Tech

Celiac disease is a life-long condition yet many people remain undiagnosed and there is concern that lengthy diagnostic delays may be putting health at risk.

Interventional treatments, especially surgery,provide good functional outcomes and a high cure rate for patients with lower-grade arteriovenous malformations (AVMs) of the brain, findings which contrast with a recent trial reporting better outcomes without surgery or other interventions for AVMs. "On the basis of these data, in appropriately selected patients, we recommend treatment for low-grade brain AVMs," concludes the study by Dr. Laligam N. Sekhar and colleagues of University of Washington, Seattle.

A new, randomized clinical study co-authored by Cohen Children's Medical Center's chair of pediatrics says there is little neurological benefit to using therapeutic hypothermia to lower a child's core temperature after an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.

The first large international study to investigate the late side-effects of a combination of two forms of brachytherapy to treat cervical cancer has shown that the technique successfully delivers higher radiation doses to the tumour without an increase in treatment-related problems afterwards.

Northwestern University scientists have developed the first liquid nanoscale laser. And it's tunable in real time, meaning you can quickly and simply produce different colors, a unique and useful feature. The laser technology could lead to practical applications, such as a new form of a "lab on a chip" for medical diagnostics.

To understand the concept, imagine a laser pointer whose color can be changed simply by changing the liquid inside it, instead of needing a different laser pointer for every desired color.

Ahmad M. Khalil, PhD, knew the odds were against him -- as in thousands upon thousands to one.

Yet he and his team never wavered from their quest to identify the parts of the body responsible for revving up one of the most aggressive forms of breast cancer, HER2+. This month in Breast Cancer Research and Treatment, Khalil and his colleagues at Case Western Reserve University proved the power of persistence; from a pool of more than 30,000 possibilities, they found 38 genes and molecules that most likely trigger HER2+ cancer cells to spread.

Although National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) guidelines consider 18F-PET/CT (FDG PET/CT) appropriate for systemic staging of newly diagnosed stage III breast cancer, the technique may not be equally valuable for all breast cancer histologies. Researchers at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center found that while FDG PET/CT is valuable for systemic staging of stage III ductal breast cancer, it adds little to the systemic staging of ILC.

Bees play a key role in our ecosystem and in the world's food supply. Thanks to a large collaborative effort, the genomes of two important pollinating bumblebees have been sequenced and compared with those of other bees, laying the foundations for the identification of biological factors essential for their conservation.

A simple method of testing "twilight vision" gives reliable results in identifying people who have decreased visual acuity under low light conditions, according to a new study.

Using filters to test at a light level 100 times lower than for daylight visual acuity testing, vision care professionals can obtain "reliable and repeatable" measurements of twilight vision, report Jason S. Ng, OD, PhD, and colleagues of Southern California College of Optometry at Marshall B. Ketchum University in Fullerton, Calif.

Testing Twilight Vision--Looking for a Standard Method

While climatologists are carefully watching carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, another group of scientists is exploring a massive storehouse of carbon that has the potential to significantly affect the climate change picture.

University of Georgia Skidaway Institute of Oceanography researcher Aron Stubbins is part of a team investigating how ancient carbon, locked away in Arctic permafrost for thousands of years, is now being transformed into carbon dioxide and released into the atmosphere.

Duke University researchers have identified a single, simple metric to guide antibiotic dosing that could bring an entire arsenal of first-line antibiotics back into the fight against drug-resistant pathogens.

A computer simulation created by Hannah Meredith, a biomedical engineering graduate fellow at Duke, revealed that a regimen based on a pathogen's recovery time could eliminate an otherwise resistant strain of bacteria. In theory, a database of recovery times for bacterial and antibiotic combinations could allow first-line antibiotics to clear many resistant infections.

The mosquito transmitted Chikungunya virus, which causes Chikungunya fever, is spreading continuously. No vaccine is so far available. Researchers of the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut have experimentally recombined segments of the virus surface protein E2, thus creating artificial proteins. The domain generated that way - "sAB+" - was able to confer a protective effect against Chikungunya virus to the animal. An immunization by means of this small protein fragment could thus provide a suitable approach to developing a Chikungunya vaccine.

Human tumors grown in mouse models have long been used to test promising anti-cancer therapies. However, when a human tumor is transplanted into a mouse, the mouse immune system must be knocked down so that it doesn't attack the foreign tumor tissue, thus allowing the tumor to grow. A University of Colorado Cancer Center study published in the journal Oncogene describes a new model, XactMice, in which human blood stem cells are used to grow a "humanized" mouse immune system prior to tumor transplantation.

The power of invisibility has long fascinated man and inspired the works of many great authors and philosophers. In a study from Sweden's Karolinska Institutet, a team of neuroscientists now reports a perceptual illusion of having an invisible body, and show that the feeling of invisibility changes our physical stress response in challenging social situations.

Analyzing the large volumes of data gathered by modern businesses and public services is problematic. Traditionally, relationships between the different parts of a network have been represented as simple links, regardless of how many ways they can actually interact, potentially loosing precious information. Only recently a more general framework has been proposed to represent social, technological and biological systems as multilayer networks, piles of 'layers' with each one representing a different type of interaction.