Body

Doctors in hospitals and emergency rooms around the world should be prepared to recognize Ebola virus infection and isolate patients if necessary, infectious disease specialists recommend. However, concerns that Ebola will spread beyond West Africa to Europe and North America are unfounded because of the way Ebola is transmitted and because of highly developed hospital infection control practices, they say.

A description of the virus, the current outbreak and recommendations for management of infected patients appear today in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

It could be a fun party trick – put your cell phone down on a table and watch it fade into the woodwork – or part of a lifesaving technology used by industry or the military.

Researchers have developed a technology that allows a material to automatically read its environment and adapt to mimic its surroundings. The technology is described in a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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.

The University of Waterloo has unveiled a new satellite image of Antarctica, and the imagery will help scientists all over the world gain new insight into the effects of climate change.

Thanks to a partnership between the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. (MDA), the prime contractor for the RADARSAT-2 program, and the Canadian Cryospheric Information Network (CCIN) at UWaterloo, the mosaic is free and fully accessible to the academic world and the public.

U.S. hospitalizations and deaths from heart disease and stroke dropped significantly in the last decade, according to new research in the American Heart Association journal Circulation.

The cholesterol-lowering drug fenofibrate cuts cardiovascular disease risks by 30 per cent in women with type-2 diabetes, a new University of Sydney study reveals.

"The finding is good news for women," says the study's chairman, University of Sydney Professor, Tony Keech.

"The study shows that fenofibrate reduced the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, or having a stroke or other adverse cardiovascular event by 30 per cent in women and 13 per cent in men."

A substantial number of older patients with limited life expectancy continue to receive routine screenings for prostate, breast, cervical and colorectal cancer although the procedures are unlikely to benefit them.

The authors are Trevor J. Royce, M.D., M.S., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and colleagues.

Cold Spring Harbor, NY – Men and women differ in plenty of obvious ways, and scientists have long known that genetic differences buried deep within our DNA underlie these distinctions. In the past, most research has focused on understanding how the genes that encode proteins act as sex determinants. But Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) scientists have found that a subset of very small genes encoding short RNA molecules, called microRNAs (miRNAs), also play a key role in differentiating male and female tissues in the fruit fly.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Fish species native to a major Arizona watershed may lose access to important segments of their habitat by 2050 as surface water flow is reduced by the effects of climate warming, new research suggests.

Most of these fish species, found in the Verde River Basin, are already threatened or endangered. Their survival relies on easy access to various resources throughout the river and its tributary streams. The species include the speckled dace (Rhinichthys osculus), roundtail chub (Gila robusta) and Sonora sucker (Catostomus insignis).

DALLAS – August 18, 2014 – Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have found a new way that internal body clocks are regulated by a type of molecule known as long non-coding RNA.

The internal body clocks, called circadian clocks, regulate the daily "rhythms" of many bodily functions, from waking and sleeping to body temperature and hunger. They are largely "tuned" to a 24-hour cycle that is influenced by external cues such as light and temperature.

MISSOULA – New research by University of Montana doctoral student Jared Oyler provides improved computer models for estimating temperature across mountainous landscapes.

The work was published Aug. 12 in the International Journal of Climatology in an article titled "Creating a topoclimatic daily air temperature dataset for the conterminous United States using homogenized station data and remotely sensed land skin temperature."

PULLMAN, Wash.—Scientists at Washington State University have identified a crucial step in DNA repair that could lead to targeted gene therapy for hereditary diseases such as "children of the moon" and a common form of colon cancer.

Such disorders are caused by faulty DNA repair systems that increase the risk for cancer and other conditions.

The findings are published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study was funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

HOUSTON – (Aug. 18, 2014) – Rice University scientists have won a race to find the crystal structure of the first virus known to infect the most abundant animal on Earth.

The Rice labs of structural biologist Yizhi Jane Tao and geneticist Weiwei Zhong, with help from researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and Washington University, analyzed the Orsay virus that naturally infects a certain type of nematode, the worms that make up 80 percent of the living animal population.

In case of an inflammation the body releases substances that increase the immune defense. During chronic inflammation, this immune response gets out of control and can induce organ damage. A research group from the Department of Biomedicine at the University and the University Children's Hospital of Basel now discovered that innate lymphoid cells become activated and induce specific T and B cell responses during inflammation. These lymphoid cells are thus an important target for the treatment of infection and chronic inflammation.

Hugely popular non-steroidal anti-inflammation drugs like aspirin, naproxen (marketed as Aleve) and ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin) all work by inhibiting or killing an enzyme called cyclooxygenase – a key catalyst in production of hormone-like lipid compounds called prostaglandins that are linked to a variety of ailments, from headaches and arthritis to menstrual cramps and wound sepsis.