, the Earth was covered from pole to pole by a thick sheet of ice lasting for millions of years. These glaciations, the most severe in Earth history, occurred from 750 to 580 million years ago. In the aftermath, the researchers discovered, the oceans ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Researchers at Oregon State University have solved a quest in fundamental material science that has eluded scientists since the 1960s, and could form the basis of a new approach to electronics. The discovery, just reported online in the professional journal Advanced Materials, outlines the creation for the first time of a high-performance "metal-insulator-metal" diode. "Researchers have been trying to do this for decades, until now without success," said Douglas Keszler, a distinguished professor of chemistry at OSU and one of the nation's leading ...

Dracula orchids tempt flies by masquerading as mushrooms. Goblin spiders lurk unseen in the world's leaf litter. The natural world is often just as haunting as the macabre costumes worn on city streets, as highlighted by two studies published this year by curators in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History, David Grimaldi and Norman Platnick. DRACULA ORCHIDS According to Grimaldi and colleagues, fruit flies (Drosophilidae) of the genus Zygothrica typically swarm on mushrooms and other rain forest fungi. But one group of orchids ...

ST. LOUIS -- Curcumin, a chemical that gives curry its zing, holds promise in preventing or treating liver damage from an advanced form of a condition known as fatty liver disease, new Saint Louis University research suggests. Curcurmin is contained in turmeric, a plant used by the Chinese to make traditional medicines for thousands of years. SLU's recent study highlights its potential in countering an increasingly common kind of fatty liver disease called non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). Linked to obesity and weight gain, NASH affects 3 to 4 percent of U.S. adults ...

LA JOLLA, CA – October 29, 2010 – For Immediate Release – A team from The Scripps Research Institute has revealed the first-ever pictures of the formation of cells' "protein factories." In addition to being a major technical feat on its own, the work could open new pathways for development of antibiotics and treatments for diseases tied to errors in ribosome formation. In addition, the techniques developed in the study can now be applied to other complex challenges in the understanding of cellular processes. Identifying and observing the molecules that form ribosomes—the ...

GALVESTON, Texas — When the space shuttle Discovery lifts off on its final flight Nov. 2, its six astronauts will be joined by 16 rodent passengers on a historic mission of their own. Riding in special self-contained modules that automatically supply them with food and water, the mice will be part of a long-term NASA effort aimed at understanding why spaceflight makes humans more vulnerable to infection by viruses and bacteria. The agency has studied the phenomenon aboard its space shuttles for more than 25 years, collecting data from laboratory animals and astronauts ...