Body

Consumers could soon see packages of pasta labeled "good source of dietary fiber" and "may reduce the risk of heart disease" thanks to the development of a new genre of pasta made with barley—a grain famous for giving beer its characteristic strength and flavor. The report appears in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Researchers report discovery of a completely new technology for more efficiently separating gold, silver, copper, and other valuable materials from rock and ore. Their report on the process, which uses nanoparticles to latch onto those materials and attach them to air bubbles in a flotation machine, appears in the ACS journal Langmuir.

José Carlos Mendes Santos (a.k.a. Louro) is a handyman in rural northeastern Bahia, Brazil - one of the areas of the world with the highest biodiversity. Two years ago, he found a tiny, inch-high plant with white-and-pink flowers in the backyards of the off-the-grid house of amateur botanist and local plant collector Alex Popovkin. The little plant was brought home to be grown on a window sill for closer observation. In parallel, work on its identification began.

Precise diagnosis of disease and developmental syndromes often depends on understanding the genetics underlying them. Most cases of early onset hearing loss are genetic in origin but there are many different forms. Heretofore, it has been difficult to identify the gene responsible for the hearing loss of each affected child, because the critical mutations differ among countries and populations. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Genome Biology has identified six critical mutations in Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arab families.

The observation that milkmaids are frequently infected with cowpox but rarely catch smallpox is generally credited to the English doctor Edward Jenner. Although Jenner might not have been the first person to notice the correlation, he was the first to make use of it: in 1796 he "vaccinated" children with material from cowpox blisters and showed that they became immune to smallpox. Jenner's work led directly to the development of a smallpox vaccine and less than 200 years later the disease was eradicated.

Botanical taxonomy, which extends to include the formal scientific naming of all plants, algae and fungi has gone through a landmark change in the procedure scientists need to follow when they describe new species. Details of the forthcoming changes to the newly-named 'International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi and plants' are laid out by Dr Sandra Knapp and colleagues in an article published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology.

While electronic cigarettes may be a long-term alternative to the real thing for some smokers, Penn State College of Medicine researchers suggest medical providers should continue to encourage more traditional smoking cessation methods.

Samson Muchina Kinyanjui and colleagues from the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Kilifi, Kenya discuss in this week's PLoS Medicine how they modified the programme's informed consent processes by taking into account local social, cultural, and economic contexts in the design and administration of consent forms. They stress that institutional wide support is important in ensuring consistency in the consenting process for all studies within a given institution.

Making use of a new "super resolution" microscope that provides sharp images at extremely small scales, scientists have achieved unprecedented views of the immune system in action. The new tool, a stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscope, shows how granules from natural killer cells pass through openings in dynamic cell structures to destroy their targets: tumor cells and cells infected by viruses. Deeper understanding of these biological events may allow scientists to devise more effective treatments for inherited diseases that impair the immune system.

A new study reveals that the way fruit bats use biosonar to 'see' their surroundings is significantly more advanced than first thought. The study, published September 13 in the online, open access journal PLoS Biology, examines Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus), which use echolocation to orient inside their caves and to find fruit hidden in the branches of trees. Their high-frequency clicks form a sonar beam that spreads across a fan-shaped area, and the returning echoes allow them to locate and identify objects in that region.

"Form follows function!" was the credo of early 20th century architects making design choices based on the intended use of the structure. Cell biologists may be turning that on its head. New research* by a team working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) reinforces the idea that stem cells can be induced to develop into specific types of cells solely by controlling their shape. The results may be important to the design of materials to induce the regeneration of lost or damaged tissues in the body.

CHICAGO – During the past two decades there has been a significant increase in the percentage of patients who have a high number of lymph nodes evaluated during colon cancer operations, but this improvement is not associated with an increase in the overall proportion of colon cancers that are node positive, according to a study in the September 14 issue of JAMA.

If you don't smoke, aren't overweight, get regular physical activity and eat vegetables, you can significantly reduce your risk for heart failure, according to research reported in Circulation: Heart Failure, an American Heart Association journal.

In a new study, people who had one healthy lifestyle behavior decreased their heart failure risk, and each additional healthy behavior further decreased their risk.

Heart failure affects about 5.7 million Americans. At age 40, a person's lifetime risk of developing heart failure is one in five.

Researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine have found that thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH), a hormone produced in the anterior pituitary gland that regulates endocrine function in the thyroid gland, can promote bone growth independent of its usual thyroid functions. The research suggests that TSH, or drugs that mimic its affect on bone, may be key to possible future treatments for osteoporosis and other conditions involving bone loss, such as cancer. The findings were published online this week in the National Academy of Sciences journal PNAS.

A U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) soil scientist in Colorado is helping farmers grow crops with less nitrogen-based fertilizer.

The fertilizers are a major reason why agriculture is a significant source of both greenhouse gas emissions and pollution in estuaries like the Gulf of Mexico and the Chesapeake Bay. If growers apply too little fertilizer, it reduces crop yields. But if they apply too much, the excess can be released into the atmosphere as nitrous oxide or leach into waterways as nitrate.