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HOUSTON, Oct. 22, 2010 – Researchers can spend entire careers producing outstanding work but still not see their efforts featured in the pages of Science, one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals. That won't be the case, though, for two junior faculty members in engineering at the University of Houston (UH).

PROVIDENCE, RI -- The 2009/2010 Influenza A (H1N1) is one of several viruses responsible for respiratory-related infections. A new study from Rhode Island Hospital examined patients with viruses and found distinguishing characteristics of the H1N1 virus in how it affects respiratory illness. Their findings will be presented at the annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America to be held in Vancouver, Canada on Friday, Oct. 22.

DETROIT – Patients were misdiagnosed with pneumonia at an alarming rate when they were readmitted to the hospital shortly after a previous hospitalization for the same illness, according to two Henry Ford Hospital companion studies.

Researchers say the misdiagnoses led to overuse of antibiotics and increased health care costs. Pneumonia ranks second to congestive heart failure as the reason for readmission within 30 days of a previous hospitalization.

Led by Henry Ford Infectious Diseases physicians Hiren Pokharna, M.D., and Norman Markowitz, M.D., researchers found that:

WORCESTER, Mass. – With a failure rate as high as 50 percent, bone tissue grafts pose a significant obstacle to orthopedic surgeons attempting to repair complex fractures or large areas of bone loss, such as those often caused by trauma and cancer. Current synthetic substitutes rarely possess the bone-like properties needed for successful grafting and are often difficult for surgeons to manipulate in the operating room. In response to these challenges, researchers at UMass Medical School have developed an easy-to-produce, inexpensive, synthetic bone material called FlexBone.

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists are developing vaccines to help protect healthy farm-raised catfish against key diseases.

Working as a team, microbiologist Phillip H. Klesius and molecular biologists Julia Pridgeon and Craig Shoemaker with USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) at the agency's Aquatic Animal Health Research Unit in Auburn, Ala., and Joyce J. Evans, aquatic pathologist at the Auburn unit's lab in Chestertown, Md., are developing vaccines against Streptococcus iniae, S. agalactiae and other pathogens.

Princeton scientists have identified genes responsible for controlling reproductive life span in worms and found they may control genes regulating similar functions in humans.

The work suggests that someday researchers may be able to develop ways to maintain fertility in humans, allowing women who want to delay having children to preserve that capacity and extend their reproduction, and to prevent maternal age-related birth defects.

A variant of last year's pandemic influenza linked to fatal cases carried a mutation that enabled it to infect a different subset of cells lining the airway, according to new research. The study, due to be published next week in the Journal of Virology, suggests that the mutant virus could have impaired the lungs' ability to clear out germs.

A toxin found in the venom of the Central American bark scorpion (Centruroides margaritatus) could hold the key to reducing heart bypass failures, according to research from the University of Leeds.

The study, published online in Cardiovascular Research, reports that one of the scorpion's toxins, margatoxin, is at least 100 times more potent at preventing neointimal hyperplasia – the most comon cause of bypass graft failure - than any other known compound.

A more personalized treatment for people with a type of metastatic liver cancer --hepatocellular carcinoma -- may be possible by targeting the protein c-Met, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers. Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the number three cause of cancer deaths in the world.

Measuring three biomarkers in a single blood sample may improve physicians' ability to identify patients at high risk of developing chronic kidney disease (CKD), according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

Research led by Klaus Stark and Christian Hengstenberg of the University of Regensburg identified a common variant of the cardiovascular heat shock protein gene, HSPB7, which was found to increase risk for dilated cardiomyopathy by almost 50%. Their paper appears on October 28 in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics.

STANFORD, Calif. — In a study to be published online Oct. 21 in PLoS Genetics, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have implicated the lack of a protein important in hooking our skin cells together in the most common variety of skin cancer. Depletion of this protein, called Perp, could be an early indicator of skin cancer development, and could be useful for staging and establishing prognoses.

(Embargoed) Scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine have reported the exact molecular structure and mechanisms of a major cell signaling pathway that serves a broad range of functions in humans.

Injecting a protein that helps break down triglycerides may someday help treat an inherited form of high triglycerides, according to a new study in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology, an American Heart Association journal.

Triglyceride is a type of fat in the blood. Elevated levels in the blood — hypertriglyceridemia — have been linked to coronary artery disease.