Body

Online game companies need to be more socially responsible for over-addictive use of their products to avoid government intervention, according to a new study by Cardiff, Derby and Nottingham Trent universities.

The study, in the journal Addiction Research and Theory, was led by Dr Shumaila Yousafzai of Cardiff Business School with psychologists Dr Zaheer Hussain and Professor Mark Griffiths from the University of Derby and Nottingham Trent University respectively.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Researchers at Mayo Clinic in Florida have revealed the process by which chronic inflammation of the pancreas, pancreatitis, morphs into pancreatic cancer.

In a study carried out at the University of Eastern Finland, bone histomorphometry and infrared spectroscopy revealed abnormal bone properties in children with vertebral fractures and in children after solid organ transplantation. Bone compositional changes in children with vertebral fractures and after different types of organ transplantation have not been reported previously.

Chronic harvesting of a tropical tree that many local communities in Western Africa depend on can alter the tree's reproduction and drastically curtail fruit and seed yields over the tree's lifetime, according to a new study.

The study, which appears today in the Journal of Ecology, is the first of its kind to use what's called "age-from-stage" mathematical modeling, a way of estimating plant age from its size, to investigate how harvesting affects a plant's life expectancy and other life history traits, such as age at maturity.

White Americans who are obese are twice as likely as black Americans to have surgery to tackle the problem, a study has found.

Bariatric surgery is now recognised as a successful treatment for preventing serious complications of obesity such as diabetes and high blood pressure. The new study is one of the first to look at whether people who need surgery most are actually receiving it.

Researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina and Imperial College London studied rates of bariatric surgery in the US from 1999 to 2010.

Scientists at the University of East Anglia have shown that sequencing the DNA of crushed up creepy crawlies can accelerate the monitoring and cataloguing of biodiversity around the world.

Research published today in the journal Ecology Letters shows that a process known as 'metabarcoding' is much faster than and just as reliable as standard biodiversity datasets assembled with traditional labour-intensive methods.

This is a veritable mechanics of aggression on the nanoscale. Certain bacteria, including Staphylococcus aureus, have the ability to deploy tiny darts. This biological weapon kills the host cell by piercing the membrane. Researchers at EPFL have dismantled, piece by piece, this intriguing little machine and found an assembly of proteins that, in unfolding at the right time, takes the form of a spur. Published in Nature Chemical Biology, this discovery offers new insight into the fight against pathogens that are increasingly resistant to antibiotics.

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital scientists have discovered a way to target the immune system to shrink or eliminate tumors in mice without causing autoimmune problems. Researchers also found evidence that the same mechanism may operate in humans. The study was published today in the advance online edition of Nature.

The findings provide a new target for ongoing efforts to develop immunotherapies to harness the immune system to fight cancer and other diseases.

By borrowing a tool from bacteria that infect plants, scientists have developed a new approach to eliminate mutated DNA inside mitochondria—the energy factories within cells. Doctors might someday use the approach to treat a variety of mitochondrial diseases, including the degenerative eye disease Leber hereditary optic neuropathy (LHON). The research, published online today in Nature Medicine, was funded by the National Eye Institute (NEI), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

A team of researchers from Philadelphia and Norway has determined the structure of an enzyme complex that modifies one end of most human proteins and is made at elevated levels in numerous forms of cancer. A study in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, led by researchers at The Wistar Institute, depicts the structure and the means of action of a protein complex called NatA. Their findings, they believe, will allow them to create an inhibitor—a potential drug—that could knock out NatA in order to curb the growth of cancer cells.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune disorder in which immune cells attack the joints, causing inflammation, swelling, and erosion.

WASHINGTON — Prothrombin complex concentrates (PCCs) are faster and more effective than fresh frozen plasma at reversing hemorrhage caused by the anti-coagulant warfarin, despite plasma being the most commonly used therapy.

By differentiating monkey stem cells into liver cells and inducing successful infection, researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have shown for the first time that the hepatitis C virus (HCV) can replicate in monkeys, according to research published in the journal Gastroenterology. The new findings may lead to the first new animal model and provide new avenues for developing treatments and vaccines for this disease, which impacts more than three million people in the United States.

HONOLULU – Multiracial people may be misidentified more often as being white than black and may value being accurately identified more so than single-race individuals, according to research presented at APA's 121st Annual Convention.

Sacramento, CA (August 2, 2013) – In a new observational study published in the Journal of Food Science, researchers looked at the association of grape consumption, in the non-alcoholic forms most commonly consumed – fresh grapes, raisins and 100% grape juice – with the diet quality of a recent, nationally representative sample of U.S. children and adults. Their findings suggest that, among adults and children, consumption of grapes and grape products is associated with healthier dietary patterns and improved nutrient intakes.