After decades of public safety campaigns focused on drinking and driving, it may be time to focus on the seventh leading cause of injury-related death, according to Bureau of Occupational Health and Injury Prevention at New York State Department of Health and Columbia University scholars looking at New York State.
In parts of the country that do not have icebergs washing up on shore or falling from the sky, it is almost spring planting season. For tomatoes, that mean unless you use a toxic organic or synthetic chemical, there is a chance of bacterial infection, leading to stunted growth and less nutritional value. The discovery of new regulations of defense pathways for plants could lead to helping those home-grown tomatoes fight off certain bacteria better and even have implications for pear trees, roses, soybeans and rice.Tomatoes infected with speck disease often have wilted leaves and damaged fruit. Credit: University of Missouri
A team of scientists have successfully transferred a receptor that recognizes bacteria from the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, a dicot, to wheat, a monocot. The receptor can trigger a defensive response and confers increased resistance to bacterial disease. The research findings demonstrate that the signaling pathways or circuitry downstream of the receptor are conserved between evolutionary distant monocots and dicots.
A new paint makes robust self-cleaning surfaces and can be applied to clothes, paper, glass and steel and when combined with adhesives, maintains its self-cleaning properties after being wiped, scratched with a knife and scuffed with sandpaper.
Self-cleaning surfaces work by being extremely repellent to water but often stop working when they are damaged or exposed to oil. The new paint creates a more resilient surface that is resistant to everyday wear and tear, so could be used for a wide range of real-world applications from clothing and cars, say the researchers.
Bacteria that live on iron were found for the first time at three well-known vent sites along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, one of the longest undersea mountain ranges in the world. Scientists report that these bacteria likely play an important role in deep-ocean iron cycling, and are dominant members of communities near and adjacent to sulfur-rich, black-smoker hydrothermal vents prevalent along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
The origin of life remains a mystery with more questions than answers. How were molecules created? How did they assemble into large structures? Among the conundrums, the "homochirality" phenomenon upon which amino acids and sugars form is particularly fascinating. The single-handedness of biological molecules has fascinated scientists since Pasteur first separated the enantiomorphic crystals of a tartrate salt more than 150 years ago because the homochirality of biological molecules is a signature of life.
Would you want to know if you or your children had risk of hereditary cancer, a genetic risk for cardiovascular disease or carried the gene associated with developing Alzheimer's disease - even if they were risks that wouldn't be relevant for possibly decades or didn't have a cure? Researchers used data from a cross-sectional online survey of a nationally-representative sample of the U.S. population that was conducted as part of the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health and found that 80 percent showed the same interest in genome sequencing for themselves as they did for their kids and 59 percent wanted to know if they had disease risks.
Academics have written a lot of articles claiming their competitors in the private sector selectively publish trials that favor their own interests don't care as much about transparency as academia, but is that really true? When it comes to investigational drugs, devices and biologic therapies, the data is available and it shows that industry was actually 3X more likely to comply with legal requirements than academic studies after disclosure was mandated.
Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University's Brain Mechanisms for Behaviour Unit have found a surprise upon mapping the precise connectivity inside a brain structure called the neostriatum. The cell groups here do not seem to be talking to each other, and are less interdependent in their functioning than previously suspected. Their findings were published in Brain Structure and Function.
Once upon a time it was believed that greedy insurance companies were bad for patients - now they are a sign of the have's and have nots. A new analysis in Neurosurgery finds that brain tumor patients with private insurance have fewer medical complications and thus are in the hospital less than those who are on Medicaid or were uninsured between 2002 and 2011.
People have highly variable views on how much overdetection is acceptable in cancer screening, finds a UK survey in The BMJ this week. The authors say invitations for screening "should include clear information on the likelihood and consequences of overdetection to allow people to make an informed choice."
This article is part of a series on overdetection (overdiagnosis) looking at the risks and harms to patients of expanding definitions of disease and increasing use of new diagnostic technologies.
Findings published today in Scientific Reports looked at the pattern of variation of the South Asian monsoon over time and compared it with the evolution of African mole rats and bamboo rats as revealed by a full analysis of their relationships coupled with studies of their distribution in space and through time and of their evolutionary rates.
They found the first proof that weakening and strengthening monsoon rains played a key role in the evolution of these species. Over a period of 24 million years, the changes observed in the teeth and head shape of the rodents examined, matched the varying strength of the monsoon. Of the 38 species studied only six still exist today and the changing rains seem to have driven several species into extinction.
Researchers trying to understand why some people have more severe wheat-related health problems than others, and with different products, have found new clues in how the grain's proteins, including gluten, change when cooked and digested. Gianfranco Mamone and colleagues say that boiling pasta releases some of its potential allergens, while other proteins persist throughout cooking and digestion. Their findings lend new insights that could ultimately help celiac patients and people allergic to wheat.
