Bethesda, MD—With cold and flu season almost here, the next time you're sick, think twice before taking something for your fever. That's because scientists have found more evidence that elevated body temperature helps certain types of immune cells to work better. This research is reported in the November 2011 issue of the Journal of Leukocyte Biology (https://www.jleukbio.org).
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CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Researchers report they have figured out how thecancer-causing bacterium Helicobacter pylori attacks a cell's energy infrastructure, sparking a series of events in the cell that ultimately lead it to self-destruct.
H. pylori are the only bacteria known to survive in the human stomach. Infection with H. pylori is associated with an increased risk of gastric cancer, the second-leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide.
London, UK (November 1st, 2011) – Policy decisions and poor management have substantially undermined the US Los Alamos National Laboratory—and, consequently, national security, according to an article available today in the current issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, published by SAGE. The article calls into question media and government stereotypes that have blamed Los Alamos's scientists for the decline.
The next time you take aspirin for a headache, thank a willow tree. Salicylic acid, a compound chemically similar to aspirin, is found in willow tree bark and is made by the plant as a chemical defense against pathogens. By mimicking the chemical production processes of plants, scientists have been able to synthetically produce and engineer many important alkaloid drug products, including caffeine, atropine (an anti-spasmodic used to treat heart arrhythmia), nicotine, morphine and quinine.
Mice are often used to test whether substances in food are harmful to humans. This requires that mice and humans metabolise substances in the same way. Humans have certain enzymes in more parts of the body than mice. The health risk associated with harmful substances in food may therefore be underestimated.
Scientists at Warwick Medical School have uncovered the molecular process of how cells are by-passing the body's inbuilt 'health checkpoint' with cells that carry unequal numbers of chromosomes that have a higher risk of developing cancer.
Studying simple yeast cells, scientists now understand the mechanism by which cells ensure their daughter cells receive the correct number of chromosomes.
Washington, DC, November 1, 2011 -- Multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii (MDR-AB) was found in the environment of 48 percent of the rooms of patients colonized or infected with the pathogen, according to a new study published in the November issue of the American Journal of Infection Control, the official publication of APIC - the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology.
The study examined how frequently the environment surrounding the patient becomes contaminated and which environmental surfaces are most commonly contaminated.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Doctors agree that vitamin D promotes bone health, but a belief that it can also prevent cancer, cardiovascular disease and other causes of death has been a major health controversy. Consistent with advice issued last fall by the Institute of Medicine, a new study finds that vitamin D did not confer benefits against mortality in postmenopausal women after controlling for key health factors such as abdominal obesity.
Bethesda, MD—A new discovery by Californian scientists may lead to a pharmaceutical breakthrough for a wide range of illnesses that involve the hydration of cells that line the inner surfaces of our body's organs and tissues. In a new report appearing in the FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org), the researchers describe how they used high-throughput screening to identify small-molecule drug candidates which help cells bypass defective channels that normally move salt and water through cell membranes.
Reston, Va. (November 1, 2011) – For prostate cancer patients with bone metastases, repeated administrations of radionuclide therapy with 188Re-HEDP are shown to improve overall survival rates and reduce pain, according to new research published in the November issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine.
Swimming jellyfish and other marine animals help mix warm and cold water in the oceans and, by increasing the rate at which heat can travel through the ocean, may influence global climate. The controversial idea was first proposed by researchers out of the California Technical Institute in 2009, but new information may help the scientists support their claim.
A new minute freshwater snail species belonging to the genus Daphniola was found by a researcher from University of Athens (Canella Radea) in a spring covered by snow on Mt. Parnassos, central Greece. This study was published in Zookeys.
The new species, Daphniola eptalophos, has a transparent conical-flat coiled shell, grey-black pigmented soft body and a black penis with a small colorless outgrowth on the left side near its base. D. eptalophos differs from its congeners in shell dimensions, soft body pigmentation and coloration of penis.
Bethesda, MD—Scientists from the National Institutes of Health in the United States have made an important discovery that should forever change the scope and direction of Alzheimer's research. Specifically, they have discovered that the protein tangles which are a hallmark of the disease involve at least three different proteins rather than just one. The discovery of these additional proteins, called neurofilaments and vimentin, should help scientists better understand the biology and progression of the disease as well as provide additional drug discovery targets.
Football has often been called "a game of inches," but biology is a game of nanometers, where spatial differences of only a few nanometers can determine the fate of a cell - whether it lives or dies, remains normal or turns cancerous. Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a new and better way to study the impact of spatial patterns on living cells.
AURORA, Colo. (Oct. 31, 2011) – Researchers at the University of Colorado School of Medicine have found a specific molecule that can prevent the development of type 1 diabetes in mice and has a similar effect on human cells from diabetic patients.
The findings, published in the latest edition of The Journal of Immunology, signal a new and promising direction in the fight against type I diabetes along with other autoimmune disorders like rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis and celiac disease.