With summer in full swing, many plants are at their peak bloom and climbing plants, like clematis, morning glories, and sweet peas, are especially remarkable. Not only are these plants beautiful, but their ability to climb walls and trellises is an impressive feat of biological engineering that has taken millions of years to accomplish.
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Mary had a little lamb, but only once a year. However, Cornell Sheep Program researchers have discovered an unusual form of a gene that prompts ewes to breed out of season as well as conceive at younger ages and more frequently.
They conducted a simple genetic test to identify the presence of the unusual form of the gene, the so-called M allele that other researchers had suspected might be correlated with out-of-season fertility, in their test flock and then validated the gene's relationship with aseasonal breeding by observing that trait in the flock.
Two titans fighting a bloody battle – that often turns fatal for both of them. This is how big predatory dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus are often depicted while hunting down their supposed prey: even larger herbivorous dinosaurs. The fossils, though, do not account for that kind of hunting behavior but indicate that theropods, the large predatory dinosaurs, were frying much smaller fish. Dr. Oliver Rauhut, paleontologist at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich, and his collegue Dr. David Hone surmise that giant carnivores like Tyrannosaurus preyed mainly on juvenile dinosaurs.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — For cancer drug developers, finding an agent that kills tumor cells is only part of the equation. The drug must also spare healthy cells, and – ideally – its effects will be reversible, to cut short any potentially dangerous side effects.
University of Illinois researchers report that they have assembled a new cancer drug delivery system that, in cell culture, achieves all of the above. The findings appear this month in the journal Angewandte Chemie.
A research article to be published on August 7, 2009 in the World Journal of Gastroenterology addresses this question. In the present study, 101 consecutive patients with bilateral intrahepatic stones who underwent bilateral liver resection in the past 10 years were reviewed retrospectively.
A world-first study involving Monash University and the Cabrini Research Institute in Melbourne has revealed the injection of bone cement into broken vertebrae is not an effective treatment for patients suffering painful osteoporotic fractures.
The treatment, known as percutaneous vertebroplasty, is regularly recommended by doctors and specialists around the world. About 600 patients across Australia undergo the procedure every year.
The study results were published today in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
It seems like common sense that an information leaflet for vision loss would have large print and appropriate contrast, but that's not the case a new study done at the University of Alberta has found.
The normal ageing process has long been linked to problems with cell respiration, the process through which the cells extract energy from nutrients. Researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have now shown how certain proteins that are synthesised in the cellular mitochondria – popularly known as the cells' power plants – become unstable and disintegrate, which in turn can impair cell respiration and cause premature ageing.
PHILADELPHIA – Results of a new study confirm trends that different Hispanic population groups have higher incidence rates of certain cancers and worse cancer outcomes if they live in the United States, than they do if they live in their homelands.
"Hispanics are not all the same with regard to their cancer experience," said Paulo S. Pinheiro, M.D., Ph.D., M.Sc., researcher in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
PHILADELPHIA – Many women at high risk for breast or ovarian cancer are choosing to undergo surgery as a precautionary measure to decrease their cancer risk, according to a report in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.
Decoding the complete DNA of cancer patients is giving scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis a clearer picture of the complexity of the disease and allowing them to see intriguing and unexpected genetic relationships among patients.
Khmer Rouge trials offer baseline study for mental health impact to a society of war crimes tribunal
CHAPEL HILL – As leaders of the former Khmer Rouge regime testify in a human rights tribunal, in harrowing detail, for the killing of more than a million Cambodians from 1975 to 1979 a central medical question remains unanswered: will the trials help a society heal or exacerbate the lingering affects of widespread trauma?
A new study by Mayo Clinic researchers has found that relief of pain from vertebral compression fractures, as well as improvement in pain-related dysfunction, were similar in patients treated with vertebroplasty and those treated with simulated vertebroplasty without cement injections. The article, "A Randomized Controlled Trial of Vertebroplasty for Osteoporotic Spine Fractures," is in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Both combination and sequential single-agent chemotherapy are reasonable options to treat metastatic breast cancer, but the choice between the two should ultimately be based on patient and disease-related factors, according to a new commentary published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
A study, led by researchers at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center - James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute, examined cancer cells from patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and from a new strain of mice that develop a very similar disease.