Body

The humble tadpole could provide the key to developing effective anti-skin cancer drugs, thanks to a groundbreaking discovery by researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA).

The scientists have identified a compound which, when introduced into Xenopus Laevis tadpoles, blocks the movement of the pigment cells that give the tadpoles their distinctive markings and which develop into the familiar greenish-brown of the adult frog.

January 29, 2009 – (BRONX, NY) – Men who develop prostate cancer face an increased risk of having an aggressive tumor if they carry a so-called breast cancer gene mutation, scientists from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University report in today's issue of Clinical Cancer Research. The findings could help to guide prostate-cancer patients and their physicians in choosing treatment options.

Scientists from Queen Mary, University of London have discovered a new part of the mechanism which allows our bodyclocks to reset themselves on a molecular level.

Circadian clocks regulate the daily fluctuations of many physiological and behavioural aspects in life, and are synchronised with our surrounding environment via light or temperature cycles. Natural changes in the length of the day mean that an animal's circadian clock often has to reset itself on a molecular level, to avoid getting out of sync with the changing calendar.

Zurich/New York, January 29, 2009. An ETH Zurich researcher has developed a computational method for predicting the structure of materials. He used it to solve the structure of a newly synthesized form of pure boron that displays some unusual physical properties and brings a surprise: it is partially ionic.

The study, involving researchers from Duke University Medical Center and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is one of the largest randomized trials to date to look at the link between the two conditions.

DALLAS – Jan. 29, 2009 – Mice whose fat cells were allowed to grow larger than fat cells in normal mice developed "healthy" obesity when fed a high-fat diet, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center found in a new study.

The fat but healthy mice lacked a protein called collagen VI, which normally surrounds fat cells and limits how large they can grow, like a cage around a water balloon. The findings appear online and in a future edition of Molecular and Cellular Biology.

Exercise is commonly used to improve physical function, decrease symptoms and minimize disability caused by chronic low back or neck pain. Numerous randomized trials and clinical practice guidelines have supported this practice, and studies suggest that individually tailored, supervised exercise programs are associated with the best outcomes.

Two new studies found that exercise may be a factor in recovering from a total knee replacement (total knee arthroplasty or TKA) and knee osteoarthritis (OA). One study involving a progressive quadriceps strengthening program after total knee replacement found that it enhanced clinical improvement almost to the level of healthy older adults. The other study, the first to examine the relationship between four components of physical activity and the incidence of knee OA in older adults, found that certain types of activities were linked to an increased risk of the disease.

Yale School of Medicine researchers have identified proteins associated with early onset neonatal sepsis (EONS), a stealthy bacterial infection linked to premature birth, illness and death. Using protein analysis, the researchers have found the biomarkers that can provide key information on how EONS develops.

In about 10% of cases, sudden cardiac death (SCD) in young people is due to a cardiac gene defect. This was the conclusion drawn by Silke Kauferstein of the Department of Forensic Medicine of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt, and her coauthors in the current Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2009; 106(4): 41-7).

Athens, Ga. – Southerners may best know sorghum as sweet, biscuit-topping syrup. But the small grain's uses range from a dependable, drought-tolerant food crop to biofuel source, says a University of Georgia researcher who led a team that recently sequenced the plant's genome.

"Sorghum's importance is enormous," said Andrew Paterson, a distinguished research professor and director of the Plant Genome Mapping Laboratory, a joint unit of the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Popular film and television shows have shaped the way Americans view American history – especially the frontier encounters between settlers and Native Americans. Examining the ways Native Americans are portrayed negatively in Westerns and other film genres, Joanna Hearne, assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri, describes recently produced animated films by Native directors that are countering media misrepresentations and helping promote Native-American stories and languages.

UV light-enhanced tooth bleaching is not only a con, but is dangerous to your eyes and skin, says a Royal Society of Chemistry journal.

The light treatment gives absolutely no benefit over bleaching without UV, and damages skin and eyes up to four times as much as sunbathing, reports a study in Photochemical & Photobiological Sciences.

Those looking to match Tom Cruise's glittering pearly-whites would be better off ignoring claims of better bleaching with UV light treatment.

Rad51 takes a leading role in the action. Always on call in the cell, molecules of the protein assemble into a long filament along a damaged or broken segment of DNA, where they help stretch out the coiled strands and align them with corresponding segments on the cell's second copy of the chromosome, which serves as a template for reconstruction. Because this protein is regulated by a gene linked to increased risk of breast cancer, BRCA2, it is also thought to play a role in suppression of that disease.

DAVIS--Researchers at the University of California, Davis have discovered that a prototype drug reduces heart enlargement, one of the most common causes of heart failure.

Heart failure, which occurs when the heart can't pump enough blood throughout the body, affects 5 million people in the United States. The condition contributes to 300,000 deaths each year.