Biologists have discovered that primitive, predatory lampreys have structures within their gills that play the same role as the thymus, the organ where immune cells called T cells develop in mammals, birds and fish. The finding suggests that in vertebrate evolution, having two separate organs for immune cell development -- the bone marrow for B cells and the thymus for T cells -- may have preceded the appearance of the particular features that mark those cells, such as antibodies and T cell receptors. The results will be published Feb. 3 by the journal Nature. The ...

They are entirely too small to be seen even with the most powerful microscope. But now an international research team has managed to capture an image of an intact virus and a membrane structure from a photosynthetic bacterium with the aid of extremely intensive and ultra-short x-ray pulses from the world's first free electron laser. This new advance in structural biology is being published today in two articles in the journal Nature. The findings for the two studies pave the way for studies of biological structures at the molecular level, including viruses, individual ...

– Early, correct diagnosis is the best way to prevent the development of Lyme arthritis in individuals with the tick-borne illness, according to a paper published in the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (JAAOS). In patients who do develop the condition, most cases can be treated successfully with antibiotics, the review found. "Lyme arthritis occurs commonly in patients with Lyme disease and should be considered when evaluating patients with joint complaints and who live in areas where the disease occurs," said study author Aristides Cruz, MD, ...

Fifteen members of the Entomological Society of America (ESA) gave presentations at the "Second Annual National Bed Bug Summit: Advancing Towards Solutions to the Bed Bug Problem," held by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Washington, DC, February 2, 2011. The meeting focused on what is being done to combat bed bugs, the importance of educating consumers, improvements in prevention and control techniques, controlling bed bugs in schools and public housing, and on the state of bed bug knowledge and futue research needs. "Many health departments are overwhelmed ...

PHILADELPHIA – A simple test performed at the sideline of sporting events can accurately detect concussions in athletes, according to study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Current sideline tests can leave a wide amount a brain function untested following concussion. Penn researchers showed that this simple test was superior to current methods and accurately and reliably identified athletes with head trauma. The study appears online now in Neurology. The one-minute test involves the athlete reading single digit numbers displayed on index-sized ...

Food scientists at the University of British Columbia have been able to pinpoint more of the complex chemistry behind coffee's much touted antioxidant benefits, tracing valuable compounds to the roasting process. Lead author Yazheng Liu and co-author Prof. David Kitts found that the prevailing antioxidants present in dark roasted coffee brew extracts result from the green beans being browned under high temperatures. Their findings will appear in a forthcoming issue of Food Research International and can be previewed at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.foodres.2010.12.037 Liu ...

TORONTO, ON – Anthropologists at the University of Toronto and the University of Cambridge have discovered the oldest cemetery in the Middle East at a site in northern Jordan. The cemetery includes graves containing human remains buried alongside those of a red fox, suggesting that the animal was possibly kept as a pet by humans long before dogs ever were. The 16,500-year-old site at 'Uyun al-Hammam was discovered in 2000 by an expedition led by University of Toronto professor Edward (Ted) Banning and Lisa Maher, an assistant professor of anthropology at U of T and research ...

HOUSTON (Feb. 2, 2011) -- For women seeking pregnancy by assisted reproductive technologies, such as in-vitro fertilization (IVF), a new study shows that the health of the uterus is more relevant than egg quality for a newborn to achieve normal birth weight and full gestation. This study, published in Fertility and Sterility, an international journal for obstetricians, offers new information for women with infertility diagnoses considering options for conceiving. The study was conducted by Dr. William Gibbons, director of The Family Fertility Program at Texas Children's ...

The same properties that make engineered nanoparticles attractive for numerous applications—small as a virus, biologically and environmentally stabile, and water-soluble—also cause concern about their long-term impacts on environmental health and safety (EHS). One particular characteristic, the tendency for nanoparticles to clump together in solution, is of great interest because the size of these clusters may be key to whether or not they are toxic to human cells. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated for the first time ...

Pasadena, Calif.—The brain—awake and sleeping—is awash in electrical activity, and not just from the individual pings of single neurons communicating with each other. In fact, the brain is enveloped in countless overlapping electric fields, generated by the neural circuits of scores of communicating neurons. The fields were once thought to be an "epiphenomenon, a 'bug' of sorts, occurring during neural communication," says neuroscientist Costas Anastassiou, a postdoctoral scholar in biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). New work by Anastassiou ...

SALT LAKE CITY, Feb. 2, 2011 – During the past two months, researchers launched weather balloons, drove instrument-laden cars and flew a glider to study winter inversions that often choke Salt Lake City in smog and trap dirty air in other urban basins worldwide. The field campaign – part of a three-year study by the University of Utah and other institutions – ends Monday, Feb. 7 as atmospheric scientists begin analyzing data they collected to learn how weather conditions contribute to inversions, which occur when warmer air aloft holds cold air ...

Academic Medical Centers (AMCs) must adjust and adapt to the new health care reform laws or risk marginalization in the new health care arena, according to a New England Journal of Medicine Perspective article published online February 2. The authors of the article, Scott A. Berkowitz, M.D., M.B.A., a fellow in cardiology and geriatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Edward D. Miller, M.D., dean and CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine, argue that AMCs can not only remain relevant in the face of sweeping change, but can lead the way by serving as examples ...

Neiker-Tecnalia (The Basque Institute for Agricultural Research and Development) has created an air-conditioned greenhouse using alternative energies that enable the reduction of energy costs, improvements in energy efficiency and an increase in crop yields. The novel system has a biomass boiler and thermodynamic solar panels, which reach an optimum temperature for the crop without using fuels derived from petroleum oil or gas. Neiker-Tecnalia has installed a biomass boiler (using wood and other organic waste as fuel), together with thermodynamic panels, with the goal ...

Older individuals, who constitute a rapidly growing population in the United States, account for a disproportionate share of health care utilization and cost. Yet more than half of clinical trials exclude people based on their age or age-related conditions, according to a new study by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Clinical Scholars® at the University of Michigan. "These findings are concerning because it means that doctors cannot be confident that clinical trial results apply to their older patients," says Donna Zulman, M.D., the study's lead author and a ...

Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) is a significant and growing problem in hospitals and other health care facilities, but no new drugs to treat the condition have been developed in several decades. However, a large-scale, phase 3 trial conducted by Canadian and U.S. researchers shows that the new antibiotic Fidaxomicin is superior to existing treatments, demonstrating a 45 percent reduction in recurrences vs. the existing licensed treatment. Their results were published in February, 2011 in The New England Journal of Medicine. "There wasn't much interest in C. difficile ...

Elements heavier than iron come into being only in powerful stellar explosions, supernovae. During nuclear reactions all kinds of short-lived atomic nuclei are formed, including more stable combinations – the so-called magic numbers – predicted by theory. Yet here, too, there are exceptions: the islands of inversion. Headed by physicists from the Excellence Cluster Universe at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM), an international team of scientists has now taken a closer look at the island that was first discovered. They have now published their results in Physical ...

For almost two decades, cardiologists have searched for ways to see dangerous blood clots before they cause heart attacks. Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis report that they have designed nanoparticles that find clots and make them visible to a new kind of X-ray technology. According to Gregory Lanza, MD, PhD, a Washington University cardiologist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, these nanoparticles will take the guesswork out of deciding whether a person coming to the hospital with chest pain is actually having a heart attack. "Every ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A NASA team including three University of Florida astronomers has found six new planets in a distant solar system that in some ways resembles our own. The NASA team, including UF associate professor Eric Ford, postdoctoral associate Althea Moorhead and graduate student Robert Morehead, will announce its findings in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. "This is the new prototype for a system of rocky planets beyond our own," Ford said. "It changes our understanding of the frequency of solar systems like our own in deep space." The planets orbit ...

– Symptomatic lumbar disc disease, a condition caused by degeneration or herniation of the discs of the lower spine, may be inherited, according to a new study published in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (JBJS). "Previous studies, including studies of twin siblings and subsequent genetic marker studies, have suggested a genetic predisposition for the development of symptomatic lumbar disc disease but have been limited by a small number of patients," noted study author Alpesh A. Patel, MD FACS, assistant professor of orthopaedic surgery at the University of Utah ...

PITTSBURGH—Writing can be a solitary, intellectual pursuit, but researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have shown that the task of writing an informational article also can be accomplished by dozens of people working independently online. Each person in the CMU experiments completed just a sliver of the work of preparing an article, such as preparing an outline, gathering facts or assembling facts into simple prose. The "authors" never even spoke with each other. But the research team led by Aniket Kittur, assistant professor in CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute ...

SAN ANTONIO (Feb. 2, 2011) — Obesity among women of childbearing age is increasing worldwide. Because babies of obese mothers are themselves predisposed to obesity, society can reasonably expect the epidemic of obese and overweight people to continue through future generations. In the midst of this trend, UT Health Science Center San Antonio obstetrics researchers are studying the question: If mothers lose body fat before pregnancy, does it improve the lifelong health of their children? This could be one way to break the transgenerational cycle. A collaborative study ...

A team of wildlife experts led by UC Davis called today for a national fight against a new fungus that has killed more than 1 million bats in the eastern United States and is spreading fast throughout North America. "If we lose bats, we lose keystone species in some communities, predators that consume enormous numbers of insects, and beautiful wildlife species that are important parts of North America's biodiversity," said Janet Foley, a UC Davis professor of veterinary medicine at the Center for Vectorborne Diseases. Foley and her co-authors' call to action appears today ...

Nacre, commonly known as mother-of-pearl, is the iridescent material lining many mollusk shells. It is part of a two-layer armor system that protects the animal from predators. The brittle outer layer of the shell absorbs the initial impact, but is prone to cracking. To prevent these cracks from catastrophically propagating through the shell to the animal itself, the nacreous layer is surprisingly strong and tough, with outstanding crack arresting properties. Thus it acts as a lining to maintain the integrity of the shell in the event of cracking of the outer layer. "What ...

Boulder, CO, USA - GSA Bulletin is now regularly posting pre-issue publication content -- finalized papers that have not been assigned to an issue but are not under embargo. GSA invites you to sign up for e-alerts and/or RSS feeds to have access to new journal content the minute it is posted online. Go to http://www.gsapubs.org/cgi/alerts and enter your e-mail address to manage your subscriptions. Faulted terrace risers place new constraints on the late Quaternary slip rate for the central Altyn Tagh fault, northwest Tibet Ryan D. Gold et al., Dept. of Geology, ...

Surgery to "deactivate" migraine headaches produces lasting good results, with nearly 90 percent of patients having at least partial relief at five years' follow-up, reports a study in the February issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). In about 30 percent of patients, migraine headaches were completely eliminated after surgery, according to the new study, led by Dr. Bahman Guyuron, chairman of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at University Hospitals Case Medical Center and Case ...