Body

The bluetongue virus, which causes a serious disease that costs thecattle and sheep industries in the United States an estimated $125million annually, manages to survive the winter by reproducing in theinsect that transmits it, report veterinary scientists at theUniversity of California, Davis.

The findings solve a century-old mystery and are particularlysignificant as global climate change brings more moderate wintertemperatures around the world. The new study appears Sept. 12 in thejournal PLOS ONE.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Sept. 12, 2014 — Physicians envision a future in which genomic data from patients is heavily used to manage care — but experts have questioned the accuracy and reliability of these analyses.

Applying analyses designed by City College of New York biologist Mike Hickerson, a team of international researchers is challenging a commonly held view that explains how so many species of birds ended up in the Neotropics, an area rich in rain forest extending from Mexico to the southernmost tip of South America. It is home to the most bird species on Earth.

The current Ebola outbreak now requires a "rapid response at a massive global scale", according to experts at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

Writing an editorial in Science, Professor Peter Piot, co-discoverer of the virus, says that the epidemic in West Africa is the result of a "perfect storm" involving dysfunctional health services, low trust in governments and Western medicine, denials about the virus's existence, and unhygienic burial practices.

Whatever the origin and condition of extraction of type I collagen fibrils, in vitro as well as in vivo, the radii of their circular circular cross sections stay distributed in a range going from 50 to 100 nm for the most part of them. Jean Charvolin and Jean-Francois Sadoc from the solid state physique laboratory at the Paris-Sud University propose therefore that, once the growth of the fibrils has been triggered by external biological factors, their lateral size be limited by internal physical stresses generated during the growth.

When corn plants come under attack from a pathogen, they sometimes respond by killing their own cells near the site of the attack, committing "cell suicide" to thwart further damage from the attacker. This cell sacrifice can cause very small, often microscopic, spots or lesions on the plant.

But up until now it's been difficult to understand how the plant regulates this "spotty" defense mechanism because the response is so quick and localized.

Porcine neonatal coccidiosis is a serious parasitic infection of young piglets that severely damages the intestinal mucosa, leading to diarrhoea and reduced nutritional intake. As the infection reduces animal growth, and because secondary infections can result in increased mortality, the disease is responsible for substantial economic losses at affected pig farms.

Cloud computing involves displacing data storage and processing from the user's computer on to remote servers. It can provide users with more storage space and computing power that they can then access from anywhere in the world rather than having to connect to a single desktop or other computer with its finite resources.

Thoughts of the family tree may not be uppermost in the mind of a person suffering from a slipped disc, but those spinal discs provide a window into our evolutionary past. They are remnants of the first vertebrate skeleton, whose origins now appear to be older than had been assumed. Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, have found that, unexpectedly, this skeleton most likely evolved from a muscle.

Melbourne researchers have discovered that cartilage plays an active role in the destruction and remodelling of joints seen in rheumatoid arthritis, rather than being an 'innocent bystander' as previously thought.

Dr Tommy Liu, Professor Ian Wicks, Dr Kate Lawler, Dr Ben Croker and colleagues from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute made the discovery while investigating the role of the protein SOCS3 in controlling inflammation during rheumatoid arthritis. The study was published in the journal Arthritis and Rheumatology.

AUGUSTA, Ga. – A small protein named GILZ appears to protect against the bone loss that often accompanies arthritis and its treatment, researchers report.

Arthritis as well as aging prompt the body to make more fat than bone, and the researchers have previously shown GILZ can restore a more youthful, healthy mix. It also tamps down inflammation, a major factor in arthritis.

Different types of dendritic cells in human skin have assorted functions in the early and more advanced stages of psoriasis report researchers in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine. The scientists suggest that new strategies to regulate the composition of dendritic cells in psoriatic skin lesions might represent an approach for the future treatment of the disease.

Combined treatment with a drug that mimics the action of a gut hormone and basal insulin [1] is more effective at improving blood sugar control than other anti-diabetic treatments, with similar rates of hypoglycaemia (dangerously low blood sugar levels) and greater weight loss, a systematic review and meta-analysis published in The Lancet shows.

New research published in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes) shows that age (or age at diagnosis) and duration of diabetes disease are linked to the risk of death and marcovascular complications (those in larger blood vessels), whereas only diabetes duration is linked to the risk of microvascular complications (in smaller blood vessels such as those in the eyes).

University of British Columbia, in collaboration with BetaLogics Venture, a division of Janssen Research & Development, LLC, has published a study highlighting a protocol to convert stem cells into insulin-producing cells. The new procedure could be an important step in the fight against Type 1 diabetes.

The protocol can turn stem cells into reliable, insulin-producing cells in about six weeks, far quicker than the four months it took using previous methods.