News Articles

An international team led by researchers from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has identified a genetic variant that is a major contributor to small size in dogs. The findings appear in the April 6, 2007 issue of the journal Science.

Most people want to be normal. So, when we are given information that underscores our deviancy, the natural impulse is to get ourselves as quickly as we can back toward the center.
Marketers know about this impulse, and a lot of marketing makes use of social norms. This is especially true of campaigns targeting some kind of public good: reducing smoking or binge drinking, for example, or encouraging recycling. The problem with these campaigns is that they often do not work. Indeed, they sometimes appear to have the opposite of their intended effect.

Starting to breed late in life is a bad idea if you want to maximise the number of offspring that you produce - or so the theory goes.
But doubt has now been cast on this hypothesis - one of the biggest assumptions in behavioural ecology - by researchers from the universities of Bristol and Cape Town and published today in Current Biology.

University of Cincinnati (UC) neuroradiologists believe a brain imaging approach that combines standard magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans with specialized contrast-enhanced techniques could lead to more effective diagnoses in patients with difficult-to-detect blood clots in veins of the brain.
James Leach, MD, reports these findings in the April issue of the American Journal of Neuroradiology. This is the first study to correlate the clinical importance of data gleaned from standard MRI scans and detailed contrast-enhanced imaging techniques in patients with chronic thrombosis (blood clots) in veins of the brain.

There are two types of screening programs – proactive and opportunistic. Proactive screening uses population registers to invite people to be screened at regular intervals, while opportunistic screening targets people attending health services for unrelated reasons.
The value of opportunistic chlamydia screening is being called into question.

Seasonal nomadism, migration, and resettlement have always been important for the people living in the northern Polar Regions as these movements are key for their survival. In the past, such movements were usually triggered by the local conditions which their continued existence is affected by activities such as aggregation in temporary winter villages near the sea ice for seal hunting and summer dispersal inland looking for wild reindeer.
Population movements and concentration have, since the 20th century, been more affected by outside factors such as the changes in policies reflecting market or state policies without a local character. The shift is causing damage to the social fabric of these societies.

Virginia Commonwealth University researchers have decoded the genome of a bacteria normally present in the healthy human mouth that can cause a deadly heart infection if it enters the bloodstream.
The finding enables scientists to better understand the organism, Streptococcus sanguinis, and develop new strategies for treatment and infection prevention.

Transmission electron micrograph of S. sanguinis. Credit: Image courtesy of Lauren Turner/VCU.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have discovered how cells fine-tune their oxygen use to make do with whatever amount is available at the moment.
Too little oxygen threatens life by compromising mitochondria that power it, so when oxygen is scarce, cells appear to adjust by replacing one protein with an energy-efficient substitute that "is specialized to keep the motor running smoothly even as it begins to run out of gas," says Gregg Semenza, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of pediatrics and director of the vascular biology program in the Institute for Cell Engineering at Hopkins. "This is one way that cells maintain energy production under less than ideal conditions." A report on the work is in the April 6 issue of Cell.

In advanced cancer, anti-tumor therapies often work only partially or not at all, and tumors progress following treatment.
Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center scientists have now linked a treatment-induced growth factor to the cancer’s future spread.

For several types of cancer, persistently high levels of the soluble factor TGF-beta in the blood after surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation therapy correlate with increased risk of early metastasis and a poor prognosis.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine & School of Engineering and Applied Science have discovered a better way to deliver drugs to tumors. By using a cylindrical-shaped carrier they were able sustain delivery of the anticancer drug paclitaxel to an animal model of lung cancer ten times longer than that delivered on spherical-shaped carriers. These findings have implications for drug delivery as well as for better understanding cylinder-shaped viruses like Ebola and H5N1 influenza.

Nanospheres in flow are readily captured non-specifically by cells, as imaged in single particle fluorescence (left).

In findings the authors called "unexpected and striking," researchers found that a new regulating messenger IP4, a small soluble molecule, augments the binding of three different PH domain proteins to one of the most commonly recognized membrane lipids, PIP3. The study also showed that inhibiting production of IP4 can result in reduced protein binding to membranes and reduced activation of key signaling molecules in developing T cells, leading to a block of T cell maturation and to severe immunodeficiency in animal models.