SANTA CRUZ, CA--A team of planet hunters led by astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington has announced the discovery of an Earth-sized planet (three times the mass of Earth) orbiting a nearby star at a distance that places it squarely in the middle of the star's "habitable zone," where liquid water could exist on the planet's surface. If confirmed, this would be the most Earth-like exoplanet yet discovered and the first strong case for a potentially habitable one. To astronomers, a "potentially habitable" planet ...

Boston, Mass. -- An international collaboration of more than 200 institutions, led by researchers at Children's Hospital Boston, the Broad Institute, and a half-dozen other institutions in Europe and North America, has identified hundreds of genetic variants that together account for about 10 percent of the inherited variation of height among people. Known as the GIANT (Genetic Investigation of ANthropometric Traits) Consortium, the collaboration pooled data from more than 180,000 individuals, including millions of genetic results from each of 46 separate studies in the ...

Washington, D.C. Astronomers have found a new, potentially habitable Earth-sized planet. It is one of two new planets discovered around the star Gliese 581, some 20 light years away. The planet, Gliese 581g, is located in a "habitable zone"—a distance from the star where the planet receives just the right amount of stellar energy to maintain liquid water at or near the planet's surface. The 11- year study, published in the Astrophysical Journal and posted online at arXiv.org, suggests that the fraction of stars in the Milky Way harboring potentially habitable planets could ...

CHICAGO --- A phase II clinical trial of the first new type of drug for musculoskeletal pain since aspirin shows that it significantly reduces knee pain in osteoarthritis, the most common osteoarthritis pain, according to new research from Northwestern Medicine. However, phase III trials of that drug, tanezumab, have been placed on clinical hold after 16 out of several thousand participants in the new trial developed progressively worsening arthritis and bone changes that required total joint replacements. "The bottom line is this is a very effective drug for relieving ...

September 29, 2010 ─ (BRONX, NY) ─ A seemingly simple inherited trait – height – springs from hundreds of genetic causes, according to an international team of scientists. Robert Kaplan, Ph.D., professor of epidemiology & population health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, is co-author of a paper on the group's findings published in the September 29 online edition of Nature. The study identified hundreds of gene variants in at least 180 locations that influence adult height. These results prove that with internet technology it ...

New Haven, Conn.—The rules that govern the world of the very small, quantum mechanics, are known for being bizarre. One of the strangest tenets is something called quantum entanglement, in which two or more objects (such as particles of light, called photons) become inextricably linked, so that measuring certain properties of one object reveals information about the other(s), even if they are separated by thousands of miles. Einstein found the consequences of entanglement so unpalatable he famously dubbed it "spooky action at a distance." Now a team led by Yale researchers ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — Just months after a pharmaceutical company halted studies of tanezumab, a drug used in reducing pain and improving function in people with moderate-to-severe osteoarthritis of the knee, the results of a small, phase II clinical trial found only a few minor side effects and substantial improvement in patient conditions. The results of the 16-week study are published in the Sept. 30 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. Other, longer-term studies have indicated that tanezumab may accelerate osteoarthritis, and the company that manufactures the ...

Research published today provides the first direct evidence that attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a genetic condition. Scientists at Cardiff University found that children with ADHD were more likely to have small segments of their DNA duplicated or missing than other children. The study also found significant overlap between these segments, known as copy number variants (CNVs), and genetic variants implicated in autism and schizophrenia, proving strong evidence that ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder – in other words, that the brains of children ...

A particularly aggressive childhood cancer can be fought successfully with far less chemotherapy than previously believed, avoiding harmful side effects caused by cancer drugs. The 96 percent survival rate found in an eight-year clinical trial at the University of California, San Francisco, stands to change the approach toward fighting intermediate-risk – stage three and stage four – neuroblastoma. Neuroblastoma attacks the network of cells that control the body's response to stress, known as the sympathetic nervous system, and affects 650 children in the United States ...

Many researchers have studied the relationship between the increase in sales of new antidepressants in recent decades and a simultaneous decline in the suicide rate. In a study based on figures from the Nordic countries, researchers at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health found no evidence that increased sales of the new medicines could be linked to a lower suicide rate. The researchers also did not find any relationship between reduced sales of the older and more toxic antidepressants and a reduction in suicide rates. The suicide rate has been declining since the ...

Severe sepsis, a disease characterised by a sudden drop in blood pressure and progressive organ dysfunction following infection, remains one of the most common causes of mortality in intensive care units worldwide. Even under the best possible medical conditions, mortality rates range between 30 and 70%. A research team from the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Portugal, led by Miguel Soares, found that free heme, released from red blood cells during infection, is the cause of organ failure, leading to the lethal outcome of severe sepsis. Moreover this team found that the ...

The key to the stability of any building is its foundation, but it is difficult to test some building sites in advance – such as those on the moon. New research from North Carolina State University is helping resolve the problem by using computer models that can utilize a small sample of soil to answer fundamental questions about how soil at a building site will interact with foundations. "If you are going to build a large structure, you have to run a lot of tests on the building site to learn how the soil will behave in relation to the building's foundation," says Dr. ...

Athens, Ga. – A new University of Georgia study suggests that mothers who consume a diet high in trans fats double the likelihood that their infants will have high levels of body fat. Researchers, whose results appear in the early online edition of the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found that infants whose mothers consumed more than 4.5 grams of trans fats per day while breastfeeding were twice as likely to have high percentages of body fat, or adiposity, than infants whose mothers consumed less than 4.5 grams per day of trans fats. The researchers investigated ...

In an advance that may give brewers powerful new ability to engineer the flavor and aroma of beer — the world's favorite alcoholic beverage — scientists are publishing the most comprehensive deciphering of the beer's "proteome" ever reported. Their report on the proteome (the set of proteins that make beer "beer") appears in ACS' monthly Journal of Proteome Research. Pier Giorgio Righetti and colleagues say they were inspired to do the research by a popular Belgian story, Les Maîtres de l'Orge (The Brew Masters), which chronicles the fortunes of a family of brewers over ...

Traces of crude oil that linger on the shores of Alaska's Prince William Sound after the Exxon Valdez oil spill remain highly biodegradable, despite almost 20 years of weathering and decomposition, scientists are reporting in a new study. Their findings, which appear in ACS' semi-monthly journal Environmental Science & Technology, suggest a simple approach for further cleaning up remaining traces of the Exxon Valdez spill — the largest in U.S. waters until the 2010 Deepwater Horizon episode. Albert D. Venosa and colleagues note that bacteria, evaporation, sunlight, and ...

Garlic has "significant" potential for preventing cardiomyopathy, a form of heart disease that is a leading cause of death in people with diabetes, scientists have concluded in a new study. Their report, which also explains why people with diabetes are at high risk for diabetic cardiomyopathy, appears in ACS' bi-weekly Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Wei-Wen Kuo and colleagues note that people with diabetes have at least twice the risk of death from heart disease as others, with heart disease accounting for 80 percent of all diabetes-related deaths. They are ...

In a real-life "back to the future" story, scientists today reported that the sustainable, environmentally-friendly process that gave birth to plywood a century ago is re-emerging as a "green" alternative to wood adhesives made from petroleum. Speaking at a meeting of the American Chemical Society, they described development of new soy-based glues that use a substance in soy milk and tofu and could mean a new generation of more eco-friendly furniture, cabinets, flooring, and other wood products. "Protein adhesives allowed the development of composite wood products such ...

Drug manufacturers have been adjusting to strict new government standards that limit the amount of potentially harmful impurities in medicine, according to the cover story of the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS' weekly newsmagazine. The impurities are "genotoxic," capable of damaging the DNA in genes. C&EN Senior Correspondent Ann Thayer notes that internationally accepted regulations long have limited the levels of impurities permitted in prescription drugs. But guidelines have not covered so-called genotoxic impurities (GTIs), substances that ...

It remains an unresolved question whether adult patients with Hodgkin's lymphoma, a certain type of lymph node cancer, benefit from allogeneic stem cell transplantation (SCT) with an unrelated donor. This is due to the fact that studies are lacking that compare this therapy with autologous transplantation or conventional chemotherapy without SCT. In addition, the few studies comparing SCT with an unrelated donor versus SCT with a related donor provide neither proof nor indications of an advantage. However, it cannot be inferred from the studies that both procedures are ...

Boston, Mass. -- A national epidemiologic study finds a strong, consistent correlation between adult diabetes and particulate air pollution that persists after adjustment for other risk factors like obesity and ethnicity, report researchers from Children's Hospital Boston. The relationship was seen even at exposure levels below the current EPA safety limit. The report, published in the October issue of Diabetes Care, is among the first large-scale population-based studies to link diabetes prevalence with air pollution. It is consistent with prior laboratory studies finding ...

Blueberries may help fight atherosclerosis, also known as hardening of the arteries, according to results of a preliminary U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)-funded study with laboratory mice. The research provides the first direct evidence that blueberries can help prevent harmful plaques or lesions, symptomatic of atherosclerosis, from increasing in size in arteries. Principal investigator Xianli Wu, based in Little Rock, Ark., with the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Arkansas Children's Nutrition Center and with the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, ...

Philadelphia, PA, September 29, 2010 – Premature infants are often examined for retinopathy of prematurity (ROP). This exam can be quite stressful for the neonate, causing changes in heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen saturation, and increased crying. In a recent study published in the Journal of AAPOS, the Official Publication of the American Association of Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus, researchers found that feeding infants one hour before the examination unexpectedly reduced stress but did not increase vomiting or gastric aspirates. Investigators from ...

DURHAM, N.C. -- Flicking through a wallpaper app with backgrounds of Mickey Mouse and a tropical waterfall, Peter Gilbert gets a plain, black and white text notification on his smartphone. A third of the way down the screen it says, "Taint: Phone Number, IMEI, ICCID (sim card identifier)." The message alerts Gilbert that the wallpaper app has sent his phone's number and other identifying information to imnet.us. Checking online, it appears the address is a website in Shenzhen, China. The notification came from TaintDroid, a prototype extension to the Android mobile-phone ...

Troy, N.Y. – The purification of drug components is a large hurdle facing modern drug development. This is particularly true of drugs that utilize proteins, which are notoriously difficult to separate from other potentially deadly impurities. Scientists within the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to understand and improve an important protein purification process. "We hope to use our insights to help those in the industry develop improved processes to provide ...

Publicly available cell-phone applications from application markets are releasing consumers' private information to online advertisers, according to a joint study by Intel Labs, Penn State, and Duke University. Researchers at the participating institutions have developed a realtime monitoring service called TaintDroid that precisely analyses how private information is obtained and released by applications "downloaded" to consumer phones. TaintDroid is an extension to the Android mobile-phone platform that tracks the flow of sensitive data through third-party applications. In ...