Body

ROSEMENT, Ill.─As participation in high-demand sports such as basketball and soccer has increased over the past decade, so has the number of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries in teens and young adults.

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – May 8, 2014 – An old idea of retreating lung tumors with radiation is new again, especially with the technological advances seen in radiation oncology over the last decade.

Some Ecuadorian tribes were famous for making mummified shrunken heads from the remains of their conquered foes. Field work in the cloud forests of Ecuador by Professor Scott Shaw, University of Wyoming, Laramie, and colleagues, has resulted in the discovery of 24 new species of Aleiodes wasps that mummify caterpillars. The research by Eduardo Shimbori, Universidade Federal de São Carlos, Brazil, and Scott Shaw, was recently published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

A naturally occurring fungus might help curb the spread of an invasive tree species that is threatening forests in most of the United States, according to researchers.

Researchers tested the fungus -- Verticillium nonalfalfae -- by injecting it into tree-of-heaven, or Ailanthus, plots, according to Matthew Kasson, who recently received his doctorate in plant pathology and environmental microbiology from Penn State. The treatment completely eradicated the tree-of-heaven plants in those forests.

A new paper by a team of researchers led by Zachary T. Schafer, Coleman Assistant Professor of Cancer Biology in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame, offers important new insights into the role carcinoma-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) play in tumor biology. A number of recent studies have revealed CAFs to be a major contributor to tumor progression through a variety of mechanisms.

Nearly one-third of songbird species across North America are experiencing long-term declines. Scientists have spent years researching potential causes for these population declines, focusing on the birds when they have just hatched as well as when they are adults. Now, researchers from the University of Missouri and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have found that songbirds are vulnerable to environmental dangers particularly when they are juveniles, shortly after they have left their parents' nests.

Viruses use human cells in order to multiply and spread. This process involves interactions with cellular host factors as well as virus-virus interactions. For example interactions among viral proteins are essential for the assembly of newly produced infectious virions.

Interaction network explains viral mechanisms and opens up possibilities for new treatments

A newly discovered grasshopper by University of Central Florida scientists now bears the name of Grammy-award winning singer and activist Ana Lila Downs Sanchez.

The scientists named the new species discovered on the side of a mountain road near Oaxaca, Mexico, after the Mexican-American singer as a nod to her efforts to preserve indigenous culture and penchant for wearing colorful, local costumes as part of her performances.

Researchers at the Max F. Perutz Laboratories (MFPL) of the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna made a breakthrough for the Platynereis model system, as they describe the first method for generating specific and inheritable mutations in the species. The method, in combination with other tools, now places this marine bristle worm in an excellent position to advance research at the frontiers of neurobiology, chronobiology, evolutionary developmental biology and marine biology.

Melbourne researchers have overturned a 40-year-old theory on when and how cells divide, showing that 'parent' cells program a cell division time for their offspring that is different from their own.

Scientists from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute have shown that both phases of the cell cycle contribute to the overall change in division time rather than one staying fixed in duration as previously thought. They have developed these findings into a new model that helps scientists predict how a population of cells has divided.

Ground breaking research by an international team of scientists has resulted in greater understanding of the effects of pesticides on aquatic invertebrates such as shrimps and snails.

Research published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology by a team of scientists from the UK, Switzerland and Finland provides an important new approach for systematically measuring and modelling the sensitivity of aquatic invertebrates to various pesticides.

University of Adelaide research may help in the fight against terrorism with the creation of a sensor that can detect tiny quantities of explosives with the use of light and special glass fibres.

Published in the journal Sensors and Actuators B: Chemical, the researchers describe a novel optical fibre sensor which can detect explosives in concentrations as low as 6.3 ppm (parts per million). It requires an analysis time of only a few minutes.

LOS ANGELES (May 7, 2014) – Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute researchers have found that a commonly prescribed drug restores blood flow to oxygen-starved muscles of boys with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a genetic muscle-wasting disease that rarely is seen in girls but affects one in 3,500 male babies, profoundly shortening life expectancy. It is the most common fatal disease that affects children.

A new study suggests that people who survived the medieval mass-killing plague known as the Black Death lived significantly longer and were healthier than people who lived before the epidemic struck in 1347.

Caused by the bacteria Yersinia pestis, the Black Death wiped out 30 percent of Europeans and nearly half of Londoners during its initial four-year wave from 1347 – 1351.

Drawing from his engineering background, Princeton University researcher Alexandre Persat had a notion as to why the bacteria Caulobacter crescentus are curved — a hunch that now could lead to a new way of studying the evolution of bacteria, according to research published in the journal Nature Communications.