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A paradigm shift in medical education is needed, one with more emphasis on training future physicians to enhance their empathy skills and to learn to view patients as persons, not just cases, a medical education specialist at Jefferson Medical College says.
"If we want to train physicians with more empathy, then education must shift from emphasizing only the biomedical to also providing a biopsychosocial framework, as well and a more complete picture of patients as persons," says Mohammadreza Hojat, Ph.D., research professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.
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Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania Schools of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine have determined a way to pre-screen cancer patients to see if they are suitable candidates for proteasome inhibitors, a promising class of anti-cancer drugs. They propose to test for p53, a well-known tumor-suppressor protein that is broken down by cellular machinery called proteasomes. This study appears online in the journal Blood, in advance of print publication in June 2007.
In cancer patients whose tumors do not produce p53, proteasome inhibitors might be ineffective. This patient group could be spared unnecessary treatment with possible harmful side effects.

After injury, even adult muscles can heal very well because they have a reserve supply of muscle stem cells, called satellite cells, which they can utilize for repair. Until now, it was unclear how this supply of satellite and muscle progenitor cells, out of which both muscle cells as well as satellite cells develop, keeps itself “fresh”. Developmental biologists Professor Carmen Birchmeier, Dr. Elena Vasyutina, and Diana Lenhard of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch, Germany, have now demonstrated that a molecular switch, abbreviated RBP-J, regulates this “fountain of youth”. If the switch is absent, the satellite cells generate muscle cells in an uncontrolled way, resulting in the depletion of the satellite cell reserves.

A group of European researchers has developed a spinal cord model of the salamander and implemented it in a novel amphibious salamander-like robot. The robot changes its speed and gait in response to simple electrical signals, suggesting that the distributed neural system in the spinal cord holds the key to vertebrates’ complex locomotor capabilities.

The EPFL Salamander Robot walks down to the waters of Lake Geneva. Credit: Photograph by A. Badertscher, courtesy Biologically Inspired Robotics Group, EPFL

ver wonder why some women seem to be more ill-tempered than others? University of Pittsburgh researchers have found that behaviors such as anger, hostility and aggression may be genetic, rooted in variations in a serotonin receptor gene. Indrani Halder, Ph.D., of the Cardiovascular Behavioral Medicine Program at the University of Pittsburgh, will present the findings today at the American Psychosomatic Society's Annual Meeting, held in Budapest, Hungary.
Previous studies have associated the hormone serotonin with anger and aggression in both humans and animals and have shown that increased serotonin activity is related to a decrease in angry and aggressive behaviors.

Several times a week, astronomers detect the violent death cry of a massive star -- an extraordinarily energetic release of gamma rays that takes place in just a matter of seconds to minutes, called a gamma-ray burst (GRB). The GRB's ejecta, which is thought to be beamed in narrow jets, slams into interstellar gas at near light speed. This violent collision shocks the material and produces a bright afterglow that can radiate brightly at X-ray and other wavelengths for several days, or even a few weeks.

Like a piece of chalk dissolving in vinegar, marine life with hard shells is in danger of being dissolved by increasing acidity in the oceans.
Ocean acidity is rising as sea water absorbs more carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere from power plants and automobiles. The higher acidity threatens marine life, including corals and shellfish, which may become extinct later this century from the chemical effects of carbon dioxide, even if the planet warms less than expected.
A new study by University of Illinois atmospheric scientist Atul Jain, graduate student Long Cao and Carnegie Institution scientist Ken Caldeira suggests that future changes in ocean acidification are largely independent of climate change.

Acrux announced positive results from its Phase 1 clinical studies
using two unique contraceptive skin sprays, each containing a progestin and an estrogen.
The first study was a Phase I, pharmacokinetic study, investigating the delivery of a formulation combining Nestorone® and the synthetic estrogen, Ethinyl Estradiol. A single dose of the combination formulation was applied to the forearm of healthy volunteers.
The results showed that the dosing of the contraceptive spray provided effective delivery of both contraceptive agents, with blood concentrations of Nestorone® and Ethinyl Estradiol in the target range expected to provide effective contraception.
The spray was well tolerated, with no serious adverse events recorded.

Could you survive a day like Jack Bauer has on the Fox television show "24?" Maybe not, and it might not be just because you lack counter-terrorism training.
People are known to differ markedly in their response to sleep deprivation, but the biological underpinnings of these differences have remained difficult to identify. Researchers have now found that a genetic difference in a so-called clock gene, PERIOD3, makes some people particularly sensitive to the effects of sleep deprivation. The findings, reported by Antoine Viola, Derk-Jan Dijk, and colleagues at the University of Surrey's Sleep Research Center, appear online this week in the journal Current Biology.

Let’s say a college student enters a classroom to take a test. She probably already has an idea how she will do—knowledge available before she actually takes out a pencil. But do animals possess the same ability to think about what they know or don’t know?
A new study by researchers from the University of Georgia, just published in the journal Current Biology, shows that laboratory rats do.

University College London researchers have found the first physiological evidence that invisible subliminal images do attract the brain's attention on a subconscious level. The wider implication for the study, published in Current Biology, is that techniques such as subliminal advertising, now banned in the UK but still legal in the USA, certainly do leave their mark on the brain.
Using fMRI, the study looked at whether an image you aren't aware of ¬– but one that reaches the retina – has an impact on brain activity in the primary visual cortex, part of the occipital lobe. Subjects' brains did respond to the object even when they were not conscious of having seen it.

A protein known as the "master watchman of the genome" for its ability to guard against cancer-causing DNA damage has been found to provide an entirely different level of cancer protection: By prompting the skin to tan in response to ultraviolet light from the sun, it deters the development of melanoma skin cancer, the fastest-increasing form of cancer in the world.
In a study in the March 9 issue of the journal Cell, researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute report that the protein, p53, is not only linked to skin tanning, but also may play a role in people's seemingly universal desire to be in the sun – an activity that, by promoting tanning, can reduce one's risk of melanoma.