Twitter users who are happy tend to be more connected with other happy users. This is the confirmation of a property of social networks known as assortativity: a measure of to what extent people who tend to connect with each other share certain characteristics. A study conceived by Vera Pancaldi and Daniel Rico from the Structural Biology and Biocomputing Programme at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), led by Alfonso Valencia, has redefined this measure in order to better understand the 3D organisation of DNA inside the cell nucleus.
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The proboscidean fossil record in China is characterized by a high evolutionary rate, wide spatio-temporal distribution and richness of environmental indicators. Therefore, proboscideans make important indicator fossils for reconstructing terrestrial palaeoenvironments in the Chinese late Cenozoic.
A new generation of drugs that prevent cancer and Alzheimer's could be developed, thanks to research from the University of Warwick.
Dr Ioannis Nezis at the School of Life Sciences has led a research team to identify, and create a database of, the proteins needed for an essential cellular process, autophagy, which keeps our bodies healthy, but which declines as we age.
Soft electronic devices, such as a smartphone on your wrist and a folding screen in your pocket, are looking to much improve your lifestyle in the not-too-distant future. That is, if we could find ways to make electronic devices out of soft organic materials instead of the existing rigid inorganic materials.
Scientists at the University of Basel have developed nanoparticles which can serve as efficient contrast agents for magnetic resonance imaging. This new type of nanoparticles produce around ten times more contrast than the actual contrast agents and are responsive to specific environments. The journal Chemical Communications has published these results.
As part of a phase II study at Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Berlin Institute of Health, two obese patients with a rare genetic disorder were given a drug treatment to stimulate the satiety center in the brain. After only a few weeks, both patients, which were severely hyperphagic before the study start, showed a normalization of their hunger feeling as well as a significant reduction of body weight. Results from this study have been published in the current edition of the New England Journal of Medicine*.
New research from North Carolina State University connects several pesticides commonly used by farmers with both allergic and non-allergic wheeze, which can be a sensitive marker for early airway problems.
Since the start of the HIV epidemic, there have been speculations as to why HIV and the immunodeficiency syndrome it causes have spread so much more in Africa than in other countries around the world. Scientists from the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) have now, for the first time, confirmed one reason for this: in a cohort study conducted in Tanzania, they discovered that an infection with the filarial nematode Wuchereria bancrofti increases the risk of HIV infection by two to three fold. The study has recently been published in the Lancet.
The glow of fireflies at dusk is a welcome sign of summer. The same enzyme that helps give these familiar bugs their characteristic flash of yellow, yields red light in acidic conditions. Similar enzymes are responsible for red and green lights in other beetles. Despite years of study, however, scientists still don't know the molecular details of how the enzyme works. Now, in the ACS journal Biochemistry, one team reports new insights into this mystery.
The first ever satellite tracking study of one the world's endangered seal species has revealed new information about their migration habits and hunting patterns.
Using satellite trackers, scientists humanely tagged and followed 75 Caspian seals for up to 11 and a half months, as part of a four year study into their behaviour. The species is found only in the land-locked waters of the Caspian Sea.
They uncovered surprising variation among individuals for when and where they migrated, how far they travelled and how they went about finding food.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - More than 36 million people worldwide, including 1.2 million in the U.S., are living with an HIV infection. Today's anti-retroviral cocktails block how HIV replicates, matures and gets into uninfected cells, but they can't eradicate the virus.
People are more likely to delegate decisions--or "pass the buck"--when faced with choices that affect others than when those decisions affect only themselves, according to new research from Mary Steffel, assistant professor of marketing in the D'Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University.
GALVESTON, Texas - In a normal full-term pregnancy, signals from the mature organs of the fetus and the aging placental membranes and placenta prompt the uterus' muscular walls to begin the labor and delivery process. It's still unclear how these signals accomplish this goal or how they reach from the fetal side to the maternal side.
A team from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston has unlocked key clues in understanding what triggers the birthing process, according to research findings recently published in PLOS ONE.
Philadelphia, PA, August 3, 2016 - Estrogen occurs naturally in cow's milk. Recently, there has been concern that consuming milk containing elevated amounts of estrogen could affect blood levels of the hormone in humans, leading to an increased risk of some cancers. A new study published in the Journal of Dairy Science® investigated cow milk's effects on blood hormone levels in adult mice and found that naturally occurring levels, and even levels as high as 100 times the average, had no effect on the mice.
Every day, more than 3,000 new abstracts are uploaded to PubMed, the main biomedical literature reference database. Even in a researcher's narrowly-defined field, it is impossible to stay on top of the ever-evolving webs of interconnections between these papers. For example, a new gene is described - might it be relevant to a researcher's specialty? It could take many painstaking hours of searching to discover the answer. Now a new tool developed in the A.C.