Body

Babies' growth in the womb and their size at birth, especially their length, are strikingly similar the world over – when babies are born to healthy, well-educated and well-nourished mothers.

That's the finding of a landmark international study, INTERGROWTH-21st, led by Oxford University researchers, which involved almost 60,000 pregnancies in eight defined urban areas in Brazil, China, India, Italy, Kenya, Oman, the UK and USA.

Researchers from DTU Systems Biology have mapped 500 previously unknown microorganisms in human intestinal flora as well as 800 also unknown bacterial viruses (also called bacteriophages) which attack intestinal bacteria.

To map the microorganisms, the researchers have developed a new principle for analysing DNA sequence data, which they have named the co-abundance principle. A principle which basically assumes that different pieces of DNA from the same organism will occur in the same amount in a sample, and that this amount will vary over a series of samples.

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Located deep in the human gut, the small intestine is not easy to examine. X-rays, MRIs and ultrasound images provide snapshots but each suffers limitations.Help is on the way.

University at Buffalo researchers are developing a new imaging technique involving nanoparticles suspended in liquid to form "nanojuice" that patients would drink. Upon reaching the small intestine, doctors would strike the nanoparticles with a harmless laser light, providing an unparalleled, non-invasive, real-time view of the organ.

Biologists at UC San Diego have solved a long-standing mystery concerning the way plants reduce the numbers of their breathing pores in response to rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

In a paper published in this week's early online edition of Nature, they report the discovery of a new genetic pathway in plants, made up of four genes from three different gene families that control the density of breathing pores—or "stomata"—in plant leaves in response to elevated CO2 levels.

RENO – A team of scientists led by Michael Sigl and Joe McConnell of Nevada's Desert Research Institute (DRI) has completed the most accurate and precise reconstruction to date of historic volcanic sulfate emissions in the Southern Hemisphere.

The new record, described in a manuscript published today in the online edition of Nature Climate Change, is derived from a large number of individual ice cores collected at various locations across Antarctica and is the first annually resolved record extending through the Common Era (the last 2,000 years of human history).

Created at Monash University, the world's first toolkit is designed for GPs to use with women from the age of 40. Thought to be the first of its kind, researchers say the toolkit has the potential to help manage menopausal conditions for women globally.

The Practitioner Toolkit for Managing the Menopause, which includes a diagnostic tool, as well as a compendium of approved hormone therapies, is published today in the journal, Climacteric.

Barcelona, 4 July 2014: An association between high blood cholesterol and breast cancer has been found in a study of more than 1 million patients over a 14 year time period in the UK. The research will be presented today at Frontiers in CardioVascular Biology (FCVB) 2014 in Barcelona, Spain. The meeting is organised by the Council on Basic Cardiovascular Science of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) in collaboration with 13 European cardiovascular science societies.

Many modern crops have high productivity, but have lost their ability to produce certain defence chemicals, making them vulnerable to attack by insects and pathogens. Swiss scientists are exploring ways to help protect 21st century maize by re-arming it with its ancestral chemical weapons.

Scientists have shown that instead of counting calories for weight loss, we would do better to boost the protein content of our diet.

Nutritional values of foods are typically given in kilojoules or kilocalories, standard units of energy. However, new research on apes and monkeys suggests that this is too simplistic as different macronutrients – carbohydrates, fats and proteins- interact to regulate appetite and energy intake. In these animals, overall energy intake seems to be less important than achieving the correct nutritional balance.

For hibernating mammals, the pre-winter months are a race against time to accumulate enough energy reserves to last until spring. Offspring born late in the year have much less time to achieve this. Austrian scientists have discovered that power-napping can help late-born dormice overcome these unfavourable odds.

A breakthrough discovery into how living cells process and respond to chemical information could help advance the development of treatments for a large number of cancers and other cellular disorders that have been resistant to therapy. An international collaboration of researchers, led by scientists with the U.S.

When Dr. Carlesso's team blocked the activity of one of the molecules in this biochemical cascade, the myeloproliferative disorder in the mice was reversed. In addition, elevated levels of the blocked molecule were found in samples from human patients with myeloproliferative disease. These findings suggest that developing drugs that target this inflammatory reaction at different key points could be a promising strategy to limit the development of myeloproliferative disease in humans.

Physicists of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Graduate School of Excellence "Materials Science in Mainz" (MAINZ) have been able with the aid of computer simulations to confirm and explain a mechanism by which two knots on a DNA strand can interchange their positions. For this, one of the knots grows in size while the other diffuses along the contour of the former.

Edmonton, July 3, 2014 – A research team at the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Alberta have discovered a new way by which metabolism is linked to the regulation of DNA, the basis of our genetic code. The findings may have important implications for the understanding of many common diseases, including cancer.

A third of the global population is infected with the bacterial pathogen, a mycobacterium, that causes tuberculosis (TB). Most carriers control the infection and are asymptomatic, but severe forms of the disease (more common in children and immune-compromised adults, and often caused by particularly aggressive—or hypervirulent—mycobacterial strains) kill over a million people every year. An article published on July 3rd in PLOS Pathogens now identifies a factor made by the host that exacerbates lung damage in severe TB.