Cancer painfully ends more than 500,000 lives in the United States each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The scientific crusade against cancer recently achieved a victory under the leadership of University of Missouri Curators' Professor M. Frederick Hawthorne. Hawthorne's team has developed a new form of radiation therapy that successfully put cancer into remission in mice. This innovative treatment produced none of the harmful side-effects of conventional chemo and radiation cancer therapies.
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Philadelphia, PA, April 3, 2013 – Depression, anxiety, and smoking are associated with lower bone mineral density (BMD) in adults, but these factors have not previously been studied during adolescence, when more than 50% of bone accrual occurs. This longitudinal preliminary study is the first to demonstrate that smoking and depressive symptoms in adolescent girls have a negative impact on adolescent bone accrual and may become a red flag for a future constrained by low bone mass or osteoporosis and higher fracture rates in postmenopausal years.
The creation of new blood vessels in the body, called "angiogenesis," is usually discussed in connection with healing wounds and tumors. But it's also an ongoing process in the female reproductive tract, where the growth and breaking of blood vessels is a normal part of the menstrual cycle. But abnormal growth of blood vessels can have painful consequences and resultant pathologies.
COLUMBUS, Ohio – A scientist's gender can have a big impact on how other researchers perceive his or her work, according to a new study.
Young scholars rated publications supposedly written by male scientists as higher quality than identical work identified with female authors.
The research found that graduate students in communication -- both men and women -- showed significant bias against study abstracts they read whose authors had female names like "Brenda Collins" or "Melissa Jordan."
Strong new biochemical evidence exists showing that the cereal grain sorghum is a safe food for people with celiac disease, who must avoid wheat and certain other grains, scientists are reporting. Their study, which includes molecular evidence that sorghum lacks the proteins toxic to people with celiac disease, appears in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
BOSTON (April 3, 2013) — Researchers from Tufts University School of Dental Medicine have discovered a statistical association between the injection of local dental anesthesia given to children ages two to six and evidence of missing lower wisdom teeth. The results of this epidemiological study, published in the April issue of The Journal of the American Dental Association, suggest that injecting anesthesia into the gums of young children may interrupt the development of the lower wisdom tooth.
With warm summer days at the beach on the minds of millions of winter-weary people, scientists are reporting that use of a new water quality test this year could prevent unnecessary beach closures while better protecting the health of swimmers. A study analyzing the accuracy of the test appears in ACS' journal Environmental Science & Technology.
In the bird world, male and female blue tits are hard to distinguish for the human observer. However, in the UV-range, visible to birds, the male is much more colourful. A closer look at the monogamous mating system of these birds again reveals that all is not what it seems: in every second nest there are chicks that are not related to the care-giving father. An already mated male can increase the number of his offspring by siring extra-pair offspring in other nests than the one he cares for with his mate.
Jerusalem, April 3, 2013 – The same factor in our immune system that is instrumental in enabling us to fight off severe and dangerous inflammatory ailments is also a player in doing the opposite at a later stage, causing the suppression of our immune response.
A new report from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) looked at the vulnerability of 54 breeding bird species to climate change impacts occurring by the year 2050 in Arctic Alaska. The assessment found that two species, the gyrfalcon and common eider are likely to be "highly" vulnerable, while seven other species would be "moderately" vulnerable to anticipated impacts. Five species are likely to increase in number and benefit from a warming climate.
NEW YORK, NY (April 3, 2013) – A team of New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute scientists led by David Kahler, PhD, NYSCF Director of Laboratory Automation, have developed a new way to generate induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell lines from human fibroblasts, acquired from both healthy and diseased donors. Reported in PLOS ONE, this cell-sorting method consistently selects the highest quality, standardized iPS cells, representing a major step forward for drug discovery and the development of cell therapies.
Humans have used the papyrus sedge for millennia. The Ancient Egyptians wrote on it, it can be made into highly buoyant boats, it is grown for ornamentation and parts can even be eaten. Now, writing in the International Journal of Environmental Technology and Management, researchers in Uganda have demonstrated that growing papyrus can be used to soak up toxins and other noxious residues from abattoir effluent.
University of British Columbia researchers have discovered two new symbionts living in the gut of termites, and taken the unusual step of naming them after fictional monsters created by American horror author HP Lovecraft.
The single-cell protists, Cthulhu macrofasciculumque and Cthylla microfasciculumque, help termites digest wood. The researchers decided to name them after monstrous cosmic entities featured in Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos as an ode to the sometimes strange and fascinating world of the microbe.
Children with autism have increased levels of genetic change in regions of the genome prone to DNA rearrangements, so called "hotspots," according to a research discovery to be published in the print edition of the journal Human Molecular Genetics. The research indicates that these genetic changes come in the form of an excess of duplicated DNA segments in hotspot regions and may affect the chances that a child will develop autism -- a behavioral disorder that affects about 1 of every 88 children in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
CLEVELAND, Ohio (April 3, 2013)—Women who have hypertensive diseases during pregnancy seem to be at higher risk of having troublesome hot flashes and night sweats at menopause, report researchers from the Netherlands in an article published online today in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society. This is the first study to look at this association.