Body

In life, we sort soiled laundry from clean; ripe fruit from rotten. Two Johns Hopkins engineers say they have found an easy way to use gravity or simple forces to similarly sort microscopic particles and bits of biological matter -- including circulating tumor cells.

WASHINGTON (June 12, 2012) —Save the Children has released a pioneering report on newborn survival over the last decade that shows the world has greatly overlooked a key area for reducing child deaths—newborn care.

The report, "A Decade of Change for Newborn Survival," was published in Health Policy and Planning today. Journalists are invited to attend the report launch, Wednesday 5:30-7:30 at FHI 360, Academy Hall, 1825 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC. (Please RSVP to tweinberg@savechildren.org)

New York, NY, June 12, 2012—JDRF-funded researchers at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) and Legacy Health have discovered a liquid glucagon formulation that may be useable in standard diabetes pumps. Such a formulation could broaden the use of glucagon to help prevent hypoglycemia in people with type 1 diabetes (T1D) who are treated with insulin. It could also open a path to future-generation artificial pancreas systems that dispense more than just insulin for optimizing glucose control.

Over 45,000 corneal transplant eye surgeries are performed in the US every year. On June 12, 2012, in an effort to standardize this complex procedure, two video articles describing pre-surgical preparation of corneal tissue were published in JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments. These articles are authored by groups of scientists from Italy and the United States.

Although humans and woolly mammoths co-existed for millennia, the shaggy giants disappeared from the globe between 4,000 and 10,000 years ago, and scientists couldn't explain until recently exactly how the Flinstonian behemoths went extinct.

In a paper published June 12 in the journal Nature Communications, UCLA researchers and colleagues reveal that not long after the last ice age, the last woolly mammoths succumbed to a lethal combination of climate warming, encroaching humans and habitat change — the same threats facing many species today.

URBANA – The first sequencing of the Asiatic pear genome has recently been completed by an international consortium of seven worldwide universities and institutions including the University of Illinois.

"Our role on the team was to work on the strategy for sequencing, analyzing the data, understanding some of the biological processes, and writing the manuscript," said U of I plant molecular geneticist Schuyler Korban, whose lab had previously been involved in a consortium that sequenced the woodland strawberry genome.

University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston researchers have developed a powerful visual analytical approach to explore genetic data, enabling scientists to identify novel patterns of information that could be crucial to human health.

The method, which combines three different "bipartite visual representations" of genetic information, is described in an article to appear in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. The work won a distinguished paper award when it was presented at the AMIA Summit on Translational Bioinformatics in March 2012.

Irvine, Calif., June 12, 2012 — Mosquitoes bred to be unable to infect people with the malaria parasite are an attractive approach to helping curb one of the world's most pressing public health issues, according to UC Irvine scientists.

Anthony James and colleagues from UCI and the Pasteur Institute in Paris have produced a model of the Anopheles stephensi mosquito – a major source of malaria in India and the Middle East – that impairs the development of the malaria parasite. These mosquitoes, in turn, cannot transmit the disease through their bites.

CHICAGO (June 12, 2012) – Hospitalization rates in New York City for patients with community-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA), a potentially deadly bacterial infection that is resistant to antibiotic treatment, more than tripled between 1997 and 2006, according to a report published in the July issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America.

CHICAGO (June 12, 2012) – A small cluster of unusual illnesses at a Colorado children's hospital prompted an investigation that swiftly identified alcohol prep pads contaminated with Bacillus cereus bacteria, according to a report in the July issue of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America. The investigation ultimately led to an international recall of the contaminated products.

The development of body-powered prosthetic hands has stagnated for over twenty years. That is the main conclusion of a study by researchers from TU Delft and the University of Groningen into this type of prosthesis, which is published in the American Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development.

High operating force

• People newly diagnosed with chronic leukemia must often wait to learn if they have a faster- or slower-progressing form of the disease.
• This study identified a molecular marker that quickly helps to distinguish which form a patients has.
• The findings could enable patients with aggressive disease to start treatment sooner.

HEIDELBERG, 12 June 2012 – Researchers in France and Sweden have discovered how one of the body's own proteins is involved in generating chronic pain in rats. The results, which also suggest therapeutic interventions to alleviate long-lasting pain, are reported in The EMBO Journal.

Chronic pain is persistent and often difficult to treat. It is due, at least in part, to changes in molecular signalling events that take place in neurons, alterations that can ultimately disrupt the transmission of nerve signals from the spinal cord to the brain.

CINCINNATI – An experimental treatment that combines intense chemotherapy with a radioactive isotope linked to synthesized neurotransmitter is being tested in newly diagnosed cases of high-risk neuroblastoma – a deadly, hard-to-cure childhood cancer.

BETHESDA, Md. (June 11, 2012) —In late 1911, British Naval Captain Robert F. Scott led a team of five Englishmen on their quest to be the first to reach the South Pole. Upon arrival they learned they had been preceded by a Norwegian team, led by Roald Amundsen (which had arrived more than a month before). Scott and his companions died during their journey home as a result of natural causes induced by the extreme physiological stresses they experienced.