Body

STANFORD, Calif. — Scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine have identified for the first time an enzyme that plays vital roles in both fetal heart development and in causing cardiac hypertrophy — an enlargement of the heart — in adults. The discovery could be used in the future to try to develop new treatments for heart disease.

DURHAM, N.C. -- It may seem intuitive that growth and development somehow go together so that plants and animals end up with the right number of cells in all the right places. But it is only now that scientists at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy have gotten some of the first insights into how this critical coordination actually works in a plant.

The answer is surprisingly simple.

WASHINGTON, June 30, 2010 – A team of researchers from Washington State University and the University of Georgia have found that organic farming increases biodiversity among beneficial, pest-killing predators and pathogens. In potato crops, this led to fewer insect pests and larger potato plants.

"It's always been a mystery how organic farmers get high yields without using synthetic insecticides," says co-author Bill Snyder, associate professor of entomology at Washington State University. "Our study suggests that biodiversity conservation may be a key to their success."

PULLMAN, Wash.—There really is a balance of nature, but as accepted as that thought is, it has rarely been studied. Now Washington State University researchers writing in the journal Nature have found that more balanced animal and plant communities typical of organic farms work better at fighting pests and growing a better plant.

How do plants and animals end up with right number of cells in all the right places?

For the first time, scientists have gained an insight into how this process is co-ordinated in plants. An international team, including Cardiff University's School of Biosciences and Duke University in the USA, have linked the process of cell division with the way cells acquire their different characteristics.

A protein called Short-root, already known to play a part in determining what cells will become, was also found to control cell division.

Smoking, an established risk factor for colon cancer, may induce specific epigenetic changes and gene mutations that may be involved in the development of colon cancer, according to an online study published June 29 in the Journal of The National Cancer Institute.

Rome, Italy: A review of studies of babies born after in vitro maturation (IVM) fertility treatment has suggested that they are more likely to be born larger than normal and to have more difficult births requiring more obstetric interventions such as caesareans.

New bean germplasm lines containing heat, drought and disease tolerance are being released by Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists and cooperators.

ARS geneticist Tim Porch, with the agency's Tropical Agricultural Research Station in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, has recently released two new kidney bean germplasm lines, named TARS HT-1 and TARS HT-2, that are tolerant to high temperature conditions. These new releases are part of collaborative breeding efforts with Cornell University, the University of Tennessee and the University of Puerto Rico.

Pay-for-performance is an increasingly popular approach to improving health care quality. But the planned nationwide implementation of institutional bonuses mandated under federal health care reform threatens to act as a "reverse Robin Hood," potentially causing hospitals in less-advantaged regions to lose funds to health care facilities in more affluent areas of the country, according to a study published in the academic journal PLoS Medicine.

Adding nutrients to the sea could decrease viral infection rates among phytoplankton and enhance the efficiency of the biological pump, a means by which carbon is transferred from the atmosphere to the deep ocean, according to a new mathematical modelling study. The findings, published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, have implications for ocean geo-engineering schemes proposed for tackling global warming.

Only a small fraction of transplant centers nationwide are willing to accept and transplant deceased-donor kidneys that they perceive as less than perfect, leading to lengthy, organ-damaging delays as officials use a one-by-one approach to find a willing taker. Now, Johns Hopkins researchers have designed a formula they say can predict which donor kidneys are most likely to be caught in that process, a method that could potentially stop thousands of usable kidneys each year from being discarded because it took too long for them to be transplanted.

AUGUSTA, GA. – More electrodes and a thinner, more flexible wire inserted further into the inner ear could improve conventional cochlear implants, a team of Medical College of Georgia and Georgia Institute of Technology researchers say.