About 80% of the active population suffers from low back pain at some point in their lives. In a paper published on August 4th 2011 in PLoS Computational Biology, researchers at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) show that overloading on already degenerated discs is less damaging than on discs which are still healthy – and that changes in cell density in discs are fundamental to the process of disc degeneration.
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Researchers have demonstrated that cells of the innate immune system are capable of "memory", and of mounting rapid protection to an otherwise lethal dose of live vaccinia virus. The study, published in the Open Access journal PLoS Pathogens on August 4th, challenges previous thought that only B cells and T cells can store memory to ward off future infection.
BOZEMAN, Mont. – Dog-sized dinosaurs that lived near the South Pole, sometimes in the dark for months at a time, had bone tissue very similar to dinosaurs that lived everywhere on the planet, according to a doctoral candidate at Montana State University.
That surprising fact falsifies a 13-year-old study and may help explain why dinosaurs were able to dominate the planet for 160 million years, said Holly Woodward, MSU graduate student in the Department of Earth Sciences and co-author of a paper published Aug. 3 in the journal "PLoS ONE."
Italian researchers may have identified a genetic "signature" for dangerous plaque that leads to stroke.
Reporting from their study published in Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association, the researchers said a pattern of five microscopic bits of genetic material called microRNAs (miRNAs) — a genetic "signature" — were present only in the plaque from patients who had experienced a stroke.
This is the first report to suggest that miRNAs may provide an important clue about which plaque in artery walls is the most dangerous.
AUSTIN, Texas—Female cognitive ability can limit how melodious or handsome males become over evolutionary time, biologists from The University of Texas at Austin, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute have observed.
Baltimore, MD — New research from a team including several Carnegie scientists demonstrates that a specific small segment of RNA could play a key role in the growth of a type of malignant childhood eye tumor called retinoblastoma. The tumor is associated with mutations of a protein called Rb, or retinoblastoma protein. Dysfunctional Rb is also involved with other types of cancers, including lung, brain, breast and bone.
WORCESTER, Mass. – Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Medical School have uncovered a novel DNA-sensing pathway important to the triggering of an innate immune response for malaria. Activation of this pathway appears to stimulate production of an overabundance of type-1 interferon by the immune system that may contribute to inflammation and fever in malaria patients and could play a part in susceptibility for the most common and lethal form of malaria known as plasmodium falciparum.
(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — The possibility of developing stem cells from a patient's own skin and using them to treat conditions as diverse as Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease and cancer has generated tremendous excitement in the stem cell research community in recent years. Such therapies would avoid the controversial need for using stem cells derived from human embryos, and in theory, also bypass immunological problems inherent in using cells from one person to treat another.
Floods and droughts in East Africa are often unleashed by far-away events in the tropical Pacific—the warm (El Niño) or cool (La Niña) phases of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). A catastrophic drought is currently wreaking havoc in wide regions of Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia, affecting food security and putting millions of people in urgent need of assistance. Scientists have attributed the severe drying to La Niña conditions that prevailed from June 2010 to May 2011 in the Pacific.
For the last 10,000 years, summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has been far from constant. For several thousand years, there was much less sea ice in The Arctic Ocean – probably less than half of current amounts. This is indicated by new findings by the Danish National Research Foundation for Geogenetics at the University of Copenhagen. The results of the study will be published in the journal Science.
Numerous potential anti-malarial candidate drugs have been uncovered by investigators from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), both parts of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center scientists have completed a comprehensive map of genetic mutations occurring in the second-most common form of brain cancer, oligodendroglioma. The findings, reported in the Aug. 4 issue of Science, also appear to reveal the biological cause of the tumors, they say.
New Haven, Conn.—Over one-third of the world's population already lives in areas struggling to keep up with the demand for fresh water. By 2025, that number will nearly double. Some countries have met the challenge by tapping into natural sources of fresh water, but as many examples – such as the much-depleted Jordan River – have demonstrated, many of these practices are far from sustainable.
5 August 2011 | Potsdam: For 20 000 years, climate variability in East Africa has been following a pattern that is evidently a remote effect of the ENSO phenomenon (El Niño Southern Oscillation) known as El Niño/La Niña. During the cold phase of La Niña, there is marginal rainfall and stronger winds in East Africa, while the El Niño warm phase leads to weak wind conditions with frequent rain. Moreover, during the coldest period of the last ice age about 18 000 to 21 000 years ago, East Africa's climate was relatively stable and dry.
A paper co-authored by William Phillip of the University of Notre Dame's Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Menachem Elimelech, Robert Goizueta Professor of Environmental and Chemical Engineering at Yale University, appearing in this week's edition of the journal Science offers a critical review of the state of seawater desalination technology.