Body

LA JOLLA--Researchers at the Salk Institute have healed injured hearts of living mice by reactivating long dormant molecular machinery found in the animals' cells, a finding that could help pave the way to new therapies for heart disorders in humans.

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) give rise to all blood and immune cells throughout the life of vertebrate organisms, from zebrafish to humans. But details of their genesis remain elusive, hindering efforts to develop induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) replacements that might address a host of blood disorders.

Brazil´s globally significant ecosystems could be exposed to mining and dams if proposals currently being debated by the Brazilian Congress go ahead, according to researchers publishing in the journal Science this week.

The new report by a group of Brazilian and British researchers comes in the wake of Brazil´s recent presidential elections. It warns that new legislation could pose a serious threat to protected areas, weakening Brazil's international status as an environmental leader.

To paraphrase a famous passage from Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: microbes, microbes everywhere, though most we do not know. This is changing, though.

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y., Nov. 6, 2014 - The national preterm birth rate fell to 11.4 percent in 2013 - the lowest in 17 years -- meeting the federal Healthy People 2020 goal seven years early. Despite this progress, the U.S. still received a "C" on the 7th annual March of Dimes Premature Birth Report Card because it fell short of the more-challenging 9.6 percent target set by the March of Dimes, the group said today.

Baltimore, MD--As animals age, their immune systems gradually deteriorate, a process called immunosenescence. It is associated with systemic inflammation and chronic inflammatory disorders, as well as with many cancers. The causes underlying this age-associated inflammation, and how it leads to diseases, are poorly understood. New work in Carnegie's Yixian Zheng's lab sheds light on one protein's involvement in suppressing immune responses in aging fruit flies. It is published in Cell.

A ground-breaking new study on DNA recovered from a fossil of one of the earliest known Europeans - a man who lived 36,000 years ago in Kostenki, western Russia - has shown that the earliest European humans' genetic ancestry survived the Last Glacial Maximum: the peak point of the last ice age.

Our genetic makeup influences whether we are fat or thin by shaping which types of microbes thrive in our body, according to a study by researchers at King's College London and Cornell University.

By studying pairs of twins at King's Department of Twin Research, researchers identified a specific, little known bacterial family that is highly heritable and more common in individuals with low body weight. This microbe also protected against weight gain when transplanted into mice.

(WINSTON-SALEM, NC, Nov. 7, 2014) - In their nightly forays, bats hunting for insects compete with as many as one million hungry roost-mates. A study published today in Science shows that Mexican free-tailed bats jam the sonar of competitors to gain advantage in aerial foraging contests.

New York, NY (November 6, 2014) - A team of scientists led by The New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute successfully created a human stem cell disease model of Parkinson's disease in a dish.

New York, NY (November 6, 2014) - A team led by New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute scientists conducted a study comparing induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells and embryonic stem cells created using somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). The scientists found that the cells derived from these two methods resulted in cells with highly similar gene expression and DNA methylation patterns.

DNA recovered from a 36,000 year old fossil skeleton found in Russia shows early divergence of Eurasians once they had left Africa, and the deep shared ancestry of Europeans.

The new study, carried out by an international team of researchers, also reveals when Neanderthals and early modern humans out of Africa interbred - around 54,000 years ago, before the modern human population began to differentiate.

Mice and humans share a lot more than immediately meets the eye, and their commonalities include their telomeres, protective ends on chromosomes. But in recent years, the role of one particular protein at telomeres has puzzled scientists.

Eight percent of your genome derives from retroviruses that inserted themselves into human sex cells millions of years ago. Right now the koala retrovirus (KoRV) is invading koala genomes, a process that can help us understand our own viral lineage and make decisions about managing this vulnerable species.

In a recent study scientists from the University of Illinois discovered that 39 different KoRVs in a koala's genome were all endogenous, which means passed down to the koala from one parent or the other; one of the KoRVs was found in both parents.

The "food" sources that support Florida red tides are more diverse and complex than previously realized, according to five years' worth of research on red tide and nutrients published recently as an entire special edition of the scientific journal Harmful Algae.

The multi-partner project was funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's ECOHAB program* (described below) and included 14 research papers from seven institutions.