Body

A new process for blowing up grains of rice produces a super-nutritious form of puffed rice, with three times more protein and a rich endowment of other nutrients that make it ideal for breakfast cereals, snack foods and nutrient bars for school lunch programs, scientists are reporting. Their study appears in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Large amounts of a substitute for one of the world's most treasured fragrance ingredients — a substance that also has potential anti-cancer activity — could be produced with a sustainable new technology, scientists are reporting. Published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the advance enables cultures of bacteria to produce a substitute for natural ambergris, which sells for hundreds of dollars an ounce.

Researchers at the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) have described a new selective target in muscle regeneration. This is the association of alpha-enolase protein and plasmin. The finding could be used to develop new treatments to regenerate muscular injuries or dystrophies. The study has been published in PLOS ONE journal.

New Rochelle, NY, December 19, 2012—Acute liver failure is usually fatal without a liver transplant, but the liver can regenerate and recover if given time to heal. A bioartificial liver machine that can provide temporary support while organ regeneration takes place has been scaled up for testing in a large animal model and is described in an article in BioResearch Open Access, a bimonthly peer-reviewed open access journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers.

Optical fibers –the backbone of the Internet–carry movies, messages, and music at the speed of light. But for all their efficiency, these ultrathin strands of pristine glass must connect to sluggish signal switches, routers, and buffers in order to transmit data. Hoping to do away with these information speed bumps, researchers have developed a new, dual-core optical fiber that can perform the same functions just by applying a miniscule amount of mechanical pressure.

Cholesterol plays a key role in regulating proteins involved in cell signaling and may be important to many other cell processes, an international team of researchers has found.

The results of their study are reported in the journal Nature Communications.

Scientists from Aalto University, Finland, have succeeded in organising virus particles, protein cages and nanoparticles into crystalline materials. These nanomaterials studied by the Finnish research group are important for applications in sensing, optics, electronics and drug delivery.

Layer structures, or superlattices, of crystalline nanoparticles have been extensively studied in recent years. The research develops hierarchically structured nanomaterials with tuneable optical, magnetic, electronic and catalytic properties.

Community solidarity and support have remarkable benefits for people coping with traumatic mass shootings, according to an American-Finnish research study recently published by the University of Turku.

James Hawdon and John Ryan, both professors of sociology at Virginia Tech, with Finnish researchers Atte Oksanen and Pekka Räsänen, investigated the responses of four communities that suffered from similar tragedies in the United States and Finland.

After a cautious and rigorous analysis of national malpractice claims, Johns Hopkins patient safety researchers estimate that a surgeon in the United States leaves a foreign object such as a sponge or a towel inside a patient's body after an operation 39 times a week, performs the wrong procedure on a patient 20 times a week and operates on the wrong body site 20 times a week.

Genomic technology has revolutionized gene discovery and disease understanding in autism, according to an article published in the December 20 issue of the journal Neuron.

The paper highlights the impact of a genomic technology called high-throughput sequencing (HTS) in discovering numerous new genes that are associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Why would our immune system turn against our own cells? This is the question that the combined Inserm/CNRS/ Pierre and Marie Curie University/Association Institut de Myologie have strived to answer in their "Therapies for diseases of striated muscle", concentrating in particular on the auto-immune disease known as myasthenia gravis.

Apart from the common European cockchafer (Melolontha melolontha), the European forest cockchafer (Melolontha hippocastani) is the most common species of the Melolontha genus. These insects can damage huge areas of broadleaf trees and conifers in woodlands and on heaths. Cockchafers house microbes in their guts that help them to digest their woody food, such as lignocelluloses and xylans.

Researchers at the RUB and from the MPI Dortmund have uncovered the mechanism thatswitches off the cell transport regulating proteins. They were able to resolve in detail how the central switch protein Rab is down-regulated with two "protein fingers" by its interaction partners. The structural and dynamic data is reported by the researchers led by Prof. Dr. Klaus Gerwert (Chair of Biophysics, RUB) and Prof. Dr. Roger S. Goody (Max Planck Institute for Molecular Physiology, Dortmund, Germany) in the Online Early Edition of the journal PNAS.

Scientists found that badgers which strayed away from the family burrow in favour of sleeping in outlying dens were more likely to carry TB.

The 12-month study of 40 wild badgers was funded by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and could have implications for the management of bovine TB in parts of the UK. The behaviour of individual animals is thought to be a key factor in how the disease is spread among animals and livestock. The new findings could help to understand and develop measures to manage TB in badgers.

Scientists at The University of Manchester have identified a protein that appears to hold the key to creating more effective drug treatments for melanoma, one of the deadliest cancers.

Researchers funded by Cancer Research UK have been looking at why new drugs called "MEK inhibitors", which are currently being tested in clinical trials, aren't as effective at killing cancer cells as they should be.