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HOUSTON -- ( Aug. 19, 2014 ) -- Scientists at the Houston Methodist Research Institute have figured out how to pick up and transfer single cells using a pipette -- a common laboratory tool that's been tweaked slightly. They describe this engineering feat and preliminary test results in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

BATON ROUGE – LSU Sociology Professor Samuel Stroope is the lead author of a new study, "Neighborhood Ethnic Composition and Problem Drinking among Older Mexican American Men," that will appear in the Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health.

Students who have books and computers at home, who take extramural cultural classes, and whose parents give advice and take part in school activities are most likely to enroll for a four-year college degree. Also, more American black students – irrespective of their class or background – will set off on this education path than their white counterparts. So says David Merolla of Wayne State University and Omari Jackson of Colby-Sawyer College in the US, in Springer's journal Race and Social Problems.

This video shows the delivery of a viable merozoite via optical tweezers to a healthy erythrocyte and subsequent invasion.

(Photo Credit: Biophysical Journal, Crick et al.)

This video shows local erythrocyte membrane deformations induced by tweezer-manipulation of post-viable merozoite contact area.

(Photo Credit: Biophysical Journal, Crick et al.)

Edmonton—The invention of fibre optics revolutionized the way we share information, allowing us to transmit data at volumes and speeds we'd only previously dreamed of.

Now, electrical engineering researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada are breaking another barrier, designing nano-optical cables small enough to replace the copper wiring on computer chips.

This could result in radical increases in computing speeds and reduced energy use by electronic devices.

The ancestors of today's crocodiles colonised the seas during warm phases and became extinct during cold phases, according to a new Anglo-French study which establishes a link between marine crocodilian diversity and the evolution of sea temperature over a period of more than 140 million years.

The research, led by Dr Jeremy Martin from the Université de Lyon, France and formerly from the University of Bristol, UK is published this week in Nature Communications.

Researchers from the Institute of General Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences and MIPT have made an important step towards creating medical nanorobots. They discovered a way of enabling nano- and microparticles to produce logical calculations using a variety of biochemical reactions.

Plants are superior to humans and animals in a number of ways. They have an impressive ability to regenerate, which enables them to regrow entire organs. After being struck by lightning, for example, a tree can grow back its entire crown. But there is one major downside to life as a plant: They are quite literally rooted to the habitats in which they live and therefore completely at the mercy of the elements. In response to this dilemma, plants have developed mechanisms that enable them to rapidly adapt their growth and development to changes.

MAYWOOD, Ill -- A leukemia drug called dasatinib shows promise for treating skin, breast and several other cancers, according to researchers at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine.

Dasatinib fights leukemia by checking the uncontrolled growth of cancer cells. But when used against other cancer cells, researchers found, the drug employs a different strategy: It causes the cells to clump together, thus preventing them from migrating. Without the ability to migrate, cancer cells cannot metastasize (spread to other parts of the body).

This news release is available in French.

This news release is available in German.

The bacterium Clostridium difficile causes antibiotic-related diarrhoea and is a growing problem in the hospital environment and elsewhere in the community. Understanding how the microbe colonises the human gut when other "healthy" microbes have been destroyed during a course of antibiotics might lead to new ways to control infection. An important clue was reported recently in an open access article published in the journal Acta Crystallographica Section D Biological Crystallography. [Bradshaw et al. (2014). Acta Cryst.

(PHILADELPHIA) – The common thought in the medical community is that the randomized, controlled trial is the gold standard in medical research. Findings from these studies are thought to be most reliable and are often endorsed by guideline-making organizations and brought into medical practice. But, Penn Medicine researchers caution that the rapid adoption of one or two studies as the basis for clinical practice, even if they are randomized controlled trials, can lead to misinformation and potential harm.

SAN ANTONIO (Aug. 14, 2014) — Cardiovascular disease is the greatest killer of humans the world over, presenting huge financial and quality-of-life issues. It is well known that the heart becomes less efficient with age in all mammals studied to date, even in the absence of overt cardiac disease. However, scientists still don't have a good understanding of how to prevent these functional declines that ultimately may lead to debilitating cardiovascular disease.

WASHINGTON, DC -- There is no guarantee that a successful pilot program introducing a health innovation can be expanded successfully to the national, regional, state or even metropolitan level because scaling up is typically complex and difficult.