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A team of scientists from Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute and IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center have developed a prototype DNA reader that could make whole genome profiling an everyday practice in medicine.

SAN FRANCISCO (November 24, 2014) --A team of scientists, including researchers from the California Academy of Sciences, has reconstructed a detailed "tree of life" for turtles. The specifics of how turtles are related--to one another, to other reptiles, and even to dinosaurs--have been hotly debated for decades. Next generation sequencing technologies in Academy labs have generated unprecedented amounts of genetic information for a thrilling new look at turtles' evolutionary history.

Members of the public in sub-Saharan Africa who are carriers of the hereditary disease sickle cell disease must be educated aggressively through public health campaigns to raise awareness of the risks of parenting offspring with the disease if their partner is also a carrier, according to research published in the International Journal of Medical Engineering and Informatics.

Scientists from the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have learned new details about how an important tumor-suppressing protein, called p53, binds to the human genome. As with many things in life, they found that context makes a big difference.

The researchers mapped the places where p53 binds to the genome in a human cancer cell line. They compared this map to a previously obtained map of p53 binding sites in a normal human cell line. These binding patterns indicate how the protein mobilizes a network of genes that quell tumor growth.

Researchers at UC San Francisco have identified patterns of genetic activity that can be used to diagnose endometriosis and its severity, a finding that may offer millions of women an alternative to surgery through a simple noninvasive procedure.

The study is online in the journal Endocrinology.

"This promising molecular diagnostic approach would not have been possible without advances in genomics and bioinformatics," said senior author Linda Giudice, MD, PhD, distinguished professor and chair of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at UCSF.

People who see their group as more homogenous - for instance, the more one thinks Americans are similar to each other - are less likely to be influenced by external terrorist threat alerts, according to research from NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

WOODS HOLE, Mass.--David Johnson was standing in a salt marsh on the northern Massachusetts coast when he saw a fiddler crab, Uca pugnax, nearly 50 miles north of its supposed natural range. The migration north of this charismatic crab with the big, waving claw may be yet another sign of climate change. Johnson, then a scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) Ecosystems Center, has published his observations in the Journal of Crustacean Biology.

The sight of a tiny hummingbird hovering in front of a flower and then darting to another with lightning speed amazes and delights. But it also leaves watchers with a persistent question: How do they do it?

Now, the most detailed, three-dimensional aerodynamic simulation of hummingbird flight conducted to date has definitively demonstrated that the hummingbird achieves its nimble aerobatic abilities through a unique set of aerodynamic forces that are more closely aligned to those found in flying insects than to other birds.

ATLANTA--Promoting healthy gut microbiota, the bacteria that live in the intestine, can help treat or prevent metabolic syndrome, a combination of risk factors that increases a person's risk for heart disease, diabetes and stroke, according to researchers at Georgia State University and Cornell University. Their findings are published in the journal Gastroenterology.

The study, a follow-up to the research team's previous paper in Science, uses an improved technical approach, making the results more significant.

Being in a position of power can fundamentally change the way you speak, altering basic acoustic properties of the voice, and other people are able to pick up on these vocal cues to know who is really in charge, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

We tend to focus on our words when we want to come across as powerful to others, but these findings suggest that basic acoustic cues also play an important role:

The two U.S. FDA approved oligonucleotide-based drugs on the market both have a modified chemical backbone made of phosphorothioates. The therapeutic advantages of the phosphorothioate group and the new types of gene expression-regulation oligonucleotide drugs that it is enabling are detailed in a Review article in Nucleic Acid Therapeutics.

CINCINNATI--Researchers at the University of Cincinnati (UC) have found that a gene abundant in the kidneys may actually play a role in the regulation of blood pressure and hypertension in experimental male mouse models.

The study led by Manoocher Soleimani, MD, James F. Heady Professor of Medicine and associate chair of research in the Department of Internal Medicine at UC, was presented during the annual meeting of the American Society of Nephrology, held Friday, Nov. 15, 2014, in Philadelphia.

Women are more sensitive to the effects of cocaine and more susceptible to cocaine abuse than men. Cocaine's ability to disrupt a woman's estrus cycle may explain the sex differences in cocaine addiction, and new evidence that caffeine may be neuroprotective and able to block cocaine's direct effects on the estrus cycle reveals novel treatment possibilities, according to an article published in Journal of Caffeine Research: The International Multidisciplinary Journal of Caffeine Science.

Changes to the structure of the protein histone H3.3 may play a key role in silencing genes that regulate cancer cell growth, according to a study led by researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published online this month in the journal Nature Communications. According to the authors, this is the first study to identify this protein as a key regulator in cellular senescence, a process in which cells stop multiplying.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Doubling or even nearly tripling saturated fat in the diet does not drive up total levels of saturated fat in the blood, according to a controlled diet study.

However, increasing levels of carbohydrates in the diet during the study promoted a steady increase in the blood of a fatty acid linked to an elevated risk for diabetes and heart disease.