Body

Stainless steel is the icon of cleanliness for home and commercial kitchens, restaurants, hospitals and other settings, but it can collect disease-causing bacteria like other surfaces if not cleaned often. Scientists now are reporting discovery, in the ACS journal Langmuir, of a practical way to make stainless steel that disinfects itself.

Scientists have discovered a 'switch' in the Hepatitis C virus which could be used as a target for new kinds of drug treatment.

Hepatitis C affects more than 170 million people worldwide, but current combination treatment is only effective against a limited range of this naturally highly variable virus.

However, according to new research by the University of Warwick, the newly discovered SL9266 'switch' is very highly conserved and present in all Hepatitis C viruses, meaning this offers a good starting point for further research into an across-the-board treatment.

During the fall, hundreds of millions of monarch butterflies living in eastern North America fly up to 1,500 miles to the volcanic forests of Mexico to spend the winter, while monarchs west of the Rocky Mountains fly to the California coast. The phenomenon is both spectacular and mysterious: How do the insects learn these particular routes and why do they stick to them?

A prevailing theory contends that eastern and western monarchs are genetically distinct, and that genetic mechanisms trigger their divergent migratory paths.

Researchers at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) have discovered the remains of newborn twin girls in the archaeological site of Olèrdola in Barcelona. They date back to between the middle of the 4th century B.C. to the beginning of the 2nd century B.C. The findings are the first bone remains of twins to be recorded.

New research funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) has shown that vitamin D3 supplements could provide more benefit than the close relative vitamin D2. The findings published in the June edition of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition could potentially lead to changes in the food industry when it comes to fortification.

As soon as they have grown to pinhead size, tumors rely on the formation of new blood vessels – a process which is scientifically called angiogenesis. Interfering with this process (antiangiogenesis) is considered to be a promising approach in cancer medicine. However, those drugs that are already available for preventing the sprouting of new blood capillaries have failed to fulfill the high expectations placed on them.

The prevalence of chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection in the U.S. may be as high as 2.2 million cases according to a new study now available in Hepatology, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases. Findings suggest the higher prevalence of chronic HBV can be attributed to foreign-born persons who were infected in their country of origin prior to arrival in the U.S.

Australian researchers have uncovered a potential new way to regulate the body's natural immune response, offering hope of a simple and effective new treatment for auto-immune diseases.

Auto-immune diseases result from an overactive immune response that causes the body to attack itself.

The new approach involves increasing good regulating cells in the body, unlike most current research which focuses on stopping "bad" or "effector" cells, says lead researcher Dr Suzanne Hodgkinson, from UNSW's Faculty of Medicine and Liverpool Hospital.

People with a past history of just a single skin infection may be three times more likely to develop a painful, costly — and potentially deadly — surgical site infection (SSI) when they have an operation, according to new Johns Hopkins research.

Johns Hopkins scientists have engineered cells that behave like AND and OR Boolean logic gates, producing an output based on one or more unique inputs. This feat, published in the May issue of Nature Chemical Biology, could eventually help researchers create computers that use cells as tiny circuits.

A protein produced by the central nervous system's support cells seems to play two opposing roles in protecting nerve cells from damage, an animal study by Johns Hopkins researchers suggests: Decreasing its activity seems to trigger support cells to gear up their protective powers, but increasing its activity appears to be key to actually use those powers to defend cells from harm.

Our ability to "read" DNA has made tremendous progress in the past few decades, but the ability to understand and alter the genetic code, that is, to "rewrite" the DNA-encoded instructions, has lagged behind. A new Weizmann Institute study advances our understanding of the genetic code: It proposes a way of effectively introducing numerous carefully planned DNA segments into genomes of living cells and of testing the effects of these changes. The study is being reported in the June issues of Nature Biotechnology and Nature Genetics.

A whole new class of biosensor that can detect exceptionally small traces of contaminants in liquids in just 40 minutes has been developed by a UNSW-led team of researchers.

Known as a biochemiresistor, it meets a long-standing challenge to create a sensor that is not only super-sensitive to the presence of chemical compounds but responds quickly. It has countless potential uses for detecting drugs, toxins and pesticides for biomedical or environmental analysis.

Coral reefs and seashores largely look the way they do because large fish and urchins eat most of the seaweed that might otherwise cover them, but a major new study has found that the greatest impact of all comes from an unexpected quarter – small marine snails.

The study published in the journal Ecology Letters is the largest of its kind ever undertaken into the ecological impacts of marine grazing animals: it was led by Associate Professor Alistair Poore, of the UNSW Evolution & Ecology Research Centre, who worked with an international team of 10 researchers.

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE -- Much of the fervor fueling the anti-immigration debate is shaped by the belief that immigrants—legal and otherwise—are somehow a threat to our national identity. Americans, some critics believe, venerate a set of ideals and attitudes that are distinctly American. But do immigrants honor these same values?