News Articles

Why is it that the origins of many serious diseases remain a mystery? In considering that question, a scientist at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine has come up with a unified molecular view of the indivisible unit of life, the cell, which may provide an answer.
Reviewing findings from multiple disciplines, Jamey Marth, Ph.D., UC San Diego Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, realized that only 68 molecular building blocks are used to construct these four fundamental components of cells: the nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), proteins, glycans and lipids. His work, which illustrates the primary composition of all cells, is published in the September issue of Nature Cell Biology.
Like the periodic table of elements, first published in 1869 by Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, is to chemistry, Marth’s visual metaphor offers a new framework for biologists.

Sarah Palin, the Republican nominee for vice president, is different from many female leaders around the world in at least one respect – her political career does not follow that of a male relative, according to an expert on women in global politics.
Many female leaders around the world had a family connection to a politically powerful male, said Pamela Paxton, associate professor of sociology and political science at Ohio State University.
“In many countries with traditional cultures, women are easily seen as ‘stand-ins’ for their father or husband,” said Paxton, who is co-author of the book "Women, Politics, and Power: A Global Perspective" (Pine Forge Press, 2007) with Melanie Hughes from the University of Pittsburgh. Often, women leaders achieve power when their male relative dies, is martyred, or otherwise is forced to leave office.

As if things weren’t tough enough for premature babies who have tubes down their throats and noses to survive, once the tubes are removed, they are often unable to take nourishment orally — that is, suck.
But 20 tube-fed preterm infants with respiratory distress syndrome treated with the NTrainer, a therapeutic device patented by the University of Kansas, rapidly learned to suck far better and transitioned to oral feeding faster than a control group of babies with the syndrome.
Respiratory distress syndrome, also known as hyaline membrane disease, is a common condition of prematurity, particularly in the youngest infants, because babies’ lungs are too immature to survive outside the womb without the help of a ventilator and/or oxygen. Overall, it is the seventh leading cause of death among infants younger than one year, fifth for African-American and third for Hispanic infants.

Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Seoul National University (SNU) have learned how to tweak a new class of polymer-based semiconductors to better control the location and alignment of the components of the blend.
Their recent results—how to move the top to the bottom—could enable the design of practical, large-scale manufacturing techniques for a wide range of printable, flexible electronic displays and other devices.
Organic semiconductors—novel carbon-based molecules that have similar electrical properties to more conventional semiconducting materials like silicon and germanium—are a hot research topic because practical, high-performance organic semiconductors would open up whole new categories of futuristic electronic devices. Think of tabloid-sized “digital paper” that you could fold up into your pocket or huge sheets of photovoltaic cells that are dirt cheap because they’re manufactured by—basically—ink-jet printing.

The largest study ever conducted of DNA evidence extracted from long-dead woolly mammoths points to a rockier past for the iconic Ice Age giants than many had suspected. The last mammoths left in Siberia 50,000 to 5,000 years ago weren't natives, they report in the September 4th Current Biology. Rather, they were North Americans that had migrated in and replaced the dwindling Siberian populations.
In the new study, the researchers analyzed mitochondrial DNA from 160 mammoth samples from across Holarctica (a region encompassing present day North America, Europe and Asia), representing most of radiocarbon time.

Down Syndrome (DS) belongs to the group of conditions called 'aneuploidies', defined by an abnormal loss or gain of genetic material, i.e. fragments of chromosomes or whole chromosomes. Aneuploidies cause congenital anomalies that are a prime cause of infant death in Europe and the USA, and are currently on the increase with advancing maternal age in European countries. The number of people with DS in Europe exceeds half a million.
The condition is more common than muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis, but the development of new therapeutic concepts is hindered by the fact that unlike muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis, where a single mutated gene causing the disease is known, the entire human chromosome 21 (containing around 300 genes) still has to be dissected into individual gene-dose contributions to the DS symptoms.
Scientists investigating the mechanisms of Down Syndrome have revealed the earliest developmental changes in embryonic stem cells caused by an extra copy of human chromosome 21 – the aberrant inheritance of which results in the condition. Their study is published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Astronomers have taken the closest look ever at the giant black hole in the center of the Milky Way. By combining telescopes in Hawaii, Arizona, and California, they detected structure at a tiny angular scale of 37 micro-arcseconds - the equivalent of a baseball seen on the surface of the moon, 240,000 miles distant. These observations are among the highest resolution ever done in astronomy.
Using a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), a team of astronomers led by Doeleman employed an array of telescopes to study radio waves coming from the object known as Sagittarius A* (A-star). In VLBI, signals from multiple telescopes are combined to create the equivalent of a single giant telescope, as large as the separation between the facilities. As a result, VLBI yields exquisitely sharp resolution.
The Sgr A* radio emission, at a wavelength of 1.3 mm, escapes the galactic center more easily than emissions at longer wavelengths, which tend to suffer from interstellar scattering. Such scattering acts like fog around a streetlamp, both dimming the light and blurring details. VLBI is ordinarily limited to wavelengths of 3.5 mm and longer; however, using innovative instrumentation and analysis techniques, the team was able to tease out this remarkable result from 1.3-mm VLBI data.

Yale molecular and evolutionary biologists in collaboration with Department of Energy scientists produced the full genome sequence of Trichoplax, one of nature's most primitive multicellular organisms, providing a new insight into the evolution of all higher animals.
The findings reported in Nature show that while Trichoplax has one of the smallest nuclear genomes found in a multi-cellular creature, it contains signature sequences for gene regulation found in more complex animals and humans. Further, it defines Trichoplax as a branching point of animal evolution.

A new study has found that mothers who delivered vaginally compared to caesarean section delivery (CSD) were significantly more responsive to the cry of their own baby, identified through MRI brain scans two to four weeks after delivery.
The results of the study in The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry suggest that vaginal delivery (VD) mothers are more sensitive to own baby-cry in the regions of the brain that are believed to regulate emotions, motivation and habitual behaviors.

In one week from today, the Large Hadron Collider(LHC) will take its first step 'back in time.' What is mass? What happened at the beginning of the universe? Are there other dimensions? We'll be on the way to finding out.
It's taken about 6,000 researchers, been over budget and behind schedule but it's finally ready to go.
If all goes according to plan, the superconducting magnets in the collider will zap atomic particles around the 17-mile tunnel at roughly the speed of light. Then the scientists will smash the particles together, replicating what happened mere nanoseconds after the first big bang.

We can keep suicidal individuals from committing suicide successfully by making sure they can't get a gun, say researchers at Harvard School of Public Health.
The article in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) was written by Matthew Miller, assistant professor of health policy and management ans associate director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, and David Hemenway, professor of health policy and director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center.
Suicide is the second-leading cause of death among Americans 40 years old and younger, according to their statistics. Among Americans of all ages, more than half of all completed suicides are gun suicides. Additionally, an estimated one-third to four-fifths of all suicide attempts, according to studies, are impulsive--with 24% taking less than 5 minutes between the decision to kill themselves and the actual attempt, while 70% took less than 1 hour.

Mice given quercetin, a naturally occurring substance found in fruits and vegetables, were less likely to contract the flu, according to a study published by The American Physiological Society. The study also found that stressful exercise increased the susceptibility of mice to the flu, but quercetin canceled out that negative effect.
Quercetin, a close chemical relative of resveratrol, is present in a variety of fruits and vegetables, including red onions, grapes, blueberries, tea, broccoli and red wine. It has been shown to have anti-viral properties in cell culture experiments and some animal studies, but none of these studies has looked specifically at the flu.
Although this study was done with mice, a recent human study found that people who took quercetin suffered fewer illnesses following three days of exhaustive exercise compared to those who did not. Unlike the mouse study, the humans were not inoculated with a virus.