Biologists affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History and City College of the City University of New York have found that grizzly bears are roaming into what was traditionally thought of as polar bear habitat—and into the Canadian province of Manitoba, where they are officially listed as extirpated. The preliminary data was recently published in Canadian Field Naturalist and shows that sightings of Ursus arctos horribilis in Canada's Wapusk National Park are recent and appear to be increasing in frequency.
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Despite a six-year hiatus, a resurrected national physical activity initiative in Canada, ParticipACTION, still has the potential to succeed thanks to a "sticky" brand fostered over thirty successful years, and support from organizations with health promotion and physical activity as their mandates, University of Alberta researchers have found.
A special issue of Insect Molecular Biology reports the detailed analyses of specific aspects of the genome of the important plant pest, the Pea Aphid. The analyses are based on the publication of the aphid genome sequence in PLoS Biology and is a major step in enhancing our understanding of insect ecology and evolution with important implications for controlling these significant plant pests.
Patients hospitalized with mild to moderate community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) should not be routinely prescribed prednisolone, a corticosteroid, as it is associated with a recurrence of symptoms after its withdrawal, according to the first randomized double-blind clinical trial to address the subject.
Acute stroke care and clinical outcomes have improved significantly at hospitals participating in the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association's Get With The Guidelines–Stroke program, according to a large study in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, a journal of the American Heart Association.
About 50 percent of the world's population carry Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) in their gastrointestinal tract - 30 percent of the German population are infected. Besides cancer, these bacteria are linked to other chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease. The decoding of the H. pylori genome in 1997 revealed this pathogen to possess surprisingly few genes for transcriptional regulators, sparking a number of crucial questions: Where do the genes of Helicobacter start, and how are these switched on and off? Have all genes been discovered already?
ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Mayo Clinic researchers along with collaborators from Life Technologies are reporting on the application of a new approach for sequencing RNA to study cancer tumors. Their findings from a proof-of-principle study on oral carcinomas appear in the current issue of PLoS One, the online science journal.
VIDEO ALERT: Additional audio and video resources, including comments by Dr. Smith, are available on the Mayo Clinic News Blog
AUGUSTA, Ga. – The presence of certain proteins in premalignant oral lesions may predict oral cancer development, Medical College of Georgia researchers said.
SIBLINGs, or Small Integrin-Binding Ligand N-linked Glycoproteins, are a family of five proteins that help mineralize bone but can also spread cancer. SIBLINGs have been found in cancers including breast, lung, colon and prostate.
OAK BROOK, Ill. – In a new study published in the March issue of Radiology, researchers from Columbia University and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute have determined that an imaging exam of the heart using the latest generation of CT technology exposes patients to as much as 91 percent less radiation than standard helical CT scanning.
In research published this week in PLoS Medicine, Susan Huang and colleagues describe the use of a novel automated cluster detection tool, WHONET-SaTScan, made by integrating two freely available software packages, to identify hospital infection clusters. After applying the software to microbiology data from patients admitted to a 750-bed academic medical center in the US across four years (2002-2006), the authors found that the tool identified a number of hospital clusters that had not been detected by routine methods.
In the final article in a six part series on treating mental health problems in resource-poor settings, Alan Flisher, from the University of Cape Town, and colleagues present "packages of care" for treating Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in low- and middle-income countries.
The genome of the pea aphid (Acyrthosiphon pisum), sequenced by the International Aphid Genomics Consortium, is published this week in the online open-access journal PLoS Biology. Scientists from more than 10 nations took part in the sequencing and analysis of the genome, whose publication in PLoS Biology is accompanied by related papers appearing in PLoS Genetics, Genome Biology, and a special issue of Insect Molecular Biology.
HOUSTON -- (Feb. 23, 2010) – Aphids could be considered the "mosquitoes" of the plant world, depending on the "blood" of plants to survive. They live in symbiosis with bacteria that pass from one generation to the next, producing essential amino acids. Aphids with the same genotype can be wingless or winged. In different seasons, they develop as asexual females who produce offspring with identical genes through parthenogenesis. When temperatures drop, they can give birth to males who then fertilize the eggs laid by females.
Pea aphids, expert survivors of the insect world, appear to lack major biological defenses, according to the first genetic analysis of their immune system.
"It's surprising," says Emory biologist Nicole Gerardo, who led the study, published this week in Genome Biology. "Aphids have some components of an immune system, but they are missing the genes that we thought were critical to insect immunity."