News Articles

Boston, MA - Among pregnant women infected with HIV, the use of antiretroviral (ARV) medications early in pregnancy to treat their HIV or to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV does not appear to increase the risk of birth defects in their infants, according to a new study led by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). It is one of the largest studies to date to look at the safety of ARV use during pregnancy.
While the study found that overall risk was low--in keeping with previous research that has found ARV use in pregnancy to be generally safe--the researchers did find that one ARV drug, atazanavir, was associated with increased risk of birth defects and they said it should be studied further.

The adult human body is made up of about 37 trillion cells. Microbes, mainly bacteria, outnumber body cells by 10 to 1. This huge community of microbes, called the microbiome, affects the health, development and evolution of all multicellular organisms, including humans, according to the latest craze in health supplement marketing and plenty of science papers latching onto the fad.
Symbiotic microbes can help prevent infection by disease-causing pathogens but sometimes the interaction goes the other way, with a pathogen or disease disrupting the normal community of symbiotic bacteria. In a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of scientists from UC Santa Barbara say that a fungal pathogen of amphibians does just that.

The Inamori Foundation has awarded the 2014 Kyoto Prizes to biomedical engineer Dr. Robert Langer in medicine, theoretical physicist Professor Edward Witten in math, and Fukumi Shimura in the Arts. Each laureate received a diploma, a 20-karat gold Kyoto Prize medal and a cash gift of 50 million yen (approximately US $450,000) in recognition of lifelong contributions to society.  

The 1KITE project (1,000 Insect Transcriptome Evolution) seeks to understand the millions of living insect species that shape our terrestrial living space and both support and threaten our natural resources by analyzing more than 1,000 insect transcriptomes, a set of all RNA molecules.Using a dataset consisting of 144 carefully chosen species, 1KITE scientists have just presented reliable estimates on the dates of origin and relationships of all major insect groups based on the enormous molecular dataset they collected. They show that insects originated at the same time as the earliest terrestrial plants about 480 million years ago.

When a cell divides, it passes through a sequence of complex events and mitochondria, the organelles called the power plants of the cell, are the main source of energy for these processes: They convert food into energy the cell can use. Freiburg biochemists Dr. Angelika Harbauer and professor Chris Meisinger led a team that have discovered a signaling path that links these two key tasks, cell division and energy conversion. .

8 percent of our genome derives from retroviruses that inserted themselves into human sex cells millions of years ago and right now the koala retrovirus (KoRV) is invading koala genomes.Koalas are the only known organism where a retrovirus is transitioning from exogenous to endogenous. An exogenous retrovirus infects a host, inserts its genetic information into the cell’s DNA, and uses the host cell’s machinery to manufacture more viruses. When an exogenous retrovirus infects an egg or sperm cell and the viral genetic information is then passed down to the host’s offspring, the virus becomes an endogenous retrovirus (ERV). 

Patients with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as Lou Gehrig's Disease, have difficulty with action verbs: Why action verbs and not regular verbs or nouns? According to some papers, the fact that ALS patients experience it isn't the actual severe motor deficits of the disease, the greater linguistic difficulty with verbs denoting action compared to nouns depends on the motor deficit. The motor system plays a role in the semantic encoding of action verbs? Real or spurious correlations? A new tested this hypothesis and their conclusion suggests a major role for the “executive function”.

In the NFL, teams share revenue from national television contracts and to sell local tickets, if a team has not sold at least to a specific threshold, the game is blacked out locally. If enough people are attending, the game is shown to fans in the region
That appeals to 'hometown' fans. One satellite network shows all games to its package subscribers but otherwise fans are only going to see their local team. If they don't have one, they see something nearby. It is a rule and there is no choice.
In the modern mobile population, that may not be a wise strategy. Fans no longer live within an hour of where they grew up and a new paper finds that choosing to broadcast the local team isn't always the smartest ratings decision. Writing in 

Over a mile beneath the West African ocean, off the coast of Angola, are over 2,000 mounds of asphalt containing a wealth of deep-water creatures. A paper in Deep-Sea Research 1 examined the images and data captured at the site to build an intriguing picture of the life and geology of this underwater area. The naturally-occurring asphalt mounds are made up of the same substance that covers our roads. They range in size from single football-sized blobs to small hills several hundred meters across.

What is the best way to learn a dance sequence?
Professional dancers make it look easy. A choreographer rattles off a long list of moves, kicks and turns and the dancers somehow remember it all. But what about the rest of us who will be hitting the club this weekend?
Researchers from Bielefeld University and the Palucca University of Dance in Dresden are here to help. They  researched whether dancers learn a dance sequence better by seeing or by listening, that is, if a dance instructor first demonstrates the sequence, or if he or she first gives a spoken explanation.

An experiment with 42 people under functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) found that if people see pictures of others being loved and cared for, it subsequently reduces
the brain's threat monitor, the amygdala,
 response to threats. 
This occurred even if the person was not paying attention to the content of the first pictures.
The study in Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, suggests that being reminded of being loved and cared for dampens the threat response and may allow more effective functioning during, and activation of soothing resources after, stressful situations. This was particularly true for more anxious individuals.

In World War II, did people with bird feeders have substantially different chirping friends than we see today?Probably not, but a group of researchers warns than 2075 might look a lot less like then, or even 1975, or today. The distribution of birds in the United States could change a lot.A new U.S. Geological Survey study in
PLOS ONE
predicts where 50 bird species will breed, feed and live in the conterminous U.S. by 2075. While some types of birds, like the Baird's sparrow, could lose a significant amount of their current U.S. range, other ranges could nearly double.