PHILADELPHIA - A recently identified immune cell that directs other cells to fight infection plays a critical role in regulating the immune system in both health and disease. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have discovered how a stimulatory molecule and a protein found on the membrane of another immune cell make T helper 17 cells multi-taskers of sorts. Th17 cells protect the body against infection and cancer, but are also culprits in some autoimmune diseases and out-of-control, cancerous cell growth. This new understanding that Th17 ...

With Election Day right around the corner, political egos are on full display. One might even think that possessing a "big ego" is a prerequisite for success in politics, or in any position of leadership. High achievers–CEO's, top athletes, rock stars, prominent surgeons, or scientists–often seem to be well endowed in ego. But when does a "healthy ego" cross the line into unhealthy territory? Where is the line between confident, positive self-image and grandiose self-importance, which might signal a personality disorder or other psychiatric illness? More fundamentally, ...

The virus, called enterovirus 71, is closely related to poliovirus, and was first detected in California in the 1960s. Since then the virus has spread across Asia, affecting mostly children and some adults. Serious cases of the disease can include neurological disorders such as meningitis, paralysis and encephalitis. As a result of a global health campaign, polioviruses have almost been eradicated in many areas of the world. Enterovirus 71, however, has caused major outbreaks of hand, foot, and mouth disease and it is still unclear why such a high number of cases occur ...

Ancient gardens are the stuff of legend, from the Garden of Eden to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Now researchers at Tel Aviv University, in collaboration with Heidelberg University in Germany, have uncovered an ancient royal garden at the site of Ramat Rachel near Jerusalem, and are leading the first full-scale excavation of this type of archaeological site anywhere in the pre-Hellenistic Levant. According to Prof. Oded Lipschits and graduate student Boaz Gross of Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology, this dig is an unparalleled look into the structure ...

Millions of Medicare recipients have been forcibly reassigned to different prescription drug plans because Part D reimbursements to insurance companies covering low-income patients are lower than the actual costs incurred, according to a study released online today by Health Affairs. The report describes how a system designed to encourage competition and to subsidize care for low-income Medicare patients instead has led companies to raise their premiums in an effort to price themselves out of the low-income segment of the Part D market. "These insufficient payments create ...

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL Minn. (October 28, 2010) – University of Minnesota Medical School and Minneapolis Veterans Affair Medical Center researchers have discovered a correlation between increased circuit activity in the right side of the brain and the debilitating, involuntary flashbacks triggered by post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The ability to objectively diagnose PTSD through concrete evidence of neural activity, its impact and its manifestation is the first step towards effectively helping those afflicted with this severe anxiety disorder. PTSD often stems ...

Boulder, CO, USA - Scientists have discovered in China the first complete skeleton of a pivotal ancestor of Earth's largest land animals – the sauropod dinosaurs. The new species, tentatively dubbed Yizhousaurus sunae, lived on the flood plains around Lufeng in the Yunnan Province of South China about 200 million years ago. The species helps explain how the iconic four-footed, long-necked sauropod dinosaurs evolved. Unlike the 120-foot-long, 100-ton sauropod giants that came later, Yizhousaurus was about 30 feet in length, but it shows all of the hallmarks of later sauropods: ...

Boulder, CO, USA - The December 2010 Lithosphere analyzes tectonic histories across the Llano Uplift, Texas; activity along the ~85-mile-long Kern Canyon fault, southern Sierra Nevada; deformed mantle materials in the Twin Sisters ultramafic body of Washington State; a giant granitic intrusion called the Sahwave Intrusive Suite near Reno, Nevada; the Socorro Magma Body, New Mexico; gravity anomalies on and offshore of the Antarctic continent; and the shallow upper mantle stratification of the "Lehmann" and "X" discontinuities. Highlights are provided below. View abstracts ...

Researchers at North Carolina State University have found a way to "cage" genetic off switches in such a way that they can be activated when exposed to UV light. Their technology gives scientists a more precise way to control and study gene function in localized areas of developing organisms. The off switches, called morpholino oligonucleotides, are like short snippets of DNA that, when introduced into cells, bind to target RNA molecules, effectively turning off specific genes. Morpholinos have been used as genetic switches in many animal models, including the zebrafish ...

The 2005 ethics rules that govern relationships between researchers within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and pharmaceutical, biotechnology and other industrial companies have significantly reduced the prevalence of such collaborations without affecting standard measures of research productivity, according to a study in the November issue of Academic Medicine. However, this report from the Mongan Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) also finds that NIH scientists and administrators believe the new rules are too restrictive. "Our ...

High school graduation and dropout rates have long been used as a key indicator of the effectiveness of a school system, but how best to calculate these rates is controversial for both educators and policymakers. HIGH SCHOOL DROPOUT, GRADUATION, AND COMPLETION RATES: BETTER DATA, BETTER MEASURES, BETTER DECISIONS, a new report from the National Research Council and the National Academy of Education, offers guidance to the federal government, states, and schools on measuring dropout rates and collecting data to help them achieve better outcomes for students. Among ...

Countless people clung to life in the branches of trees hemming the shorelines during the deadly 2004 tsunami that killed more than 230,000 coastal residents in Indonesia, India, Thailand and Sri Lanka. In the aftermath of the disaster, land change scientist Chandra Giri from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) decided to explore to what degree those unique trees – which make up valuable forest ecosystems called mangroves -- safeguard lives, property and beaches during hurricanes, tsunamis and floods. Encountering challenges while trying to quantify the long-standing hypothesis ...

Race may not be as important as previously thought in determining who buddies up with whom, suggests a new UCLA–Harvard University study of American college students on the social networking site Facebook. "Sociologists have long maintained that race is the strongest predictor of whether two Americans will socialize," said Andreas Wimmer, the study's lead author and a sociologist at UCLA. "But we've found that birds of a feather don't always flock together. Whom you get to know in your everyday life, where you live, and your country of origin or social class can provide ...

Copper sulfate has emerged as an effective treatment for Ichthyophthirius multifiliis, also known as "Ich," a protozoan parasite that appears as white spots on infected fish, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientist. Aquatic toxicologist David Straus with USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) investigated copper sulfate as a method to control both Ich in catfish and a fungus—Saprolegnia—on catfish eggs. Straus works at the ARS Harry K. Dupree Stuttgart National Aquaculture Research Center in Stuttgart, Ark. ARS is the chief intramural scientific ...

Three million Californians are enrolled in high-deductible health plans, insurance policies that offer consumers a lower monthly premium in return for higher out-of-pocket spending for health care services, according to a new report from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. These health plans, which can impose deductibles of more than $5,000, may cause members to delay care and can put families in financial jeopardy should a health crisis arise, say the authors of the report, "Profiling California's Health Plan Enrollees: Findings from the 2007 California Health ...

PHILADELPHIA — An investigational DNA methylation test could alter the screening landscape for colorectal cancer, according to data presented at the American Association for Cancer Research special conference on Colorectal Cancer: Biology to Therapy, held here Oct. 27-30, 2010. Colorectal cancer is the third leading cause of cancer, and the second leading cause of cancer mortality. While celebrities continue to undergo public colonoscopies in an effort to increase awareness, only 60 percent of adults age 50 and older have undergone recommended screening, according to ...

La Jolla, CA, October 28, 2010 – For Immediate Release – A group of researchers at The Scripps Research Institute and the Scripps Translational Science Institute has published a paper that reviews new strategies for identifying collections of rare genetic variations that reveal whether people are predisposed to developing common conditions like diabetes and cancer. In our modern genetic age, the entire DNA sequences, or "genomes," of humans and thousands of other animals, plants, and microbial life forms have been completely decoded and are publicly available to scientists ...

BOSTON – The discovery that a protein called Rictor plays a key role in destroying a close cousin of the AKT oncogene could provide scientists with a new molecular target for treating certain cancers, including breast cancer. Described in the September 2010 issue of the journal Molecular Cell, the study was led by scientists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). The oncogenic cousin, known as SGK1, resembles the widely known AKT oncogene in structure, according to the study's senior author Wenyi Wei, PhD, of the Department of Pathology at BIDMC and Assistant ...

LIVERMORE, Calif. – Beta cells, which make insulin in the human body, do not replicate after the age of 30, indicating that clinicians may be closer to better treating diabetes. Type 1 diabetes is caused by a loss of beta cells by auto-immunity while type 2 is due to a relative insufficiency of beta cells. Whether beta cells replicate after birth has remained an open issue, and is critically important for designing therapies for diabetes. By using radioactive carbon-14 produced by above-ground nuclear testing in the 1950s and '60s, researchers have determined that the ...

Noble metals such as platinum and palladium are becoming increasingly important because of growth in environmentally friendly applications such as fuel cells and pollution control catalysts. But the world has limited quantities of these materials, meaning manufacturers will have to rely on efficient recycling processes to help meet the demand. Existing recycling processes use a combination of two inorganic acids known as "aqua regia" to dissolve noble metals, a class of materials that includes platinum, palladium, gold and silver. But because the metals are often dissolved ...

Montreal, October 28, 2010 – A team of scientists at the Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal (IRCM) led by Dr. Jean-François Côté, Director of the Cytoskeletal Organization and Cell Migration research unit, identified a novel molecular mechanism in the control of cell motility. Their findings were published online today in Current Biology, a journal from the Cell Press group. This scientific breakthrough could eventually lead to the development of new cancer-treating drugs that could block the spread of tumours (metastasis). "As many as 90% of cancer patient ...

Two spacecraft are now beginning to study the moon's environment as part of NASA's ARTEMIS mission, whose principal investigator is Vassilis Angelopoulos, a UCLA professor of Earth and space sciences. One of these satellites has been in the lunar environment since Aug. 25, and the second arrived Oct. 22, marking the start of the ARTEMIS mission to gather new scientific data in the sun-Earth-moon environment. ARTEMIS is an acronym for Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon's Interaction with the Sun. For roughly six months, the ...

URBANA – Finding good child care and being able to engage easily in important interactions with your child care provider are critical to any mother's ability to work outside the home. "Suppose you're living in the rural Midwest and you don't speak English very well. Can you imagine leaving your child with a child care provider if you couldn't communicate well with that person?" said Angela Wiley, a University of Illinois associate professor of applied family studies. "The immigrant moms we interviewed for this study faced just this dilemma," she said. Immigrant Latino ...

Researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine have identified a mechanism controlling the function of a protein that binds to DNA during embryonic development and may function to prevent abnormal tumor growth. When the protein, TCF3, is modified by a small molecule called a phosphate, it no longer binds DNA, changing the way the protein signals during development. This discovery identifies a new diagnostic marker (phosphorylated TCF3) that may be associated with cancer and could represent a potential drug target. The results are published in the current issue of Developmental ...

CORAL GABLES, FL (October 28, 2010)—To help unravel the mysteries of human cognitive development and reach new the frontiers in robotics, University of Miami (UM) developmental psychologists and computer scientists from the University of California in San Diego (UC San Diego) are studying infant-mother interactions and working to implement their findings in a baby robot capable of learning social skills. The first phase of the project was studying face-to-face interactions between mother and child, to learn how predictable early communication is, and to understand what ...