Numerous patients suffering from chronic liver diseases are currently receiving inadequate treatment due to the lack of organs donated for transplantation. However, hepatocytes derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) could offer an alternative for the future. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin compared hepatocytes from embryonic stem cells with hepatocytes from iPS cells and found that their gene expression is very similar. Nevertheless, in comparison to "real" hepatocytes, just under half of the genes exhibited a different ...

Regularly drinking green tea could protect the brain against developing Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia, according to latest research by scientists at Newcastle University. The study, published in the academic journal Phytomedicine, also suggests this ancient Chinese remedy could play a vital role in protecting the body against cancer. Led by Dr Ed Okello, the Newcastle team wanted to know if the protective properties of green tea – which have previously been shown to be present in the undigested, freshly brewed form of the drink – were still active once the tea ...

While a much hailed communication intervention works for families making decisions for chronically-ill loved ones in medical intensive care units, Case Western Reserve University researchers found the intervention was less effective for surgical and neurological ICU patients. Barbara Daly and Sara Douglas, the study's lead researchers from the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing at Case Western Reserve, attribute the varied results to different types of patients served by the three types of ICUs and differences among ICU cultures. "We found the same approach is ...

The use of environmental DNA (eDNA) by scientists from the University of Notre Dame and The Nature Conservancy to detect invasive Asian carp in the Chicago-area waterway has been validated in Conservation Letters, a new flagship peer-reviewed journal published by the Society for Conservation Biology. "When you are dealing with cutting-edge research like eDNA, a very important part of the process is getting your science peer-reviewed and published in a well-respected journal," said Professor David Lodge, director of the University of Notre Dame's Environmental Change Initiative. ...

Sometimes it's almost impossible to talk without using your hands. These gestures seem to be important to how we think. They provide a visual clue to our thoughts and, a new theory suggests, may even change our thoughts by grounding them in action. University of Chicago psychological scientists Sian Beilock and Susan Goldin-Meadow are bringing together two lines of research: Beilock's work on how action affects thought and Goldin-Meadow's work on gesture. After a chat at a conference instigated by Ed Diener, the founding editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science, ...

Artificial joint replacements can drastically change a patient's quality of life. Painful, arthritic knees, shoulders and hips can be replaced with state-of-the-art metal or ceramic implants, eliminating pain and giving a person a new lease on life. But, what if, instead of metal and plastic, doctors were able to take a patient's cells and grow an entirely new joint, replacing the old one with a fully functional biological joint? A team of University of Missouri and Columbia University researchers have found a way to create these biological joints in animals, and they believe ...

New Rochelle, NY, January 5, 2011—A new, simplified method for producing large amounts of viral vector cassettes capable of shuttling genes into host cells will help advance the promising field of gene therapy as applications move into large animal studies and human clinical trials. The novel adeno-associated virus (AAV) production method is described in an article published Instant Online ahead of publication in Human Gene Therapy, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. (www.liebertpub.com). The article is available free online at www.liebertpub.com/hum This ...

In a finding that gives new meaning to the adage, "waste not, want not," scientists are reporting that household sewage has far more potential as an alternative energy source than previously thought. They say the discovery, which increases the estimated potential energy in wastewater by almost 20 percent, could spur efforts to extract methane, hydrogen and other fuels from this vast and, as yet, untapped resource. Their report appears in ACS' journal Environmental Science & Technology. Elizabeth S. Heidrich and colleagues note that sewage treatment plants in the United ...

Scientists in China are reporting development of a less expensive, more eco-friendly method for making deuterium-depleted drinking water, citing studies suggesting that it may be a more healthful form of water. Their report appears in ACS' bi-weekly journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research. Changgong Meng and Feng Huang note that natural water, widely known as H2O, actually is a mixture of H2O and tiny amounts of D2O — about 150 parts per million (ppm), or a few drops of D2O in every quart of water. Deuterium-depleted water usually contains about 125 ppm. ...

A team of researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine has developed the first web-based screening tool for Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). This instrument has recently been used by soldiers returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who participated in the Sixth Annual Road to Recovery Conference and Tribute in Orlando to determine if they sustained a TBI. "Traumatic brain injury is underdiagnosed, and left untreated can have long-term cognitive, behavioral and physical effects," said Wayne Gordon, PhD, the Jack Nash Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine and an Associate ...

Scientists are reporting new evidence on how studded tires — wintertime fixtures in some areas but banned in others for causing damage to pavement — may also damage the health of motorists and people living near highways. Studded tires have small metal protrusions from the rubber tread that improve traction on icy or snow-covered roads. Their study appears in ACS' Chemical Research in Toxicology, a monthly journal. Anders Ljungman and colleagues note that studded tires grind away at the road surface, generating the kind of dust particles believed to contribute to heart ...

Momentum is building for a new energy "smart grid" that would overhaul the U.S.'s 100-year-old electrical power network. The impact would be huge –– from installation of a new web of electrical transmission lines to smart meters to control home appliances. The meters would offer consumers discounted rates if they use electricity at off-peak hours. A key objective of the $1.5 trillion dollar plan is "time of use" electricity pricing that would increase the cost to consumers of energy at peak mid-day hours and lower it at others, according to an article in the current edition ...

Alexandria, VA – Over the past five decades, OPEC has earned a reputation for being a powerful cartel that controls the world's oil production and prices - but there are limits to OPEC's influence and wealth. In fact, many OPEC countries face grave problems, which are to some extent the result of their oil-income dependence. EARTH examines OPEC's past, current and future place in this world. Will OPEC continue to control the planet's oil for the next 50 years? Learn more about this eye-opening subject in February's featured article "OPEC and Oil: The Next 50 Years," and ...

Dr. Emil Kozarov and a team of researchers at the Columbia University College of Dental Medicine have identified specific bacteria that may have a key role in vascular pathogenesis, specifically atherosclerosis, or what is commonly referred to as "hardening of the arteries" – the number one cause of death in the United States. Fully understanding the role of infections in cardiovascular diseases has been challenging because researchers have previously been unable to isolate live bacteria from atherosclerotic tissue. Using tissue specimens from the Department of Surgery ...

PHILADELPHIA – Lou Gehrig's disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) are characterized by protein clumps in brain and spinal-cord cells that include an RNA-binding protein called TDP-43. This protein is the major building block of the lesions formed by these clumps. In a study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, a team led by Virginia M.-Y. Lee, PhD, director of Penn's Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research, describes the first direct evidence of how mutated TDP-43 can cause neurons to die. Although ...

A team led by Patrick T. Mather, director of Syracuse Biomaterials Institute (SBI) and Milton and Ann Stevenson professor of biomedical and chemical engineering in Syracuse University's L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science (LCS), has succeeded in applying the concept of functionally graded materials (FGMs) to shape memory polymers (SMPs). SMPs are a class of "smart" materials that can switch between two shapes, from a fixed (temporary) shape to a predetermined permanent shape. Shape memory polymers function as actuators, by first forming a heated article ...

The oceans became oxygen-rich as they are today about 600 million years ago, during Earth's Late Ediacaran Period. Before that, most scientists believed until recently, the ancient oceans were relatively oxygen-poor for the preceding four billion years. Now biogeochemists at the University of California-Riverside (UCR) have found evidence that the oceans went back to being "anoxic," or oxygen-poor, around 499 million years ago, soon after the first appearance of animals on the planet. They remained anoxic for two to four million years. The researchers suggest that ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — In one University of Illinois lab, invisibility is a matter of now you hear it, now you don't. Led by mechanical science and engineering professor Nicholas Fang, Illinois researchers have demonstrated an acoustic cloak, a technology that renders underwater objects invisible to sonar and other ultrasound waves. "We are not talking about science fiction. We are talking about controlling sound waves by bending and twisting them in a designer space," said Fang, who also is affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. "This ...

The bulk of the world's fisheries--including the kind of small-scale, often non-industrialized fisheries that millions of people depend on for food--could be sustained using community-based co-management. This is the conclusion of a study reported in this week's issue of the journal Nature. "The majority of the world's fisheries are not--and never will be--managed by strong centralized governments with top-down rules and the means to enforce them," says Nicolas Gutiérrez, a University of Washington fisheries scientist and lead author of the Nature paper. "Our findings ...

Boston, MA -- The deaths of 1.8 million female infants and children in India over the past 20 years are related to domestic violence against their mothers, according to a new study led by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). In their examination of over 158,000 births occurring between 1985 and 2005, the researchers found that husbands' violence against wives increased the risk of death among female children, but not male children, in both the first year and the first five years of life. "Being born a girl into a family in India in which your mother ...

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Mayo Clinic researchers have determined the lifetime risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis and six other autoimmune rheumatic diseases for both men and women. The findings appear online in Arthritis and Rheumatism. VIDEO ALERT: Additional audio and video resources, including excerpts from an interview with Cynthia Crowson describing the research, are available on the Mayo Clinic News Blog(http://newsblog.mayoclinic.org/2011/01/05/whats-your-risk-of-developing-rheumatoid-arthritis/) "We estimated the lifetime risk for rheumatic disease for both ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Most people like to play it safe when combining colors for an article of clothing or outfit, a new study suggests. When consumers were asked to choose colors for seven different parts of an athletic shoe, they tended to pick identical or similar colors for nearly every element. They usually avoided contrasting or even moderately different color combinations. A red and yellow athletic shoe? Not going to happen. Blue and grey? That's more like it. This is one of the first studies to show how consumers would choose to combine colors in a realistic ...

An international team of physicists and neuroscientists has reported a breakthrough in magnetic resonance imaging that allows brain scans more than seven times faster than currently possible. In a paper that appeared Dec. 20 in the journal PLoS ONE, a University of California, Berkeley, physicist and colleagues from the University of Minnesota and Oxford University in the United Kingdom describe two improvements that allow full three-dimensional brain scans in less than half a second, instead of the typical 2 to 3 seconds. "When we made the first images, it was unbelievable ...

Cardiologists at the University of Connecticut Health Center have identified a protein fragment that when detected in the blood can be a predictor of heart attack. Their research, led by Dr. Bruce Liang, director of the Pat and Jim Calhoun Cardiology Center, is published in the Jan. 11 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. It found heart attack patients had elevated levels of the protein fragment known as Caspase-3 p17 in their blood. "We've discovered a new biomarker for heart attack, and showed that apoptosis, or a particular kind of cell death, ...

Cancer cells reproduce by dividing in two, but a molecule known as PML limits how many times this can happen, according to researchers lead by Dr. Gerardo Ferbeyre of the University of Montreal's Department of Biochemistry. The team proved that malignant cancers have problems with this molecule, meaning that in its absence they can continue to grow and eventually spread to other organs. Importantly, the presence of PML molecules can easily be detected, and could serve to diagnose whether a tumor is malignant or not. "We discovered that benign cancer cells produce the ...