Body

Funding for trauma research is needed now more than ever, and should become a priority in the wake of so many lives lost at mass casualty events--including most recently at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, say experts in an opinion piece published in the online journal Trauma Surgery & Acute Care Open.

The fossilised remnants of tube-like "dwellings" which housed a primitive type of prehistoric sea worm on the ocean floor have been identified in a new study.

According to researchers, the long, perforated tubes may have looked like narrow chimneys reaching up from the sea bed, and were made by a creature called Oesia, which lived a solitary existence inside them about 500 million years ago.

6 July 2016 - In the first genome-scale experiment of its kind, researchers have gained new insights into how a mouse embryo first begins to transform from a ball of unfocussed cells into a small, structured entity. Published in Nature, the single-cell genomics study was led by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and the Wellcome Trust-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute.

Genetic testing in men with advanced prostate cancer could pick up a significant proportion whose disease may be caused by inherited mutations in genes involved in repairing DNA damage, a major new study reveals.

Testing prostate cancer patients for mutations in key DNA repair genes could identify those who may benefit from precision treatments that specifically target DNA repair weaknesses in cancer cells.

Society must align the overlapping priorities and often clashing interests of medical intelligence, national security agendas and the global health community, according to global health advocates writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have made an important breakthrough in their ongoing efforts to develop a diagnostic test that can tell health-care providers whether a patient has a bacterial infection and will benefit from antibiotics.

The study will be published July 6 in Science Translational Medicine.

Bacterial infections that don't respond to antibiotics are of rising concern, as is sepsis -- the immune system's last-ditch, failed attack on infection that ends up being lethal itself. Reporting online in Nature on July 7, researchers at Boston Children's Hospital describe new potential avenues for controlling both sepsis and the runaway bacterial infections that provoke it.

Viral hepatitis has become one of the leading causes of death and disability across the globe - killing at least as many people annually as TB, malaria or HIV/AIDS.

This is the finding of new research from scientists at Imperial College London and University of Washington, who analysed data from 183 countries collected between 1990 and 2013.

Viral hepatitis exists in five forms - A, B, C, D and E and is transmitted through bodily fluids, or, in the case of A and E, through food or drink contaminated with faeces.

Scientists at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and University of Melbourne report they have used a genetic test that spots bits of cancer-related DNA circulating in the blood to accurately predict the likelihood of the disease's return in some -- but not all -- of a small group of patients with early-stage colon cancer.

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., JULY 6, 2016--In a step that could bring perovskite crystals closer to use in the burgeoning solar power industry, researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Northwestern University and Rice University have tweaked their crystal production method and developed a new type of two-dimensional layered perovskite with outstanding stability and more than triple the material's previous power conversion efficiency.

MADISON, Wis. -- Without question, the domesticated hybrid yeast that gives us lager beer is an organism worth many billions of dollars.

Beer is the world's most commonly fermented beverage and lager beer commands 94 percent of the global market. Making the beer possible is a biological oddity: a hybrid yeast that combines two distinct species and confers the ability to make cold-brewed beer, a product that first emerged 500 years ago in Europe.

Using radiocarbon dating as a forensic tool, researchers have found that human cartilage rarely renews in adulthood, suggesting that joint diseases may be harder to treat than previously thought. The technique, which dates tissues by tracing radioactive carbon and measuring it against levels of carbon-14 in the atmosphere from the nuclear bomb testing in the 1950's and 1960's, reveals that cartilage is an essentially permanent tissue in healthy and osteoarthritic adults alike.

Researchers are working on mimicking cellular systems to develop molecular motors that can move or even deliver drugs to target tissues. Engineering such motors may ultimately lead to molecular robots that can execute more complex tasks. To this end, researchers must find ways to convert motion at the molecular level to motion at the macroscopic level. They also must find ways to cause chemical reactions to repeat autonomously and continuously.

Future Science Group (FSG) published journal, Future Oncology, has released a special issue that examines the field of oncofertility, which aims to preserve fertility in cancer patients.

As the field of cancer research has developed and improved, the numbers of patients surviving many years post-diagnosis is growing. This has led to prioritizing cancer management and improving the quality of life in survivors.

Just as improved diet and medical care have resulted in increased life expectancy in humans, advances in nutrition and veterinary care have increased the life span of pet cats. The result is a growing population of ageing cats; in the USA, for example, it is estimated that 20% of pet cats are 11 years of age or older.