Despite progress in decoding the genome, scientists estimate that fully 95 percent of our DNA represents dark, unknown territory. In the October 1 issue of the journal Cell researchers at The Wistar Institute shed new light on the genetic unknown with the discovery of the ability of long non-coding RNA (ncRNA) to promote gene expression. The researchers believe these long ncRNA molecules may represent so-called gene enhancer elements—short regions of DNA that can increase gene transcription.
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Fish byproducts may be a new source of fish feed, thanks to research by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)-funded scientists in Hawaii.
Research scientist Dong-Fang Deng and her colleagues with the Oceanic Institute in Waimanalo, Hawaii, are collaborating with USDA food technologist Peter Bechtel to develop the new fish feeds. Bechtel is with the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Subarctic Agricultural Research Unit in Kodiak, Alaska. ARS is the USDA's principal intramural scientific research agency.
After a decade of joint work involving 2,700 researchers from 80 countries, the world's scientists – as well as the general public – can now access the Census of Marine Life, which provides the first in-depth look at the more than 120,000 diverse species which inhabit our oceans.
The Census of Marine Life initiative, started in 2000, is the result of one of the largest scientific collaborations ever conducted , the result of more than 540 expeditions and 9,000 days at sea, plus more than 2,600 academic papers published during that period.
Tech savvy humans who use social media sites to instantly update their 'statuses', may be behaving like vultures who use 'face flushing' as a visible way of instantly updating their own status when interacting with peers and rivals. Research, published in Ethology, reveals how the ability to rapidly change skin colour is a key form of interaction for vultures, especially for displays of dominance.
Researchers in India have demonstrated that producing nanoscopic crystals of a pharmaceutical product can allow the medication to be absorbed by the gut even if the drug is not soluble in water.
A research team, co-headed by Dr. Woo Lee and Dr. Hongjun Wang of Stevens Institute of Technology, has published a paper describing a new method that generates three-dimensional (3D) tissue models for studying bacterial infection of orthopedic implants. Dr. Joung-Hyun Lee of Stevens, and Dr. Jeffrey Kaplan of the New Jersey Dental School, are co-authors of the research.
New research suggests that climate change following massive volcanic eruptions drove Neanderthals to extinction and cleared the way for modern humans to thrive in Europe and Asia.
The research, led by Liubov Vitaliena Golovanova and Vladimir Borisovich Doronichev of the ANO Laboratory of Prehistory in St. Petersburg, Russia, is reported in the October issue of Current Anthropology.
A new study from North Carolina State University finds that fish located near coal-fired power plants have lower levels of mercury than fish that live much further away but that appears to be linked to high levels of another chemical, selenium, near such facilities, which poses problems of its own.
Placing speed cameras on roads reduces the number of road traffic injuries and deaths, concludes a team of researchers from The University of Queensland, in Brisbane, Australia. Their findings are published this month in The Cochrane Library. Preventing road traffic injuries is of global public health importance.
When compared with placebo and other drugs, long-term use of finasteride improves urinary tract symptoms associated with benign prostatic hyperplasia, and reduces disease progression. This conclusion comes from combining the findings of 23 randomized clinical trials that evaluated almost 21,000 men, and is published this month in The Cochrane Library.
There is no evidence that increasing the dose of inhaled corticosteroids at the onset of an asthma exacerbation, as part of a patient-initiated action plan, reduces the need for rescue oral corticosteroids. This is the conclusion of work published in The Cochrane Library this month.
The provision of made-to-order drugs ("specials") in primary care is expensive, often unnecessary, and associated with legal pitfalls, says the Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin (DTB).
It calls for a major overhaul of the practice, in a review of the evidence in this month's issue.
Bespoke drugs or "specials" are medicines made specifically to meet the needs of individual patients, so may be prepared in formulations and strengths which differ from those of standard licensed medicines.
A persistently noisy workplace more than doubles an employee's risk of serious heart disease, suggests research published online in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
Young male smokers seemed to be particularly at risk, the findings showed.
The researchers base their findings on a nationally representative sample of more than 6,000 employees, aged from 20 upwards, who had been part of the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) between 1999 and 2004.