Body

Initial results of a first and largest of its kind study focusing on the safety of adolescent bariatric surgery were published this week in JAMA Pediatrics. The "Teen Longitudinal Assessment of Bariatric Surgery" (Teen-LABS) study is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and is being conducted at five sites in the U.S., including Nationwide Children's Hospital. Thomas H. Inge, MD, PhD, with Cincinnati Children's Hospital, is the study's principal investigator.

Companies often put a personal face on products in an attempt to reach a deeper connection with consumers. New research suggests the same idea can be applied to social causes: Putting a human face on the campaign for a social cause actually increases support for it.

The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

November 5, 2013, San Francisco, CA—Since the onset of the AIDS pandemic more than three decades ago, researchers from the lab and physicians in the clinic have been working toward one shared goal: an AIDS-free world. This week, a conference hosted by the journals Cell and The Lancet brought leading researchers and clinicians together to discuss recent findings that could bring hope to the estimated 35 million people world-wide who live with HIV.

Bethesda, Md. (Nov. 6, 2013)—After menopause, women's levels of estrogen and progesterone fall. Their formerly lower risk for heart disease equals, even surpasses, men's risk. One possible contributing explanation for the change in risk is that sex hormones affect the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), which controls constriction of blood vessels and participates in the fight or flight response.

WACO, Texas (Nov. 6, 2013) —Can parents use digital cameras and smart phones to potentially screen their children for the most common form of pediatric eye cancer? Baylor University and Harvard Medical School researchers believe so.

Scientists have discovered a molecular invisibility cloak that enables HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, to hide inside cells of the body without triggering the body's natural defence systems.

Their study shows how 'uncloaking' the virus using an experimental drug triggers an immune response that stops the virus from replicating in cells grown in the laboratory.

The findings could lead to new treatments and help to improve existing therapies for HIV infection.

CINCINNATI – Cells that allow helpful bacteria to safely colonize the intestines of newborn infants also suppress their immune systems to make them more vulnerable to infections, according to new research in Nature.

November 6, 2013, Salt Lake City, UT – A remarkable new species of tyrannosaur has been unearthed in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM), southern Utah. The huge carnivore inhabited Laramidia, a landmass formed on the western coast of a shallow sea that flooded the central region of North America, isolating western and eastern portions of the continent for millions of years during the Late Cretaceous Period, between 95-70 million years ago.

RNA is the key functional component of spliceosomes, molecular machines that control how genes are expressed, report scientists from the University of Chicago online, Nov. 6 in Nature. The discovery establishes that RNA, not protein, is responsible for catalyzing this fundamental biological process and enriches the hypothesis that life on earth began in a world based solely on RNA.

Natural aerosols, such as emissions from volcanoes or plants, may contribute more uncertainty than previously thought to estimates of how the climate might respond to greenhouse gas emissions.

An international team of researchers, led by the University of Leeds, has shown that the effect of aerosols on the climate since industrialisation depends strongly on what the atmosphere was like before pollution – when aerosols were produced only from natural emissions. The research will be published in the journal Nature on 7 November.

Reston, Va. (November 6, 2013) – For patients who fail to respond to current first-line and second-line treatments for colorectal cancer liver metastases (also known as salvage patients), radioembolization with Y-90 microspheres could extend survival according to new research published in the November issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine. A systematic review conducted by researchers showed that approximately 50 percent of salvage patients have an overall survival of more than 12 months after this nuclear medicine therapy.

Onions, a key ingredient in recipes around the globe, come in a tearless version that scientists are now reporting could pack health benefits like its close relative, garlic, which is renowned for protecting against heart disease. They published their laboratory analysis, which suggests a similar heart-friendly role for the tearless onions, as well as a possible role in managing weight gain, in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have discovered one of the pathogenic components of diabetes in the heart, as published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

While both heart disease and diabetes are widely studied, how diabetic cardiomyopathy develops is not well understood, other than that it seemed to be linked to protein kinase C (PKC) — a family of enzymes that controls the functions of other proteins by using phosphates to turn them on and off.

Results of an EORTC study published in Cancer point out the prognostic value of baseline recorded health-related quality of life for survival for eleven types of cancer: brain, breast, colorectal, esophageal, head and neck, lung, melanoma, ovarian, pancreatic, prostate, and testicular cancer. For each cancer site, at least one health-related quality of life parameter provided additional prognostic information over and above the clinical and sociodemographic variables.

Costa Rica reveals astonishing biodiversity of braconid wasps, with 277 new species of the tribe Heterospilini described in the latest special issue of the open access journal ZooKeys.