News Articles

(Vienna, Feb. 23, 2016) One in four cases of colorectal cancer (CRC) detected in a guiac faecal occult blood testing (gFOBT) programme are diagnosed within two years of a negative screening result, a study in the UEG Journal (1) has found, suggesting that gFOBT should be replaced by more sensitive screening methods to improve detection rates.
CRC is the most common type of digestive cancer in Europe (2) and annual incidence is predicted to rise by 12% by 2020 (3).

Archaeological and genetic analysis may indicate that three skeletons buried in medieval graves in France may have been Muslim, according to a study published February 24, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Yves Gleize from the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (Inrap) and University of Bordeaux, France, Fanny Mendisco from University of Bordeaux, France, and colleagues.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- The human brain has a remarkable defense system that filters bacteria and chemicals. For brain tumor patients, the barrier works almost too well by blocking most chemotherapy drugs.
Now, a team led by a University of Florida Health researcher has found that a laser system already used to kill brain tumors has another benefit: It opens a temporary "window" in the blood-brain barrier that enables crucial chemotherapy drugs to pass into the brain for up to six weeks. The findings are published today (Feb. 24) in the journal PLOS ONE.

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- One of the great joys in mathematics is the ability to use it to describe phenomena seen in the physical world, says University at Buffalo mathematician Gino Biondini.
With UB postdoctoral researcher Dionyssios Mantzavinos, Biondini has published a new paper that advances the art -- or shall we say, the math -- of describing a wave. The findings, published Jan. 27 in Physical Review Letters, are thought to apply to wave forms ranging from light waves in optical fibers to water waves in the sea.
The study explores what happens when a regular wave pattern has small irregularities, a question that scientists have been trying to answer for the last 50 years.

Agriculture is one of the few areas where government regulations have not caused costs to boom with little value to the public. In the past few decades, American science and technology have produced more food on less land with less environmental strain than ever thought possible. There is so much food people can self-identify with the organic growing process, something that would have meant starvation when organic was the only solution.

Self-organizing social behaviour in the so-called plant-animal, a 'solar-powered' species of marine flat worm that gains all its energy from the algae within its own body, has been demonstrated by researchers from the University of Bristol, UK.
Professor Nigel Franks in the School of Biological Sciences and colleagues, especially Dr Alan Worley, formerly of the School of Physics, made direct comparisons between videos of the real worms and computer simulations of virtual worms with different patterns of behaviour. This showed that individual plant-animal worms (Symsagittifera roscoffensis) interact with one another to coordinate their movements.

Microbirthing, which involves taking a swab from the mother's vagina and wiping this over the baby's mouth, eyes, face and skin shortly after birth by Cesarean section, is a growing fad, but there is no evidence this 'vaginal seeding' does anything positive, according to an editorial in the BMJ. Around one in four babies are born via caesarean section in the UK. 

Fish and other important resources are moving toward the Earth's poles as the climate warms, and wealth is moving with them, according to a new paper by scientists at Rutgers, Princeton, Yale, and Arizona State universities.
Climate change is forcing some species of migrating fish to shift their range toward the poles, which means big changes for people whose livelihoods depend on those fish.

APEX, the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment telescope, is located at 5100 metres above sea level on the Chajnantor Plateau in Chile's Atacama region. The ATLASGAL survey took advantage of the unique characteristics of the telescope to provide a detailed view of the distribution of cold dense gas along the plane of the Milky Way galaxy [1]. The new image includes most of the regions of star formation in the southern Milky Way [2].

A new editorial warns that newborns may develop infections from exposure to vaginal bacteria, and suggest that encouraging breast feeding and avoiding unnecessary antibiotics may be a much better idea for creating a healthy immune system in infants.
The term vaginal seeding, also called microbirthing, describes wiping babies with vaginal fluid after they have been born by Cesarean. The belief is that this boosts poorly-defined beneficial gut microbes that keep our immune systems healthy and so may reduce the risk of developing conditions such as asthma, food allergies, and hay fever in later life.

WASHINGTON, D.C., Feb. 23, 2016 -- Musical styles and genres differ around the world, but the emotional power of music is universally felt. To understand this evocative force, researchers in many fields, including information science, neural perception, and signal processing, investigate music's underlying structure, examining features such as the tone, timbre, and auditory and rhythmic features of a piece.
Now a team of Japanese scientists from the University of Tokyo has developed a new approach to analyzing musical structure. The new method overcomes many of the limits of previous tools. The researchers publish their results in the journal Chaos, from AIP Publishing.

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, a condition closely linked to obesity, affects roughly 25 percent of people in the U.S. There is no drug treatment for the disease, although weight loss can reduce the buildup of fat in the liver.
Now, studying mice, new research shows that a natural sugar called trehalose prevents the sugar fructose -- thought to be a major contributor to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease -- from entering the liver and triggers a cellular housekeeping process that cleans up excess fat buildup inside liver cells.
The research, by a team at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, appears Feb. 23 in the journal Science Signaling.