Research at the University of Leeds has identified a key gene that assisted the transition of plants from water to the land around 500 million years ago.
The ANR gene is required to tolerate 'extreme dehydration' in the moss Physcomitrella patens, a land plant that is used as an experimental model.
Researchers at the Centre for Plant Sciences at the University found that the ANR gene - present in the most ancient land plants - was inherited from ancestral fresh water algae.
African American parents and caregivers most often use messages of egalitarianism - emphasizing equal rights, opportunities, and shared humanity across lines of ethnicity and race - when talking with their young preschool-aged children about race, finds a study led by NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. The findings are published online in the Journal of Early Childhood Research.
A nation's electricity consumption has been seen as a useful proxy for measuring economic growth offering a useful alternative to conventional measures such as gross domestic product (GDP) by incorporating the assumption that greater consumption means a better quality of life. However, country-by-country analysis reported in International Journal of Global Energy Issues suggests that this may not necessarily be the case.
Tropical Cyclone 01B became more organized and was named Roanu early on Thursday, May 19, 2016. This makes it the first cyclone of the monsoon season. Before this storm was named it had already caused massive landslides and flooding in Sri Lanka.
An oral drug used to treat an illness unrelated to HIV eradicated infectious HIV-producing cells in lab cultures while sparing uninfected cells - and suppressed the virus in patients during treatment and for at least eight weeks after the drug was stopped, according to results of a clinical pilot trial and researchers at Rutgers University and Dartmouth College.
Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most common type of childhood cancer in Switzerland. Despite intensive chemotherapy, one fifth of the patients suffer a relapse, which usually goes hand in hand with a poor prognosis. Researchers from the University of Zurich and the Children's Hospital Zurich have now found a way to kill off resistant leukemia cells: via necroptosis.
Some of the final cases of Ebola in Sierra Leone were transmitted via unconventional routes, such as semen and breastmilk, according to the largest analysis to date of the tail-end of the epidemic.
An international team of researchers has produced a detailed picture of the latter stages of the outbreak in Sierra Leone, using real-time sequencing of Ebola virus genomes carried out in a temporary laboratory in the country.
A third of the global burden of disease for mental, neurological and substance use disorders occurs in India and China - more than in all high-income countries combined - yet most people with mental disorders in these countries do not receive needed treatment.
New Haven, Conn. -- Yale scientists have solved a puzzle of the immune system -- how antibodies enter the nervous system to control viral infections. Their finding may have implications for the prevention and treatment of a range of conditions, including herpes and Guillain-Barre syndrome, which has been linked to the Zika virus.
In a study published online by JAMA Cardiology, Sonia S. Anand, M.D., Ph.D., F.R.C.P.C., of McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and colleagues examined whether a digital health intervention using email and text messages designed to change diet and physical activity would improve heart attack risk among a South Asian population.
In light of heavy criticism of the World Health Organization's handling of the Ebola outbreak, the election process for the next director general will be under intense scrutiny.
In The BMJ today, Devi Sridhar and colleagues outline the key questions on epidemic preparedness for prospective candidates.
TAMPA, Fla. (May 18, 2016) - A serious and sometimes fatal bacterial infection, known as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), may soon be beatable thanks to the efforts of University of South Florida scientists who have isolated and tested an extract from a sponge found in Antarctica. The sponge extract, known as Dendrilla membranosa, yields a new, natural product chemical which has shown in laboratory tests that it can eliminate more than 98 percent of MRSA cells. The research team has named the new chemical "darwinolide."
Howard Hughes Medical Institute scientists have designed a potential cancer therapy that uses a unique strategy to block mTOR, a molecule that helps drive the growth of many tumors. In animal experiments, the drug reduces the size of tumors that are resistant to earlier-generation mTOR inhibitors.
The work, reported May 18, 2016, in the journal Nature, was led by HHMI investigator Kevan Shokat at the University of California, San Francisco and Neal Rosen at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
In recent years, the amount of genomic data available to scientists has exploded. With faster and cheaper techniques increasingly available, hundreds of plants, animals and microbes have been sequenced in recent years. However, this ever-expanding trove of genetic information has created a problem: how can scientists quickly analyze all of this data, which could hold the key to better understanding many diseases, and solving other health and environmental issues.