Body

Three beautiful new lizards from the Andes of Peru have been delimited and discovered using different lines of evidences by Peruvian and American biologists from San Marcos and Brigham Young universities respectively. The study was published in the open access journal Zookeys.

Pursuant to the Act on the Reform of the Market for Medicinal Products (AMNOG), the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) reassessed vemurafenib (trade name: Zelboraf), a drug for the treatment of adults with a certain type of advanced melanoma. The reason for this was that the Federal Joint Committee (G-BA) had limited its decision on the first assessment to one year. This obliged the drug manufacturer to submit a second dossier.

A novel method for extracting titanium, a metal highly valued for its light weight, high strength, corrosion resistance and biocompatibility, could lower its cost and make it more widely accessible, for example, for producing lighter car parts to improve fuel efficiency. The method, which significantly reduces the energy required to separate it from its tightly bound companion, oxygen, appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Adults nationwide are concerned about the use of e-cigarettes by children and teens, with 44 percent indicating worries that the devices will encourage kids to use tobacco products, according to a new poll from the University of Michigan.

According to the latest University of Michigan Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health, nearly half of parents are concerned their child will try e-cigarettes, which are battery-operated devices that look like cigarettes but don't burn tobacco.

Health advocates cheered last month's U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposal to ban partially hydrogenated oils — which contain trans fats that increase the risk of heart disease — but some wonder whether the substitutes for these fats will be any healthier. An article in Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, investigates the matter.

In the quest to shrink motors so they can maneuver in tiny spaces like inside and between human cells, scientists have taken inspiration from millions of years of plant evolution and incorporated, for the first time, corkscrew structures from plants into a new kind of helical "microswimmer." The low-cost development, which appears in ACS' journal Nano Letters, could be used on a large scale in targeted drug delivery and other applications

Biologists from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) have for the first time shown that amphipods from the warmer Atlantic are now reproducing in Arctic waters to the west of Spitsbergen. This surprising discovery indicates a possible shift of the Arctic zooplankton community, scientists report in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series. The primary victims of this "Atlantification" are likely to be marine birds, fish and whales.

Using numerical modeling, an Italian research team has discovered the role 'macrocells' play in the corrosion of hollow submerged marine concrete structures such as tunnels and parking structures.

Singapore, 18 December 2013 – A recent study led by scientists from the National University of Singapore (NUS) opens a possible new route for treatment of Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA), a devastating disease that is the most common genetic cause of infant death and also affects young adults. As there is currently no known cure for SMA, the new discovery gives a strong boost to the fight against SMA.

Researchers at Emory and Georgia Tech have developed a potential treatment for atherosclerosis that targets a master controller of the process.

The results are scheduled for publication Dec. 18 in the journal Nature Communications.

In a twist, the master controller comes from a source that scientists had thought was leftover garbage. It is a micro RNA molecule, which comes from an unused template that remains after punching out ribosomes –– workhorse protein factories found in all cells.

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have shown for the first time that the specialised role stem cells go on to perform is controlled by primary cilia –tiny hair-like structures protruding from a cell.

Stem cells are capable of becoming any cell type within the body through the process of differentiation.

The discovery has the potential for application in the development of new therapies for a range of medical treatments where scientists aim to replace or regenerate tissues that have become diseased or dysfunctional.

Spiders may not be the pure predators we generally believe, after a study found that some make up a quarter of their diet by eating pollen.

Dr Dirk Sanders of the University of Exeter demonstrated that orb web spiders – like the common garden variety – choose to eat pollen even when insects are available.

Spider webs snare insect prey, but can also trap aerial plankton like pollen and fungal spores.

While residents of wealthy nations tend to have greater life satisfaction, new research shows that those living in poorer nations report having greater meaning in life.

These findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that meaning in life may be higher in poorer nations as a result of greater religiosity. As countries become richer, religion becomes less central to people's lives and they lose a sense of meaning in life.

With the Neanderthal genome now published, for the first time, scientists have a rich new resource of comparative evolution. For example, recently, scientists have shown that humans and Neanderthals once interbreed, with the accumulation of elements of Neanderthal DNA found in up to 5 percent in modern humans.

Many children with intellectual disability or lower functioning autism spectrum disorders, particularly those in low and middle income countries, do not receive psychosocial treatment interventions for their condition. If non-specialists were able to deliver such care, more children may be able to receive treatment.