Body

Johns Hopkins biomedical engineers, working with colleagues in Korea, have produced a laboratory chip with nanoscopic grooves and ridges capable of growing cardiac tissue that more closely resembles natural heart muscle.

Toronto – As pension funds have grown and become increasingly complex many have turned to using multiple, often pricier specialist managers to steer their investment decisions.

Has it been the right move?

A new study of the British pension fund industry, funded by the Rotman International Centre for Pension Management at the University of Toronto, shows it has, resulting in improved performance.

Bacteria dance the electric slide, officially named electrokinesis by the USC geobiologists who discovered the phenomenon.

Their study, published online today in PNAS Early Edition, describes what appears to be an entirely new bacterial behavior.

The metal-metabolizing Shewanella oneidensis microbe does not just cling to metal in its environment, as previously thought. Instead, it harvests electrochemical energy obtained upon contact with the metal and swims furiously for a few minutes before landing again.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — A new study links chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, with increased activity of cells that act as sentinels to activate the body's immune system.

Bethesda, MD, December 2009 - A team of scientists at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and the National Institutes of Health have piloted psychotherapy treatment to prevent excessive weight gain in teenager girls deemed 'at risk' for obesity. The study, published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders, found that girls who participated in Interpersonal Psychotherapy may be better able to prevent their BMI from increasing over the course of a year compared to girls who took traditional health education classes.

Projecting the charisma of a newly hired Chief Executive Officer often leads financial analysts to make crucial errors in forecasting the company's future performance, according to a new study in the current issue of Organization Science, a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®).

COLUMBIA, Mo. – As soon as babies are born, they are susceptible to diseases and infections, such as jaundice and e-coli. For up to a month, their immune systems aren't adequately developed to fight diseases. Although these infections are often minor, they can lead to serious problems if left untreated. To help strengthen newborns' immune systems, University of Missouri researchers have pinpointed a group of depleted white blood cells, which might lead to an immune-strengthening vaccine.

Although physicians support the use of electronic health records, concerns about potential privacy breaches remain an issue, according to two research articles published in the January 2010 issue of the Journal of the American Informatics Association (JAMIA), in its premiere issue as one of 30 specialty titles published by the BMJ (British Medical Journal) Group, UK.

An international team of Canadian and Spanish scientists have found the first potential immunological clue of why some people develop severe pneumonia when infected by the pandemic H1N1 virus.

DURHAM, N.C. – Scientists seeking to understand how to make an AIDS vaccine have found the cause of a major roadblock. It turns out that the immune system can indeed produce cells with the potential to manufacture powerful HIV-blocking antibodies – but at the same time, the immune system works equally hard to make sure these cells are eliminated before they have a chance to mature.

BOSTON (December 15, 2009) – Although seen as a potential heart disease therapy, raising high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol levels by inhibiting activity of a transfer protein may not be effective, a new study suggests. Scientists at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (USDA HNRCA) at Tufts University and Boston University School of Medicine found an association between low plasma cholesterol ester transfer protein (CETP) activity and increased risk of heart disease in the Framingham Heart Study population.

Leipzig: Species distribution models are of only limited use in predicting the future distribution of mammals. This is the finding of a study of the climate niches of 140 indigenous European mammals. The researchers analysed data on species distribution, climate, land cover and topography, as well as the phylogenetic information of the species. Judging by the large differences in climate niches even for closely related species, mammals seem to adapt fast to changing climatic conditions. This in turn makes predictions based on current distributions unreliable.

Extinct woolly mammoths and ancient American horses may have been grazing the North American steppe for several thousand years longer than previously thought. After plucking ancient DNA from frozen soil in central Alaska, a team of researchers used cutting-edge techniques to uncover "genetic fossils" of both species locked in permafrost samples dated to between 7,600 and 10,500 calendar years.

In 2006, a team of Spanish and American researchers found the fossil remains of a whale, 4.5 million years old, in Bonares, Huelva. Now they have published, for the first time, the results of the decay and fossilisation process that started with the death of the young cetacean, possibly a baleen whale from the Mysticeti group.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Improving the energy efficiency of Maryland homes heated by natural gas would generate a "hat trick" of economic and environmental benefits over the next 10 years, including more than 80,000 new jobs, savings of hundreds of dollars in average heating bills and a nine percent reduction in residential carbon emissions, concludes a new study by the University of Maryland Center for Integrative Environmental Research (CIER).