Body

DURHAM, N.C. -- Mathematicians at Duke University are developing ways to help doctors predict how different cancers are likely to progress when actual measurements of tumor growth are hard to come by.

More than one in three people in the United States will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives. Accurate predictions of tumor growth are key to determining the right dose of radiation and chemotherapy, how often patients should undergo screening, and whether a treatment is effective.

COLUMBIA, Mo. - In the past decade, enrollment and graduation numbers have risen in for-profit colleges; however, little is known about how employers perceive potential employees with for-profit college degrees on their resumes. In a new study, researchers at the University of Missouri found that hiring managers show no preference for hiring people with for-profit college credentials compared to those holding comparable credentials from public community colleges.

A new discovery published in the Nov. 2015 issue of The FASEB Journal shows that cancer cells use previously unknown channels to communicate with one another and with adjacent non-cancerous cells. Not only does this cast an important light on how cancer metastasizes and recruits cellular material from healthy cells, but it also suggests that these physical channels might be exploitable to deliver drug therapies.

Skillful surgeons can do amazing things in extremely small places, but finding better ways to suture tiny blood vessels has been an ongoing challenge for even the best.

In an article just published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, several University of Delaware researchers show how a new peptide-based hydrogel could one day make that reconnection process easier to perform and less likely to fail.

A team of scientists, including several from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, have determined the structures of several important tuberculosis enzymes, which could lead to new drugs for the disease.

AURORA, Colo. (Nov. 2, 2015) - One in five pediatricians dismiss families who refuse to vaccinate their children, according to findings published today in the journal Pediatrics and based on research by faculty from the University of Colorado School of Medicine on the Anschutz Medical Campus.

Sean O'Leary, MD, MPH, associate professor of pediatrics, and his colleagues surveyed more than 800 physicians across the country and found 21 percent of the responding pediatricians dismissed families from their practice when the families refused vaccines.

Researchers at Simon Fraser University and the BC Cancer Agency have developed a groundbreaking method to identify and separate stem cells that reside in the tonsils. Their research, which sheds new light on the fight against oral cancer, is published today in the journal Stem Cell Reports.

PHILADELPHIA -- Scientists in recent years have made great progress in characterizing the bacterial population that normally lives on human skin and contributes to health and disease. Now researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have used state-of-the-art techniques to survey the skin's virus population, or "virome." The study, published in the online journal mBio last month, reveals that most DNA viruses on healthy human skin are viral "dark matter" that have never been described before.

Savannah, Ga. - University of Georgia Skidaway Institute of Oceanography scientist Aron Stubbins joined a team of researchers to determine how hydrothermal vents influence ocean carbon storage. The results of their study were recently published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Hydrothermal vents are hotspots of activity on the otherwise dark, cold ocean floor. Since their discovery, scientists have been intrigued by these deep ocean ecosystems, studying their potential role in the evolution of life and their influence upon today's ocean.

Iron nanoparticles injected before magnetic resonance imaging can make tissues more visible and the same nanoparticles may allow doctors to precisely target tumors with new medicines. However, among the challenges to the practical use of nanoparticles in the human body is what scientists refer to as lack of "hemocompatibility" - nanoparticles tend to be attacked and cleared by the immune system, negating their usefulness and also potentially causing side effects including shock and loss of blood pressure.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A new study explores how a young cowbird, left as an egg in the nest of a different species, grows up to know it's a cowbird and not a warbler, thrush or sparrow.

The study, published in Animal Behaviour, reveals that cowbird juveniles leave the host parents at dusk and spend their nights in nearby fields, returning just after daybreak. This behavior likely plays a role in the cowbirds' ability to avoid imprinting on their host parents.

The world's record for the smallest land snail is broken once again. A minute shell with an average diameter of 0.7 mm was found in Malaysian Borneo by a team of Dutch and Malaysian biologists along with another 47 new species of greatly varying sizes. Called 'dwarf' ("nanus" meaning "dwarf" in Latin), the new snail, Acmella nana, is first-shown to the world in the open-access journal ZooKeys, where the last record-holder was announced only about a month ago.

There are substantial differences in obstetric care provided to First Nations women compared with women in the general population, and these differences may contribute to higher infant mortality in First Nations populations, according to research published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

Griffith University's Institute for Glycomics has made scientific history by determining the first three-dimensional image of a protein linked to the spread of cancer.

The world-first image is revealed today (Nov. 2) in the prestigious journal Nature Chemical Biology in a paper titled 'Functional and structural characterization of a heparanase', by the Institute's Director, Professor Mark von Itzstein, and his team.

A common heart drug may stop the progression of angiosarcoma, a cancer of the inner lining of blood vessels, according to a study by researchers at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) El Paso.

Angiosarcomas are highly lethal tumors that can occur in any part of the body. The tumor typically appears as a growth or lesion on the skin; the larger the growth, the greater the risk of mortality.