DURHAM, N.C., and SINGAPORE – Scientists at a Duke University medical school in Singapore have found a new way to study cancer that could be very useful for developing targeted therapies against cancer and possibly many other diseases.
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Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified the primary immune sensor that detects the presence of stomach viruses in the body. They show that the sensor – a protein called MDA-5 – triggers an immune response that revs up the body's defenses to fight off the infection. This knowledge may help develop a treatment that prevents or reduces infection, the researchers suggest in their study, published July 18th in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens.
Understanding how interactions between genes and the environment influence social behavior is a fundamental research goal. In a new study, researchers at the University of Lausanne and the University of Georgia have shed light on the numbers and types of genes that may control social organization in fire ant colonies.
"Survival of the fittest" is the catch phrase of evolution by natural selection. While natural selection favors the most fit organisms around, evolutionary biologists have long wondered whether this leads to the best possible organisms in the long run.
A team of researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, led by Drs. Matthew Cowperthwaite and Lauren Ancel Meyers, has developed a new theory, which suggests that life may not always be optimal. The results of this study appear July 18th in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology.
The UK government may save up to £18.6 million a year by deciding to use the HPV vaccine Cervarix, given that it is equally effective as the more expensive Gardasil in preventing cervical abnormalities, according to a study published on BMJ.com today.
Every year in the UK nearly 3 000 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer caused by human papillomaviruses (HPV). Some of these viruses also cause over 100 000 diagnosed cases of anogenital warts.
Every hospital emergency department should share information about violent incidents with local crime reduction agencies to tackle the problem of knife crime, says an expert in this week's BMJ.
Professor Jonathan Shepherd, Director of the Violence Research Group at Cardiff University, believes anonymous data should be collected by all emergency departments on the locations and times that violence occurs and the types of weapons used, and then shared with crime reduction partnerships, so that violence "hotspots" can be identified and targeted.
Drugs that have helped treat millions of rheumatoid arthritis sufferers may hold the key to many more medical conditions, including atherosclerosis – a leading cause of heart disease – says the researcher who jointly invented and developed them.
Professor Marc Feldmann will tell scientists attending the 2008 Congress of European Pharmacological Societies (EPHAR) – hosted by the British Pharmacological Society – that drugs he and colleagues helped develop have already proved successful against other autoimmune diseases.
Breast cancer research needs to investigate how a person's ethnicity influences their response to treatment and its outcome, according to a new Comment piece in today's Lancet (18 July) by researchers from Imperial College London.
Emerging evidence suggests that particular drugs may benefit people from one ethnic group more than others, because of differences in their genetic makeup. However, most key trials looking at treatments for breast cancer have been carried out in predominantly white populations in Europe, North America and Australasia.
In studying how animals change size as they evolve, biologists have unearthed several interesting patterns. For instance, most species are small, but the largest members of a taxonomic group -- such as the great white shark, the Komodo dragon, or the African elephant – are often thousands or millions of times bigger than the typical species. Now for the first time two SFI researchers explain these patterns within an elegant statistical framework.
CHICAGO — A recent study led by Rahul Khare, MD, emergency department physician and assistant director of operations at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, sought to determine the cost-effectiveness of utilizing a CT scanner to evaluate low-risk chest pain patients in the emergency room.
Commonly viewed as an inevitable consequence of aging and often ignored in clinical practice, falls among the elderly were cut by 11 percent when researchers at Yale School of Medicine used a combination of fall prevention educational campaigns and interventions aimed at encouraging clinicians to incorporate fall-risk assessment and management into their practices.
Postmenopausal women who regularly sleep more than nine hours a night may have an increased risk of ischemic stroke, researchers reported in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association.
Compared to women sleeping seven hours, the risk of ischemic stroke was 60-70 percent higher for those sleeping nine hours or more, said lead author Jiu-Chiuan Chen, M.D., Sc.D., assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina's School of Public Health in Chapel Hill.
SALINAS, CA - The lettuce cut and packaged for food service and salad mixes is an increasingly important component of the produce industry. Lettuce is highly perishable, and the cutting required in processing further shortens its shelf life.
Packaging cut lettuce and other fresh produce in semipermeable plastic films extends shelf life via a technique called "modified-atmosphere packaging". The success of modified-atmosphere (MA) packaging for lettuce and certain salad greens has led to innovative products, marketing strategies, and enhanced sales to consumers.
The Internet gives scientists and researchers instant access to an astonishing number of academic journals. So what is the impact of having such a wealth of information at their fingertips? The answer, according to new research released today in the journal Science, is surprising--scholars are actually citing fewer papers in their own work, and the papers they do cite tend to be more recent publications. This trend may be limiting the creation of new ideas and theories.
Troy, N.Y. – A new technique for growing single-crystal nanorods and controlling their shape using biomolecules could enable the development of smaller, more powerful heat pumps and devices that harvest electricity from heat.
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have discovered how to direct the growth of nanorods made up of two single crystals using a biomolecular surfactant. The researchers were also able to create "branched" structures by carefully controlling the temperature, time, and amount of surfactant used during synthesis.