News Articles

When a cell's chromosomes lose their ends, the cell usually kills itself to stem the genetic damage - University of Utah biologists say their discovery about how those cells evade suicide and start down the path to cancer may lead to new treatments.
A new study of fruit flies is the first to show in animals that losing just one telomere, the end of a chromosome, can lead to many abnormalities in a cell's chromosomes, which are strands of DNA that carry genes.
"The essential point is that loss of a single telomere may be a primary event that puts a cell on the road to cancer," says Kent Golic, a professor of biology at the University of Utah and senior author of the study, published in the journal Genetics.

A new study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry says that women who smoke are at greater risk of developing major depressive disorder. Australian researchers from the University of Melbourne and Geelng's Barwon Health assessed a group of 1043 Australian women, whose health had been monitored for a decade as part of the Geelong Osteoporosis Study.
On their ten year follow up participants were given an additional test of a psychiatric assessment.
Results revealed that women with depression were more likely to have been smokers than those without depression. Compared with non-smokers, the likelihood for developing depression more than doubled for heavy smokers (those who smoked more than 20 cigarettes a day).

Clear air turbulence (CAT) is energy associated with gravity waves — phenomena in the atmosphere that look like ocean waves but which can occur in clear air. They can be created by air flow over mountains, frontal boundaries or other causes.
The type of gravity wave that John Knox, an assistant professor in the department of geography at the University of Georgia, and his colleagues identified as a possible source of airplane flight bumpiness comes from a different source; these waves are spontaneously generated and associated with jet streams at high altitudes, near cruising levels for airplanes.
Their new method outlined in the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences could help pilots chart new courses around these patches of rough but clear air that can turn an otherwise unremarkable flight into a nightmare.

Wind farms pose less of a threat to farmland birds than previously feared, new research has found. The study, published this week in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology, helps resolve a potentially major environmental conflict: how to meet renewable energy targets at the same time as reversing dramatic declines in biodiversity on European farmland.
Dr Mark Whittingham and colleagues from Newcastle University conducted bird surveys on arable farmland around two wind farms in the East Anglian fens. They recorded almost 3,000 birds from 23 different species, including five red-listed species of high conservation concern – the yellowhammer, the Eurasian tree sparrow, the corn bunting, Eurasian skylark and the common reed bunting.

An analysis of news media coverage of medical studies indicates that news articles often fail to report pharmaceutical company funding and frequently refer to medications by their brand names, both potential sources of bias, according to a study in the October 1 issue of JAMA.
New articles represent an important source of medical information for many patients, and even some physicians. "An increasingly recognized source of commercial bias in medical research is the funding of studies by companies with a financial interest in the results," the authors write. Little is known about how frequently news articles report the funding sources of the medical research they report on, or how frequently news articles use brand medication names instead of generic names, which could create commercial bias.

A link between reduced levels of the 'stress hormone' cortisol and antisocial behaviour in male adolescents has been discovered by a research team at the University of Cambridge.
Levels of cortisol in the body usually increase when people undergo a stressful experience, such as public speaking, sitting an exam, or having surgery. It enhances memory formation and is thought to make people behave more cautiously and to help them regulate their emotions, particularly their temper and violent impulses.
The new research, funded by the Wellcome Trust, shows that adolescents with severe antisocial behaviour do not exhibit the same increase in cortisol levels when under stress as those without antisocial behaviour.

Sunnybrook researcher Dr. Donald Redelmeier and Stanford University statistician Robert Tibshirani have found an increased risk of fatal motor vehicle crashes on United States (US) presidential election days.
US presidential elections have large effects on public health by influencing policy, the economy, and military action. "Whether the US presidential electoral process has a direct effect on public health had never been tested despite the endless media commentary and the 1 billion dollars spent on this year's election alone," says Dr. Donald Redelmeier.

It's not what you take but the way that you take it that can produce different results in women who take hormone replacement therapy (HRT), according to new research on the association between HRT and heart attacks, published the European Heart Journal [1] today.
The study is the largest to look at the effects of HRT since the Women's Health Initiative trial was stopped early after finding that HRT increased the risk of women developing a range of conditions including breast cancer and thromboembolism.
The research is an observational study of 698,098 healthy Danish women, aged 51-69, who were followed between 1995-2001. It has found that overall there was no increased risk of heart attacks in current users of HRT compared to women who had never taken it.

The detailed study, called the ACS Nearby Galaxy Survey Treasury (ANGST) program, explored a region called the Local Volume, where galaxy distances range from 6.5 million light-years to 13 million light-years from Earth.
A typical galaxy contains billions of stars but looks smooth when viewed through a conventional telescope because the stars appear blurred together. In contrast, the galaxies observed in this new survey are close enough to Earth that the sharp view provided by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 can resolve the brightness and colour of some individual stars. This allows scientists to determine the history of star formation within a galaxy and tease out subtle features in a galaxy's shape.

Researchers have identified two new genes – and confirmed the role of a third gene – associated with increased risk of higher levels of uric acid in the blood, which can lead to gout, a common, painful form of arthritis. Combined, the three genetic variations were associated with up to a 40-fold increased risk in developing gout. The findings suggest that genetic testing could one day be used to identify individuals at risk for gout before symptoms develop, as well as determine who might benefit from medications to prevent the development of gout.
The genes were identified using data from two large genome-wide association studies – genetic variations of nearly 7,700 participants from NHLBI's Framingham Heart Study SHARe (SNP Health Association Resource) and more than 4,100 participants in NWO's Rotterdam Study. Researchers then replicated their finding using data from nearly 14,900 participants in NHLBI's Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study (ARIC).

The Captain can't freeze smelly fish that's past its best - and Icelandic scientists can now help him out by detecting the levels of stench-making bacteria faster than ever before.
The research in the Royal Society of Chemistry's Journal of Environmental Monitoring reports a new method to detect bacteria that break down dead fish and produce the distasteful smell of rotting fish. It opens the door to a standard of quality control even higher and speedier than the finely-tuned nose of the bushy-bearded Birdseye.
Using a technique based on the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), Eyjófur Reynisson and colleagues from Matis-Icelandic Food Research, Reykjavik, can assess the levels of Pseudomonas bacteria in fish in just five hours. This is four times faster than the current quickest method, which involves traditional cultivation of the bacteria Pseudomonas, the root cause of stinking fish.

There's a lot of truth in the old proverb "experience is the best teacher," and apparently it even applies to 10-month-old infants.
Researchers have found that infants who had an opportunity to use a plastic cane to get an out-of-reach toy were better able to understand the goal of another person's use of a similar tool than were infants who had previously only watched an adult use a cane to retrieve a toy.