Hospital for Special Surgery researchers have found that statins may be able to prevent miscarriages in women who are suffering from pregnancy complications caused by antiphospholipid syndrome (APS), according to a study in mice. In this autoimmune syndrome, the body produces antibodies directed at phospholipids, the main components of cell membranes. This news comes from a study published in the October issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation that is currently online in advance of print.
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AMES, Iowa – Ratnesh Kumar keeps his prototype soil sensors buried in a box under his desk. He hopes that one day farmers will be burying the devices under their crops.
Kumar is leading an Iowa State University research team that's developing transceivers and sensors designed to collect and send data about soil moisture within a field. Eventually the researchers are hoping the sensors will also collect data about soil temperature and nutrient content.
Researchers report on a previously unknown relationship between stem cell potency and the metabolic rate of their mitochondria –a cell's energy makers. Stem cells with more active mitochondria also have a greater capacity to differentiate and are more likely to form tumors.
These findings, appearing this week in JBC, could lead to methods of enriching the best stem cells from a population for therapeutic use and may provide some insights into the role of stem cells in cancer.
Shinya Yamanaka MD, PhD, of Kyoto University and the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease (GICD) has taken another step forward in improving the possibilities for the practical application of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell technology.
National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientists have identified a protein that plays matchmaker between two key types of white blood cells, T and B cells, enabling them to interact in a way that is crucial to establishing long-lasting immunity after an infection. Their finding may also explain why some individuals who have a genetic defect that prevents them from making this protein—called SAP—suffer from lethal infections with a common virus that otherwise is rarely fatal (Epstein-Barr virus), while others with this genetic defect have problems with B-cell lymphomas.
INDIANAPOLIS – Investigators from the Herman B Wells Center for Pediatric Research at the Indiana University School of Medicine are focusing on a family of blood proteins that they hope holds a key to decreasing the toxic effects of chemotherapy in children and adults.
Their findings may one day help in the development of targeted therapies for leukemia, multiple myeloma and other cancers of the blood.
Plowing, sowing, spreading fertilizer, harvesting – The days are gone when farmers labored from dawn to dusk in the fields. Today's modern farmer spends a considerable part of each day sitting in front of a computer. Everything has to be documented: The crops being cultivated, the parcels of land on which they are grown, the types of fertilizer and pesticide employed. He has to hire the services of specialized firms for the harvest, order next year's seed, sell the farm's products.
Whereas a few years ago, organic products were sold exclusively by small health-food stores, they can now be found in the majority of supermarkets. A growing number of consumers prefer to buy organic food that has been grown without the use of chemical pesticides. Conventional farming practice involves treating seeds with a mixture of chemicals: Fungicides to protect the emerging seedlings from attack by microscopic fungi, insecticides against wireworms, aphids and biting insects, herbicides to suppress weeds.
New Haven, Conn. — Yale scientists have created nanowire sensors coupled with simple microprocessor electronics that are both sensitive and specific enough to be used for point-of-care (POC) disease detection, according to a report in Nano Letters.
The association between gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) and laryngeal disorders has been recognized since the late 1960s. Chronic laryngeal signs and symptoms associated GERD are often referred to as reflux laryngitis or laryngopharyngeal reflux (LPR). However, the cause-and-effect relationship between GERD and LPR still remains elusive..
BA, the congenital absence or destruction of intra- or extra-hepatic biliary system, affects about 5 - 10/100 000 live births. End stage liver cirrhosis developed in some BA patients later in life. As a result of liver cirrhosis, regenerative nodules may develop in cirrhotic liver including a specific type termed MRN. The clinical significance and pathological features of MRN have been discussed in some articles. However, the image features of MRN and how to differentiate them from HCC have yet to be elucidated.
Excessive activation of inflammatory mediator cascade during SAP is a major cause of distant organ injury and the high mortality. Cytokines such as TNF- alpha and IL-1 beta are released early in the development of systemic inflammatory response. This leaves a narrow therapeutic window for administration of therapeutics and delayed delivery of that anti-inflammatory therapeutics is not effective after the inflammatory mediator cascade has developed.
The stickleback fish, Gasterosteus aculeatus, is one of the most thoroughly studied organisms in the wild, and has been a particularly useful model for understanding variation in physiology, behavior, life history and morphology caused by different ecological situations in the wild.
On biological levels from molecular and genetic to developmental and morphological, and finally ending with the population level, it has proven far more complex than even imagined.
A research team from the Peninsula Medical School, the University of Exeter, the University of Plymouth and the University of Iowa, have found evidence linking Bisphenol A (BPA) to diabetes and heart disease in adults.
Their research paper is to be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Wednesday 17 September and it is the first time that evidence has emerged of the association between higher BPA levels and disease in adults.