Some thirty million years ago, Ganges river dolphins diverged from other toothed whales, making them one of the oldest species of aquatic mammals that use echolocation, or biosonar, to navigate and find food. This also makes them ideal subjects for scientists working to understand the evolution of echolocation among toothed whales.
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ANN ARBOR—One of the major obstacles to growing new organs—replacement hearts, lungs and kidneys—is the difficulty researchers face in building blood vessels that keep the tissues alive, but new findings from the University of Michigan could help overcome this roadblock.
"It's not just enough to make a piece of tissue that functions like your desired target," said Andrew Putnam, U-M associate professor of biomedical engineering. "If you don't nourish it with blood by vascularizing it, it's only going to be as big as the head of a pen.
Cambridge, Mass. – April 4, 2013 – Agios Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the leading biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering and developing novel drugs in the fields of cancer metabolism and rare metabolic genetic diseases, announced today the publication of two articles in the journal Science by Agios scientists and their collaborators demonstrating the effects of the company's small molecule isocitrate dehydrogenase 1 and 2 (IDH1 and IDH2) mutant specific inhibitors in primary human tumor models.
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – For the first time, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have isolated adult stem cells from human intestinal tissue.
The accomplishment provides a much-needed resource for scientists eager to uncover the true mechanisms of human stem cell biology. It also enables them to explore new tactics to treat inflammatory bowel disease or to ameliorate the side effects of chemotherapy and radiation, which often damage the gut.
It's generally thought that anticancer chemotherapies work like antibiotics do, by directly killing off what's harmful. But new research published online on April 4 in the Cell Press journal Immunity shows that effective chemotherapies actually work by mobilizing the body's own immune cells to fight cancer. Researchers found that chemo-treated dying tumors secrete a factor that attracts certain immune cells, which then ingest tumor proteins and present them on their surfaces as alert signals that an invader is present.
Researchers from The Wistar Institute explain a new molecular mechanism behind the phenomenon of oncogene-induced senescence. By depriving the cell of the ability to make new nucleotides—the building blocks of DNA molecules—cells can suppress cancer development by forcing a damaged cell into a senescent state, where the cell remains alive yet cannot reproduce.
According to the researchers, their findings may offer a new strategy to strengthen the effects of anti-cancer drugs and chemotherapies.
Scientists from the University of Notre Dame, The Nature Conservancy, and Central Michigan University have presented their findings of Asian carp DNA throughout the Great Lakes in a study published in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences.
Children's sense of having and owning a body differs from that of adults, indicating that our sense of physical self develops over time, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
CHAPEL HILL, N.C – Viruses have historically been classified into one of two types – those with an outer lipid-containing envelope and those without an envelope. For the first time, researchers at the University of North Carolina have discovered that hepatitis A virus, a common cause of enterically-transmitted hepatitis, takes on characteristics of both virus types depending on whether it is in a host or in the environment.
A new study which was performed jointly at Umeå University and the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, discovered that bacteria can degrade the cell membrane of bacterial competitors with enzymes that do not harm their own membrane. This exciting finding opens the way for the development of new antibacterial drugs to fight bacteria using their own weapons. (NATURE, 2013).
SOUTH BEND, IND. – Scientists from the University of Notre Dame, The Nature Conservancy, and Central Michigan University presented their findings of Asian carp DNA throughout the Great Lakes in a study published in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. "The good news is that we have found no evidence that Asian carp are widespread in the Great Lakes basin, despite extensive surveys in Southern Lake Michigan and parts of lakes Erie and St Clair," said Dr.
The genus Megachile is a cosmopolitan group of solitary bees, often called leafcutter bees.
This is one of the largest genera of bees, with well over 1,500 species in over 50 subgenera. A new species, Megachile chomskyi, has been found only in Texas, US. What is specific and interesting about this bee is the fact that it is among those insects which exhibit a narrow, specialized preference for pollen sources.
Los Angeles, CA (April 04, 2013). Graduates are taking up jobs that don't fully use their skills and as a result are causing high turnover for employers, claims new research published today in the journal Human Relations, published by SAGE. The findings raise questions about today's high throughput in university education.
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — The costs of caring for people with dementia in the U.S. are comparable to – if not greater than – those for heart disease and cancer, according to new estimates by researchers at the University of Michigan Health System and nonprofit RAND Corporation.
Annual healthcare costs tied to dementia, including both formal and unpaid care, reach $159-$215 billion – rivaling the most costly major diseases – according to the findings that appear in The New England Journal of Medicine.