Body

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 10, 2011—For physicians within several medical specialties, including dermatology, cardiology and orthopedics, personal usage of and patient recommendations for dietary supplements are quite common¹, according to a study published in Nutrition Journal, a peer-reviewed, on-line journal that focuses on the field of human nutrition.

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Circulating through the bloodstream of every human being is a rare and powerful type of cell, one that can actually create new blood vessels to bypass blockages that cause heart attacks and peripheral artery disease. Though everyone has these cells – called endothelial progenitor cells – they are often dysfunctional in people prone to vascular disease.

WASHINGTON – Nanotech consumer products continue to grow at a consistent pace.

According to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN) over 1,300 manufacturer-identified, nanotechnology-enabled products have entered the commercial marketplace around the world. The most recent update to the group's five-year-old inventory reflects the continuing use of the tiny particles in everything from conventional products like non-stick cookware to more unique items such as self-cleaning window treatments.

AgroAtlas is a new interactive website that shows the geographic distributions of 100 crops; 640 species of crop diseases, pests, and weeds; and 560 wild crop relatives growing in Russia and neighboring countries. Downloadable maps and geographic information system (GIS) software are also available, allowing layering of data, such as that relating major wheat production areas to concentrations of Russian wheat aphids.

Preserving an intact population of weed-eating fish may be vital to saving the world's coral reefs from being engulfed by weed as human and climate impacts grow.

A new study by researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies has found weed-eaters like parrotfish and surgeonfish can only keep coral reefs clear of weed up to a point. After the weeds reach a certain density, they take over entirely and the coral is lost.

In mathematics, you need at most only four different colors to produce a map in which no two adjacent regions have the same color. Utah and Arizona are considered adjacent, but Utah and New Mexico, which only share a point, are not. The four-color theorem proves this conjecture for generic maps of countries, but actually of more use in solving scheduling problems, scheduling, register allocation in computing and frequency assignment in mobile communications and broadcasting.

Institute of Medical Biology (IMB) scientists under the Agency of Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in Singapore are part of an international team of researchers [1]who became the first in the world to discover the gene behind a rare skin cancer which grows rapidly for a few weeks before healing spontaneously, according to research published in Nature Genetics [2] today.

LA JOLLA, CA – March 9, 2011 – For Immediate Release – Scientific advances at The Scripps Research Institute were key to laying the foundation for the new drug Benlysta® (belimumab), approved today by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Benlysta®, which treats the most common type of lupus, is the first in a new class of pharmaceuticals that prevents the body from attacking its own critical tissues.

Over 50 percent of the population in the United States and over 60 percent in the world live in coastal areas. Rapidly growing human populations near the ocean have massively altered coastal water ecosystems.

From neurosurgery to bar code readers, lasers have been used in a myriad of applications since they were first introduced in the late 1950's. Now, with the work being done in Jeff Gelles' Lab at Brandeis University, researchers have developed a way to use lasers to study the splicing of pre-messenger RNA molecules, an essential process in creating proteins to sustain advanced organisms, including human life. This process of splicing is carried out by a cellular micro-machine called the spliceosome.

Illicit drug users are at increased risk of being exposed to microbial pathogens and are more susceptible to serious infections say physicians writing in the Journal of Medical Microbiology. The review, which aims to improve the microbiological diagnosis of drug use-related infections, assesses the role of drug related practices in the spread of a range of bacterial, viral, fungal and protozoal infections.

March 10, 2011 – A detailed analysis of gene fusions present at high frequency in the most common pediatric brain tumors has been performed for the first time in a study published online today in Genome Research (www.genome.org), shedding new light on how these genomic rearrangements form in the early stages of cancer.

Boston, MA – A team of researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) have found that approximately one out of every twelve adult smokers have abnormal lung densities present on chest computed tomography (CT) images suggestive of interstitial lung disease which is associated with substantial reductions in lung volumes. In addition, despite being positively associated with smoking, these lung densities were inversely not associated with emphysema. This research is published online on March 10th in the New England Journal of Medicine.

A strong international collaboration and a single patient with mild muscle disease and severe cognitive impairment have allowed University of Iowa researchers to identify a new gene mutation that causes muscular dystrophy.

Pregnant non-smokers who breathe in the second-hand smoke of other people are at an increased risk of delivering stillborn babies or babies with defects, a study led by researchers at The University of Nottingham has found.

The study, published in the April edition of the journal Pediatrics, found passive smoking increased the risk of still birth by almost one-quarter (23 per cent) and was linked to a 13 per cent increased risk of congenital birth defects.