Body

Rare birds living in Hawaii's higher elevation forests may lose more than 50% of their habitat under climate shifts projected by the end of the century, according to a study published October 28, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Lucas Fortini from the U.S. Geological Survey and colleagues.

Understanding why a tumour metastasises in specific organs and do not in others is one of the top goals of oncology, and also one of the oldest. 126 years ago, the British physician, Stephen Paget, formulated his 'seed and soil theory', which advocates that metastasis requires the dispersal of tumour cells, 'seeds', as well as a welcoming environment, 'fertile soil', in the recipient organ. However, since then "the progress made in deciphering the mechanisms that guide metastasis to specific organs has been insufficient," write the authors in the report published in 'Nature'.

PHILADELPHIA - Autophagy, literally self-eating or the degradation of unwanted cellular bits and pieces by the cell itself, has been shown for the first time to also work in the cell nucleus. In addition, in this setting it plays a role in guarding against the start of cancer, according to new research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

A new study suggests the road to obesity may be paved with non-nutritious carbohydrates in breast milk, shifting popular notions about how and why children grow to become overweight adults.

Previous research has shown that maternal obesity strongly affects a baby's risk for becoming overweight, but scientists are unsure about how fatness is transmitted, said Michael Goran, the study's corresponding author and director of the Childhood Obesity Research Center at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

A consortium of 48 scientists from 50 institutions in the United States has called for an ambitious research effort to understand and harness microbiomes - the communities of microorganisms that inhabit ecosystems as varied as the human gut and the ocean, to improve human health, agriculture, bioenergy, and the environment.

Their proposal, published in the October 30 issue of the journal Science, calls for a major research project to develop new research tools and collaborations that will unlock the secrets of Earth's microbial communities.

Even fish look forward to retirement.

After making an exhausting migration from river to ocean and back to river -- often multiple years in a row -- one species of Alaskan trout decides to call it quits and retire from migrating once they are big enough to survive off their fat reserves.

This is the first time such a "retirement" pattern has been seen in fish that make this river-to-ocean migration, according to University of Washington-led research published in July in the journal Ecology.

A new publication from scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai offers a glimpse of precision medicine in action, with a massive data analysis project that identified clinically and genetically distinct subtypes of patients with type 2 diabetes. This work not only points to the possibility for more tailored diagnosis and treatment of type 2 diabetes in the future, but also reveals a novel approach that can be applied to virtually any disease.

Researchers at New Mexico State University tested 10 commercially available products for their effectiveness at repelling mosquitoes, and the results were published in the Journal of Insect Science.

PHILADELPHIA - Patients who are divorced, separated or widowed had an approximately 40 percent greater chance of dying or developing a new functional disability in the first two years following cardiac surgery than their married peers, according to a new study from researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania published in this week's JAMA Surgery.

An international group led by RIKEN in Japan and INSERM in France have found that retroviral long-terminal-repeat (LTR) promoters--a type of repetitive element that are widely distributed in the human genome--are highly activated in hepatocellular carcinomas, the most common type of liver cancer. Intriguingly, these areas--which are particularly activated in HCCs associated with viral hepatitis, are not normally activated in the liver but are in reproductive tissues such as testis and placenta.

Increasing cigarette exercise taxes may have the unintended consequence of encouraging consumers to seek higher nicotine content and more dangerous cigarette products, according to a study published in Marketing Science, a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).

Electric eels temporarily paralyze their prey by shocking them with electricity using a series of brief, high-voltage pulses, much as a Taser would do. Now, a researcher reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on October 28 has discovered that the eels can at least double the power of their electrical discharge by curling up their bodies. In bringing their tail up and around, the eels sandwich prey between the two poles of their electric organ, which runs most of the length of their long, flexible bodies.

Amsterdam, October 28, 2015 - Using e-cigarettes is related to problematic drinking, according to new research published in Addictive Behaviors. In a study involving around 1400 people, researchers also found that more women than men use e-cigarettes socially, opposite to patterns seen in regular cigarette smoking.

The authors of the new study, from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis in the United States, say it's crucial to consider the knock-on effects of e-cigarette use when evaluating their safety, not just their direct health effects.

Among more than 1,500 adults who underwent cardiac surgery, those who were divorced, separated, or widowed were more likely to have died or develop a new functional disability after the surgery compared with the married participants, according to a study published online by JAMA Surgery.

ROCHESTER, MINN. - A blue-ribbon project group funded by the National Institutes of Health has published the first consensus guidelines on how researchers should share genomic findings in research on adults and children with other family members. The recommendations, published in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, offer direction on sharing information before and after the death of an individual research participant.