Body

Montreal, March 15, 2016 -- Even though the search for the Fountain of Youth dates back to the ancient Greeks, the quest to live forever continues today. Indeed, it has been said that the ability to slow the aging process would be the most important medical discovery in the modern era.

A new study published in the journal Oncotarget by researchers from Concordia and the Quebec-based biotech company Idunn Technologies may have uncovered an important factor: plant extracts containing the six best groups of anti-aging molecules ever seen.

Washington, D.C.--March 15, 2016--Researchers in France have discovered that volatile compounds released by a bacterial pathogen stimulate the growth of a fungal pathogen found in lung infections in cystic fibrosis (CF). The findings, published this week in mBio, an online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, show for the first time that one pathogen can emit a signal through the air that acts as a direct fuel for another pathogen to grow.

Berlin, March 15, 2016 ? Changes in farming practices over the last 50 years have resulted in decreased agro-diversity which, in turn, has resulted in decreased dietary diversity. The significant impact of this change in dietary richness on human health is the topic of an insightful perspective in Molecular Metabolism by Mark Heiman, MicroBiome Therapeutics and Frank Greenway, Pennington Biomedical Research Center.

Many bacteria swim using flagella - long tails that are attached to tiny motors made of proteins, just tens of nanometres wide. These motors spin the flagella, which work as nanoscale propellers to drive the bacterium forward.

Despite motors in diverse bacteria having the same core structure, different bacteria vary widely in their swimming power. For example, Campylobacter jejuni, which causes food poisoning, can swim powerfully enough to bore through the mucus that lines the gut, an environment too thick and sticky for other bacteria to push through.

Under certain conditions appropriately selected particles can form closed surfaces in liquids with surprisingly complex shapes, cutting through space by a regular network of channels. So far, we have looked at cubosomes - for this is what these spectacular three-dimensional nanostructures are called - only from the outside. Advanced theoretical modelling carried out at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw has allowed us to look into their interior for the first time.

New research from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute transforms the current view that metamorphosis in fruit flies, whereby larvae change into adults, consists of two separate stages.

The repeated storms which battered Europe's Atlantic coastline during the winter of 2013/14 were the most energetic in almost seven decades, new research has shown.

And they were part of a growing trend in stormy conditions which scientists say has the potential to dramatically change the equilibrium state of beaches along the western side of the continent, leading to permanent changes in beach gradient, coastal alignment and nearshore bar position.

New Haven, Conn.--New research from the Yale School of Public Health reveals that differences in smoking habits between African Americans and whites may lead to a disparity in screening for lung cancer.

The paper was published online March 15 in Nicotine & Tobacco Research.

Cigarette smoking, the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, has been widely studied, yet most studies have focused on how the habit affects the population as a whole. Attention to smoking patterns within specific racial and ethnic groups has been limited.

Walking is the most common exercise, and many walkers like to count how many calories are burned.

Little known, however, is that the leading standardized equations used to predict or estimate walking energy expenditure -- the number of calories burned -- assume that one size fits all. They've been in place for close to half a century and were based on data from a limited number of people.

The brilliant-thighed poison frog Allobates femoralis is a ground-dwelling species inhabiting the tropical forests of South America. Males guard large territories in which females lay their eggs on fallen leaves. After three weeks of development, the tadpoles are generally transported on the backs of the males to the nearest body of water. "Females only do so when the male is not in his territory at this time," explains Eva Ringler from the Department of Comparative Cognitive Research at the Messerli Research Institute of Vetmeduni Vienna.

Own offspring should come first

Mothers who have postnatal depression are unlikely to have more than two children according to research carried out by evolutionary anthropologists the University of Kent and published by Evolution, Medicine and Public Health.

Until now very little has been known about how women's future fertility is impacted by the experience of postnatal depression.

Photosynthesis is the process by which plants, algae and cyanobacteria use the energy from the Sun to make sugar from water and carbon dioxide, releasing oxygen as a waste product. But a few groups of bacteria carry out a simpler form of photosynthesis that does not produce oxygen, which evolved first.

A new study by an Imperial researcher suggests that this more primitive form of photosynthesis evolved in much more ancient bacteria than scientists had imagined, more than 3.5 billion years ago.

Brisbane, Australia: A global study involving 50 different research centres has found hundreds of genes which cause five common, hard-to-treat and debilitating inflammatory diseases, paving the way to new treatments for these conditions.

Led by Brisbane's QUT and Christian-Albrechts-University, Kiel, Germany, the results of the world-first study have been published in the international journal Nature Genetics.

The internet has given almost everyone a very public voice and a chance to offer their opinion on almost every subject in a way that was not possible before.

Now, research published in the International Journal of Knowledge and Web Intelligence demonstrates how consumer product reviews published on the internet could be analyzed through data mining techniques and allow designers to find ways to improve a given product or even add features that had not occurred to the manufacturer.

A pregnant Tyrannosaurus rex that roamed Montana 68 million years ago may be the key to discerning gender differences between theropod, or meat-eating dinosaur, species. Researchers from North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences have confirmed the presence of medullary bone - a gender-specific reproductive tissue - in a fossilized T. rex femur. Beyond giving paleontologists a definitively female fossil to study, their findings could shed light on the evolution of egg laying in modern birds.