Body

HOUSTON – (June 14, 2013) – Too much sugar can set people down a pathway to heart failure, according to a study led by researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).

A single small molecule, the glucose metabolite glucose 6-phosphate (G6P), causes stress to the heart that changes the muscle proteins and induces poor pump function leading to heart failure, according to the study, which was published in the May 21 issue of the Journal of the American Heart Association. G6P can accumulate from eating too much starch and/or sugar.

After three years of research, a multicenter, national research study led by Beaumont orthopedic surgeon and sports medicine specialist, Joseph Guettler, M.D., may have some answers as to why youth baseball pitching injuries continue to rise despite the implementation of nationally recommended pitching limits. In fact, serious pitching injuries requiring surgery have skyrocketed with one estimate reporting serious throwing injuries are occurring 16 times more often today than just 30 years ago.

Memory improved in mice injected with a small, drug-like molecule discovered by UCSF San Francisco researchers studying how cells respond to biological stress.

The same biochemical pathway the molecule acts on might one day be targeted in humans to improve memory, according to the senior author of the study, Peter Walter, PhD, UCSF professor of biochemistry and biophysics and a Howard Hughes Investigator.

Parasites comprise a large proportion of the diversity of species in every ecosystem. Despite this, they are rarely included in analyses or models of food webs. If parasites play different roles from other predators and prey, however, their inclusion could fundamentally alter our understanding of how food webs are organized.

Milan, 14 June 2013. Lifestyle factors, lack of awareness by both patients and physicians, hesitancy in initiating and intensifying drug treatment, and healthcare structural deficiencies are amongst the reasons for the increasing problem of high blood pressure in Europe, according to new joint Guidelines issued today by the European Society of Hypertension (ESH) and the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).

In current health lore, antioxidants are all the rage, as "everybody knows" that reducing the amount of "reactive oxygen species" -- cell-damaging molecules that are byproducts of cellular metabolism -- is critical to staying healthy. What everyone doesn't know is that our bodies already have a complex set of processes built into our cells that handle these harmful byproducts of living and repair the damage they cause.

From skeletons and biopsies, an international team of scientists was successful in reconstructing a dozen medieval and modern genomes of the leprosy-causing bacteria Mycobacterium leprae. Under the direction of Professor Johannes Krause, University of Tübingen, and Professor Stewart Cole, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne (EPFL), the research group created a genome from archaeological finds for the first time without having to resort to a reference sequence. Professor Almut Nebel and Dr.

They lie dormant for years, but at the first sign of favorable conditions they awaken. This sounds like the tagline for a science fiction movie, but it describes the amazing life-cycles of microbial organisms that form the biological soil crusts (BSCs) of Earth's deserts. Now a research team with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has reported a unique molecular-level analysis of a BSC cyanobacterium responding to the wetting and drying of its environment.

The ocean the Titanic sailed through just over 100 years ago was very different from the one we swim in today. Global warming is increasing ocean temperatures and harming marine food webs. Nitrogen run-off from fertilizers is causing coastal dead zones. A McGill-led international research team has now completed the first global study of changes that occurred in a crucial component of ocean chemistry, the nitrogen cycle, at the end of the last ice age. The results of their study confirm that oceans are good at balancing the nitrogen cycle on a global scale.

Many scientists dream of making a single discovery that provides fundamental insight into nature, may be used to help save human lives, and can assist in the preservation of an endangered species. In new research reported in the journal Cell, a Japanese team is on the verge of accomplishing this nearly impossible feat.

In a piece of work carried out by the Carbohydrate Metabolism Research Team of the Institute of Agrobiotechnology (a centre jointly owned by the NUP/UPNA-Public University of Navarre, the Spanish National Scientific Research Council-CSIC, and the Government of Navarre), the discovery has been made of the way in which the glgS gene (now renamed as the "surface composition regulator", scoR) acts in bacteria and how the mechanisms involved in bacterial infection can be altered by manipulating this gene, which indirectly affects glycogen production.

Scientists who designed GPS tracking collars to study hunting cheetahs in Botswana have miniaturised them to track 50 domestic cats in a Surrey village for a BBC programme. The BBC also deployed cat-cams which were turned on by the collar's activity sensor when the cat was moving. 'The Secret Life of The Cat' is broadcast on BBC Two Horizon on Thursday June 13th 2013 at 21:00.

If you are healthy and plan to start running for the first time, it is perfectly all right to put on a pair of completely ordinary 'neutral' running shoes without any special support. Even though your feet overpronate when you run – i.e. roll inwards.

There appears to be no risk that overpronation or underpronation can lead to running injuries through using neutral shoes for this special group of healthy beginners.

Cold Spring Harbor, NY – By identifying a protein that acts as a genetic modifier, scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have solved the mystery of why some infants are born with a grave syndrome consisting of cleft palate and major deformities of the skin and limbs, while other infants bearing the same predisposing genetic mutation bear little or no sign of the illness, called EEC.

Ottawa—June 14, 2013—Here's a good reason to pay attention in math class. Nature Communications has published a paper from Ottawa researchers today, outlining how advanced mathematical modelling can be used in the fight against cancer. The technique predicts how different treatments and genetic modifications might allow cancer-killing, oncolytic viruses to overcome the natural defences that cancer cells use to stave off viral infection.