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.
DNA molecules provide the "source code" for life in humans, plants, animals and some microbes. But now researchers report an initial study showing that the strands can also act as a glue to hold together 3-D-printed materials that could someday be used to grow tissues and organs in the lab. This first-of-its-kind demonstration of the inexpensive process is described in the brand-new journal ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering.
A variety of wheat that is resistant to a destructive fungal disease has been found to have specialized and protective cell walls, according to research published in BMC Plant Biology. These insights could help to produce stronger, disease-resistant varieties of durum wheat for improved pasta production.
Researchers have determined that languages with a wide range of tone pitches are more prevalent in regions with high humidity levels while languages with simpler tone pitches are mainly found in drier regions. They explain this by noting that the vocal folds require a humid environment to produce the right tone. That means climate and weather our voices too.
Two teams of astronomers have used computer models to look back nearly 13 billion years, when the Universe was less than 10 percent its present age, to determine how quasars - extremely luminous objects powered by supermassive black holes with the mass of a billion suns - regulate the formation of stars and the build-up of the most massive galaxies.
Using a combination of data gathered from powerful radio telescopes and supercomputer simulations, the teams found that a quasar spits out cold gas at speeds up to 2000 kilometers per second, and across distances of nearly 200,000 light years - much farther than has been observed before.
Diabetes has been described as an epidemic of modern times so why does it affect aboriginal people more?
Over the past several decades diabetes has become a prevalent health concern among Canada's First Nations communities, but it wasn't always so.
Organic semiconductors are prized for light emitting diodes (LEDs), field effect transistors (FETs) and photovoltaic cells. As they can be printed from solution, they provide a highly scalable, cost-effective alternative to silicon-based devices. Uneven performances, however, have been a persistent problem. Scientists have known that the performance issues originate in the domain interfaces within organic semiconductor thin films, but have not known the cause. This mystery now appears to have been solved.
A new study has identified genes involved in long-term memory in the worm as part of research aimed at finding ways to retain cognitive abilities during aging.
The study identified more than 750 genes involved in long-term memory, including many that had not been found previously and that could serve as targets for future research, said senior author Coleen Murphy, an associate professor of molecular biology and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University.
Some suggest that the universe naturally produces complexity. The emergence of life in general and perhaps even rational life, with its associated technological culture, may be extremely common, argues Kelly Smith, Associate Professor of Philosophy&Biological Sciences at Clemson, in a recent Space Policy paper.What's more, he suggests, this universal tendency has distinctly religious overtones and more knowledge of astrobiology may even establish a truly universal basis for morality.
UK doctors subject to complaints procedures are at significant risk of becoming severely depressed and suicidal, reveals research published in the online journal BMJ Open.
Those referred to the UK professional regulator, the General Medical Council, seem to be most at risk of mental ill health, the findings suggest.
The researchers base their findings on an anonymised online survey of more than 95,000 UK doctors in 2012, all of whom were members of the British Medical Association (BMA).
Emerging data on the role of inflammation and the immune system in the development, growth, and spread of breast tumors have focused increased attention on the role cytokines such as interleukin and transforming growth factor-β play in breast cancer initiation, protection, and metastasis.
A comprehensive overview of this new knowledge and its potential to lead to novel therapeutic approaches is presented in a Review article in Journal of Interferon & Cytokine Research.
Researchers have created a new approach that protects animal models against a type of genetic disruption that causes intellectual disability, including serious memory impairments and altered anxiety levels. The method focuses on treating the effects of mutations to a gene known as Syngap1. Damaging mutations in Syngap1 that reduce the number of functional proteins are one of the most common causes of sporadic intellectual disability and are associated with schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder.
Inflammation has long a target in Alzheimer's disease studies so a new finding in Neuron is counterintuitive. In the study, researchers hace uncovered the mechanism by which anti-inflammatory processes may trigger the disease and this anti-inflammatory process might actually trigger the build-up of sticky clumps of protein that form plaques in the brain. These plaques block brain cells' ability to communicate and are a well-known characteristic of the illness.
The finding suggests that Alzheimer's treatments might need to be tailored to patients depending on which forms of Apolipoprotein E, a major risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, these patients carry in their genes.
