Body

New Haven, Conn. – In research that could lead to new asthma drugs, scientists at Yale School of Medicine, Hydra Biosciences of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the University of California, San Francisco have discovered that a protein may be a trigger of allergy-induced asthma in mice. They also demonstrated how a drug known to reduce inflammatory and neuropathic pain may also inhibit asthma symptoms in mice. Their paper is published in the May 18-22 online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- The birds are watching. They know who you are. And they will attack.

Nope, not Hitchcock.

It's science.

University of Florida biologists are reporting that mockingbirds recognize and remember people whom the birds perceive as threatening their nests. If the white-and-grey songbirds common in cities and towns throughout the Southeast spot their unwelcome guests, they screech, dive bomb and even sometimes graze the visitors' heads -- while ignoring other passers-by or nearby strangers.

Berkeley - Global warming may include some periods of local cooling, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. Results from satellite and ground-based sensor data show that sweltering summers can, paradoxically, lead to the temporary formation of a cooling haze in the southeastern United States.

There appears to be a link between sleep and weight control, with some studies indicating that sleep disruption can increase weight gain and others that diet affects sleep. Victor Uebele and colleagues, at Merck Research Laboratories, West Point, have now provided further evidence to support this association by showing that T-type calcium channels regulate body weight maintenance and sleep in mice. These data suggest that sleep and circadian treatment approaches may be of benefit in the fight against obesity.

Glucocorticoids are steroid hormones that have numerous functions; for example, they regulate the response to stress and suppress inflammation. Synthetic glucocorticoids are used clinically in many situations, most famously to treat asthma, allergies, and autoimmunity. They have also been shown in animals and humans to help protect the heart from the damaging effects of heart attack, and this has been attributed to their anti-inflammatory effects.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Charles Darwin described the sudden origin of flowering plants about 130 million years ago as an abominable mystery, one that scientists have yet to solve.

But a new University of Florida study, set to appear next week in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is helping shed light on the mystery with information about what the first flowers looked like and how they evolved from nonflowering plants.

Being overweight or obese is a leading contributor to cardiovascular disease (CVD) and associated risk factors; however, in patients with established CVD, obesity appears to play a protective role. In fact, data suggest obese patients with heart disease do better and tend to live longer than leaner patients with the same severity of disease, according to a review article published in the May 26, 2009, issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

CLEVELAND – A new study finds that individuals who have low expression of the "Celebrex gene," 15-PGDH, are actually resistant to Celebrex treatment when used to prevent colon cancer. The study, published in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), is by Sanford Markowitz, M.D., Ph.D., the Markowitz-Ingalls Professor of Cancer Genetics at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and an oncologist at the Ireland Cancer Center of University Hospitals Case Medical Center and his colleagues.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 15, 2009 -- Hydra Biosciences, Inc., a biotech company developing novel ion channel drugs, today announced that research published by Hydra Biosciences scientists and collaborators at Yale University for the first time identified the ion channel TRPA1 as playing an essential role in allergic asthma and demonstrated that Hydra's TRPA1 antagonist HC-030031 effectively treated allergic asthma in mice.

A combined tooth-venom arsenal revealed as key to Komodo Dragon's hunting strategy.

A new study has shown that the effectiveness of the Komodo Dragon bite is a combination of highly specialized serrated teeth and venom. The authors also dismiss the widely accepted theory that prey die from septicemia caused by toxic bacteria living in the dragon's mouth.

The carnivorous reptiles (Varanus komodoensis) are known to bite prey and release them, leaving them to bleed to death from their wounds: the victims are reported to go into shock before the dragons kill and eat them.

Some researchers believe that prey are killed by pathogenic bacteria in the dragons' mouths but the new research – published in the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – shows that the combination of the reptiles' teeth and venom likely accounts for their hunting prowess.

Women may be more susceptible to the lung damaging effects of smoking than men, according to new research by Inga-Cecilie Soerheim, M.D., and her colleagues from Channing Laboratory, Brigham and Women's Hospital and University of Bergen, Norway. They analyzed data from a Norwegian case-control study including 954 subjects with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and 955 controls. All were current- or ex-smokers, and the COPD subjects had moderate or severe COPD.

A new drug-free treatment for asthma has been shown to be effective in an international study of patients with severe, uncontrolled asthma. The results showed statistically significant improvements in quality of life and reductions in asthma attacks and emergency room visits for patients who underwent the treatment.

Hanover, NH—Dartmouth Medical School geneticists have made new inroads into understanding the regulatory circuitry of the biological clock that synchronizes the ebb and flow of daily activities, according to two studies published May 15.

Research on the relationship between clocks and temperature, reported in Cell, offers insight into a longstanding puzzle of temperature compensation: why the 24-hour circadian rhythm does not change with temperature when metabolism is so affected.

A Web-based system allowing general practitioners to confer with specialists regarding patients with skin conditions may reduce referrals to dermatologists by approximately 20 percent, according to a report in the May issue of Archives of Dermatology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.