Northwestern University researchers have taken another step towards realizing a new class of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) enzyme mimics, opening the door for the development of highly sensitive chemical detection systems that go beyond nucleic acid targets. The blueprint for building synthetic structures to detect and signal the presence of targets such as small molecule medical analytes (signalers of disease or bodily malfunction, such as neurotransmitters) and environmental hazards, such as TNT, to name just a few, is inspired by biology and its allosteric enzymes. ...

As researchers and policymakers work toward an effective HIV vaccine in a constrained global economy, cost-effective prevention strategies such as Couples Voluntary Counseling and Testing (CVCT) must take a larger role in efforts to decrease the rates of HIV/AIDS in Africa, says Emory University HIV/AIDS vaccine researcher Susan Allen, MD, MPH. Allen, who has worked to combat the AIDS epidemic in Africa for more than 25 years, highlighted the value of CVCT and other cost-effective HIV prevention strategies today at the AIDS Vaccine 2010 Conference in Atlanta. "The ...

A break in the two chromosomes has given scientists a break in finding a new gene involved in puberty, Medical College of Georgia researchers report. It's also helped clear up why some patients with delayed puberty have no sense of smell, said Dr. Lawrence C. Layman, chief of the MCG Section of Reproductive Endocrinology, Infertility and Genetics. The WRD11 gene interacts with a transcription factor that appears to be involved in development of gonadotropin releasing hormones that enable sexual maturation as well as olfactory neurons in the brain, according to a study ...

Van Den Ende-Gupta syndrome (VDEGS) is an extremely rare genetic disorder that is characterized by distinctive head and facial features, such as unusual eyelids, narrow and beaked noses, flat nasal bridges, jaw deformities, and a turned out lower lip. As part of McGill's "RaDiCAL" project (Rare Disease Consortium for Autosomal Loci), collaborators in Qatar conducted field research with three patients from biologically interrelated Bedouin families, and sent samples to Canada for analysis by GA JOE – a high-tech genome analyzing machine. The research effort was led by husband ...

Richmond, Va. (September 30, 2010) – Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center researcher Steven Grant, M.D., and a team of VCU Massey researchers have uncovered the mechanism by which leukemia cells trigger a protective response when exposed to a class of cancer-killing agents known as histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDACIs). The findings, published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, could lead to more effective treatments in patients with leukemia and other cancers of the blood. "Our findings provide new insights into the ways such cancer cells develop ...

MAYWOOD, Il. -- The latest advances in treating neurologic disorders such as stroke, headache, Parkinson's disease, epilepsy and sleep disorders are detailed in a special issue of the journal Neurologic Clinics. Guest editor is Dr. Jose Biller, chairman of the Department of Neurology at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. "Great therapeutic strides in the clinical neurosciences have been made in the past decades," Biller wrote in the preface to the November 2010 issue, now available online. "It is likely that subsequent decades will bring even greater ...

PORTLAND, Ore. — Oregon Health & Science University's Center for Research on Occupational and Environmental Toxicology (CROET) is responding to concerns raised by Portland-area hair salons about a product used for hair straightening. CROET has issued two public alerts describing its findings on the possible negative health impacts of this product. The product being tested is called Brazilian Blowout. After receiving two samples from Portland-area salons, CROET asked the Department of Consumer and Business Services' Oregon Occupational Safety & Health Division to chemically ...

Boulder, CO, USA – The October Geology includes a study using fish teeth to understand ocean circulation; discussion of the "Dead Clade Walking" taxa; description of the first reported example of igneous aragonite; discovery of a Paleogene California River, flowing in similar location but opposite direction to the Colorado River; a report of the earliest definite record of predation on pelagic sea lilies; and discovery of the only known active drumlin field in the world. GSA Today examines calderas. Relationship between mass extinction and iridium across the Cretaceous-Paleogene ...

What do a car engine, a power plant, a factory and a solar panel have in common? They all generate heat – a lot of which is wasted. University of Arizona physicists have discovered a new way of harvesting waste heat and turning it into electrical power. Using a theoretical model of a so-called molecular thermoelectric device, the technology holds great promise for making cars, power plants, factories and solar panels more efficient, to name a few possible applications. In addition, more efficient thermoelectric materials would make ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons, ...

Troy, N.Y. – The National Lighting Product Information Program (NLPIP) released its latest Specifier Report, designed to provide objective performance information on existing street lighting technologies -- including light-emitting diode (LED), induction, and high pressure sodium (HPS) streetlights. This report comes at a critical time when many municipalities, some with funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, are in the process of replacing HPS streetlights with LED and induction models. NLPIP, established by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's ...

A team of astronomers that includes the University of Hawaiʻi' at Manoa's Nader Haghighipour has announced the discovery of a planet that could have liquid water on its surface. The planet, which is probably 30 percent larger than Earth, was discovered using one of the telescopes of the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea. It orbits a relatively small star, Gliese 581, that is 20 light-years from Earth in the constellation Libra. "By determining the orbit of this planet, we can deduce that its surface temperature is similar to that of Earth," said Haghighipour. ...

For the first time, scientists are using advanced technology and an innovative vessel to study, image, and map the unexplored offshore Northern San Andreas Fault from north of San Francisco to its termination at the junction of three tectonic plates off Mendocino, Calif. The team includes scientists from NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service, Oregon State University, the California Seafloor Mapping Program, the U.S. Geological Survey and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The expedition which concludes Sunday is sponsored by NOAA's Office of Ocean Exploration and ...

TORONTO, Sept. 30, 2010 – A waterproof controller designed and built by York University researchers is allowing an underwater robot to go "wireless" in a unique way. AQUA, an amphibious, otter-like robot, is small and nimble, with flippers rather than propellers, designed for intricate data collection from shipwrecks and reefs. The robot, a joint project of York, McGill and Dalhousie universities, can now be controlled wirelessly using a waterproof tablet built at York. While underwater, divers can program the tablet to display tags onscreen, similar to barcodes read ...

NANO -- World's smallest antenna . . . Instead of the conventional long piece of metal or dipole antenna, electronic devices of tomorrow could incorporate an antenna no bigger than a gnat. This is made possible by a design that allows an electrically charged nano-mechanical oscillator to be tuned to specific electromagnetic waves. "Gone will be the days when we need to match the antenna length to the wavelength," said Panos Datskos, a co-developer of this proprietary technology. The potentially revolutionary system detects very small electric fields over large frequency ...

High in an alpine meadow, Gesine Pufal, from the University of Wellington, New Zealand, crouched low to the ground and splashed some water from her water bottle on a low green plant cushion, then sat back waiting to see if something would move. Sound crazy? Many hikers passing by her may have thought so, but Pufal was trying to find potential plant species that possess a type of plant movement called hygrochasy. Although the ability to move is typically thought to be a characteristic unique to the animal kingdom, plants are also capable of movement, from the sudden ...

Tropical Storm Nicole was a tropical storm for around 6 hours before it weakened into a remnant low pressure area and is now off the Florida coast. NASA Satellite imagery captured different views of Nicole's clouds as the system weakened back into a low pressure area. While Nicole weakened, a huge trough of low pressure over the U.S. eastern seaboard from Florida to Maine has become the key weathermaker there. The trough, an elongated area of low pressure, is streaming tropical moisture from Nicole's remnants and the Gulf of Mexico, bringing high rainfall totals and severe ...

A new study, derived from novel sleep research conducted by University of California, San Diego researchers 14 years earlier, suggests that the secret to a long life may come with just enough sleep. Less than five hours a night is probably not enough; eight hours is probably too much. A team of scientists, headed by Daniel F. Kripke, MD, professor emeritus of psychiatry at UC San Diego School of Medicine, revisited original research conducted between 1995 and 1999. In that earlier study, part of the Women's Health Initiative, Kripke and colleagues had monitored 459 women ...

When NASA launched the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) on October 19, 2008, space physicists held their collective breath for never-before-seen views of a collision zone far beyond the planets, roughly 10 billion miles away. That's where the solar wind, an outward rush of charged particles and magnetic fields continuously spewed by the Sun, runs into the flow of particles and fields that permeates interstellar space in our neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy. No spacecraft had ever imaged the collision zone, which occurs in a region known as the heliosheath, because ...

VIDEO: See a time-lapse series showing hyper-replication of Salmonella bacteria (red) in epithelial cells from two to seven hours after infection. Click here for more information. New findings by National Institutes of Health scientists could explain how Salmonella bacteria, a common cause of food poisoning, efficiently spread in people. In a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers describe finding a reservoir of rapidly ...

A cheetah lies still in the grass. Finally, a gazelle comes into view. The cheetah plunges forward, reaches sixty-five miles per hour in three seconds, and has the hapless gazelle by the jugular in less than a minute. Then it must catch its breath, resting before eating. A blue whale surfaces, blasting water high from its blowhole. It breathes in great gasps, filling its thousand-gallon lungs with air. Then it descends again to look for krill, staying below for 10, 20, even 30 minutes before taking another breath. Both animals need oxygen, of course. And both depend ...

Ames, Iowa - An Iowa State University researcher searched for new genes that are turned on during infection in a type of mosquito that is not only a pest, but transmits disease-causing pathogens. Lyric Bartholomay, assistant professor of entomology, along with colleagues from around the world, infected the common southern house mosquito (Culex quinquefasciatus) with various pathogens to see which mosquito genes are activated in response to the infection. Bartholomay is the first author on the paper, "Pathogenomics of Culex quinquefasciatus and Meta-Analysis of Infection ...

DARIEN, IL – A study in the Oct. 1 issue of the journal Sleep found that getting too little or too much sleep in early pregnancy is associated with elevated blood pressure in the third trimester. The study suggests that improving prenatal sleep hygiene may provide important health benefits. Results show that the mean systolic blood pressure in the third trimester was 114 mm Hg in women with a normal self-reported nightly sleep duration of nine hours in early pregnancy, 118.05 mm Hg in women who reported sleeping six hours or less per night, and 118.90 mm Hg in women ...

SAN FRANCISCO, CA– Amblyopia, known as "lazy eye," is a major cause of vision problems in children and a common cause of blindness in people aged 20 to 70 in developed countries. In amblyopia the person's stronger eye is favored and his/her weaker eye gradually loses visual power as a result. When the condition is detected and treated before age 7, more than 75 percent of children achieve 20/30 vision or better, the Amblyopia Treatment Study reports. But parents and teachers can easily miss this problem–especially in very young children. Pediatric ophthalmologists (Eye ...

SAN FRANCISCO – For suicidal adolescents, the emergency department (ED) is most often the chosen portal to mental health services. New research, presented Friday, Oct. 1, at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) National Conference and Exhibition in San Francisco, looks at what happens to the 30 percent of suicidal adolescents who are discharged from the ED and whether they go on to access additional mental health services. In "Predictors of Mental Health Follow up Among Adolescents with Suicidal Ideation After Emergency Department Discharge," researchers followed ...

For the first time to date, research published in the October edition of the Journal of Thoracic Oncology (JTO) sought to determine the use of chemotherapy in a contemporary, diverse non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) population encompassing all patient ages. Prior population-based studies have shown that only 20 to 30 percent of advanced lung cancer patients receive chemotherapy treatment. These studies have previously relied on the Medicare-linked Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database, thus excluding the 30 to 35 percent of lung cancer patients younger ...