Body

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- University of Florida chemists have pioneered a method to tease out promising molecular structures for capturing energy, a step that could speed the development of more efficient, cheaper solar cells.

"This gives us a new way of studying light-matter interactions," said Valeria Kleiman, a UF associate professor of chemistry. "It enables us to study not just how the molecule reacts, but actually to change how it reacts, so we can test different energy transfer pathways and find the most efficient one."

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA…An international team of paleontologists has discovered a new species of mammal that lived 123 million years ago in what is now the Liaoning Province in northeastern China. The newly discovered animal, Maotheriumasiaticus, comes from famous fossil-rich beds of the Yixian Formation. This new remarkably well preserved fossil, as reported in the October 9 issue of the prestigious journal Science, offers an important insight into how the mammalian middle ear evolved.

As the proverbial "fire hose of data" becomes a Niagara torrent, with conservative estimates of 12,000 draft genomes hitting the public databases by 2012, researchers may be surprised to find that these datasets describe genomes that are not complete.

Celiac disease (CD) is an inherited intestinal disorder characterized by life-long intolerance to the ingestion of gluten, a protein found in wheat, rye, and barley. Although CD can be diagnosed at any age, it commonly occurs during early childhood (between 9 and 24 months). Reduced bone mineral density is often found in individuals with CD. A new article in the journal Nutrition Reviews examines the literature on the topic and reveals that a gluten-free diet can affect children's recovery

WASHINGTON, Oct. 8—Two billion people worldwide carry the pathogen that causes tuberculosis (TB), and most of them do not even know they are infected. This is because some 90 percent of people with TB have "latent" infections. They have no symptoms, they can't spread the disease to others and the bug remains dormant in their lungs -- often for years.

The intense exchanges that human mothers share with their newborn infants may have some pretty deep roots, suggests a study of rhesus macaques reported online on October 8th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

The new findings show that mother macaques and their infants have interactions in the first month of life that the researchers say look a lot like what humans tend to do.

(Boston) – Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have identified a tool, the "Getting-Out-of-Bed (GoB) measure" to assess motivation and life outlook in older adults. The study, which appears in the October issue of the Journal of Psychosocial Oncology, shows that the tool has the potential to be an easy-to-use measure to bolster motivation and thus, improve health behaviors and outcomes in the growing population of older adults.

If a little vitamin A is good, more must be better, right? Wrong! New research published online in the FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org) shows that vitamin A plays a crucial role in energy production within cells, explaining why too much or too little has a complex negative effect on our bodies. This is particularly important as combinations of foods, drinks, creams, and nutritional supplements containing added vitamin A make an overdose more possible than ever before.

Elderly cancer patients need a combination of treatments tailor-made to their specific needs to successfully combat the disease. The challenge is to boost their immune response to cancer vaccines, because like the rest of our organs, our immune system ages and gradually becomes less efficient as we get older. Dr. Joseph Lustgarten, from the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in the US, reviews the effects of aging on the immune system and strategies used to activate a stronger antitumor immune response in the elderly, including genetic modifications in animal models.

A Japanese research group led by Prof. Makoto Tominaga and Dr. Sravan Mandadi (National Institute for Physiological Sciences: NIPS) found that ATP plays a key role in transmitting temperature information from skin keratinocytes to afferent sensory neurons. Their findings were presented in the Pflugers Archiv European Journal of Physiology published on October 2009.

Overweight individuals are not just at greater risk of having sleep-disordered-breathing (SDB), they are also likely to suffer greater consequences, according to new research.

According to the study, to be published in the October 15 issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, an official publication of the American Thoracic Society, excess weight increased the severity of oxygen desaturation in the blood of individuals with SDB during and after apneas and hypopneas.

Patients with moderate to severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) can benefit from triple therapy that includes a long-acting β-agonist (LABA), an inhaled corticosteroid (ICS) and an anti-muscarinic agent, according to researchers in Germany.

DALLAS – Oct. 8, 2009 – The antidote for acute liver failure caused by acetaminophen poisoning also can treat acute liver failure due to most other causes if given before severe injury occurs, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers and their colleagues at 21 other institutions have found.

This release is available in http://chinese..org/zh/emb_releases/2009-10/w-scw100509.php">Chinese.

North Carolina, October, 2009 – Scientists from the United States and China have revealed the potential for human stem cells to provide a vaccination against colon cancer, reports a study published in Stem Cells.

Current figures underestimate the number of children who may be at risk of harm from parental substance use. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Public Health have generated new estimates using five national surveys which include measures of binge, hazardous and dependent drinking, illicit drug use and mental health.