In today's increasingly urbanized world, the lights in many places are always on, and according to a report published online on September 16 in of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, that's having a real impact on the mating life of forest-breeding songbirds.
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Even children of a healthy weight who have an imbalanced metabolism due to poor diet or exercise may be at increased risk of asthma, according to new research, which challenges the widespread assumption that obesity itself is a risk factor for asthma.
Were our early mammalian ancestors vegetarians, vegans or omnivores? It's difficult for anthropologists to determine the diet of early mammalians because current fossil analysis provides too little information. But a new method that measures the size of chips in tooth fossils can help determine the kinds of foods these early humans consumed.
New Rochelle, NY, September 16, 2010—Not only do undergraduate students gain valuable hands-on experience by participating in scientific research projects, but they also make meaningful contributions, examples of which are highlighted in the current special issue of DNA and Cell Biology, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. The issue is available free online.
Certain bacteria that inhabit the intestine provide the environmental trigger that initiates and perpetuates chronic intestinal inflammation in individuals who are genetically susceptible to inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), a study led by Harvard School of Public Health researchers has found.
INDIANAPOLIS – There is no apparent link between asthma and tooth decay, according to a study published in the September 2010 issue of the Journal of the American Dental Association.
The number of times our cells can divide is dictated by telomeres, stretches of DNA at the tips of our chromosomes. Understanding how telomeres keep our chromosomes – and by extension, our genomes – intact is an area of intense scientific focus in the fields of both aging and cancer. Now, scientists at The Wistar Institute have published the first detailed report on the structure and function of a crucial domain in the protein known as Cdc13, which sustains telomeres by clamping to DNA and recruiting replicating enzymes to the area.
Some intensive care patients develop post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) after the trauma of a difficult hospital stay, and this is thought to be exacerbated by delusional or fragmentary memories of their time in the intensive care unit. Now researchers writing in BioMed Central's open access journal Critical Care have found that if staff and close relatives make a diary for patients, featuring information about their stay and accompanied by photographs, PTSD rates can be significantly reduced.
London, UK (September 16, 2010) – Amid growing concern that synthetic life sciences pose biosecurity and biosafety risks, scrutiny is increasing into the burgeoning DNA sequence trade. Research published today in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, published by SAGE, looks at the necessity of a global regulator for DNA trade, and the significant barriers to creating one.
Chronic stress acts as a sort of fertilizer that feeds breast cancer progression, significantly accelerating the spread of disease in animal models, researchers at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center have found.
Researchers discovered that stress is biologically reprogramming the immune cells that are trying to fight the cancer, transforming them instead from soldiers protecting the body against disease into aiders and abettors. The study found a 30-fold increase in cancer spread throughout the bodies of stressed mice compared to those that were not stressed.
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have discovered a caste of genetically identical "warrior worms" –– members of a parasitic fluke species that invades the California horn snail. The findings are reported in the early online version of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
What, in nature, drives the incredible diversity of flowers? This question has sparked debate since Darwin described flower diversification as an 'abominable mystery.' The answer has become a lot clearer, according to scientists at the University of Calgary whose research on the subject is published today in the on-line edition of the journal Ecology Letters.
A new study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine reveals that women with low sexual arousal experienced clinically significant symptom changes after taking a placebo.
BENIN (16 September 2010)—Farmers and crop scientists worldwide are engaged in an ambitious new effort to add 3,000 yam samples to international genebanks with the aim of saving the diversity of a crop that is consumed by 60 million people on a daily basis in Africa alone, according to an announcement today from the Global Crop Diversity Trust.
The combination of depression and heart disease seems to be far more lethal than having either one of these conditions in isolation, suggests research published online in Heart.
Previous research has indicated that people who are depressed, but otherwise healthy, are more likely to develop coronary heart disease, irrespective of what other risk factors they might have.
And people who are depressed are more likely to die from all causes, but it still remains unclear as to whether depression is more fatal for those with heart disease than it is for those without.