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A team of scientists in Japan has found that a DNA modification called 5hmC - thought to be involved in turning genes on and off - localizes at sites of DNA damage and repair. They also found that a family of recently discovered enzymes, called TETs for short, is important in maintaining 5hmC's reparative role.

Genome wide association studies (GWAS) scan the entire genome in order to pinpoint genetic variants associated with a particular disease. The technique is employed to identify biological pathways - the series of actions and changes that have occurred in cells and genetic material - that can be linked to the causation of a disease.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) are two devastating adult-onset neurodegenerative disorders. No cure exists for these diseases. Ten percent of ALS patients suffer from a familial form of the disease, while FTD is caused in 40% of patients by a genetic defect. In 2011, the most important genetic cause of ALS and FTD was discovered. The causative mutation was a repetition of a piece of non-coding DNA, a so called tandem repeat, in a gene with an unknown function, named C9orf72.

It's official: There really was a giant, flightless bird with a head the size of a horse's wandering about in the winter twilight of the high Arctic some 53 million years ago.

TEMPE. Ariz. February 9, 2016 -- Finding solutions to technological and social challenges has become more complex over the past half-century, and making significant progress often demands collaboration by sizable teams of experts with diverse and highly specialized kinds of knowledge.

Such "team science," as it's called, has led to important advances that could never have been accomplished by lone researchers.

Paul West, co-director and lead of the Institute on the Environment's Global Landscapes Initiative, will present at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on February 12. West will discuss opportunities for subsistence farmers to enhance productivity while considering climate change, water availability and quality, and habitat loss.

Everyone wants a house to live in, and more and more, people around the world want the kinds of houses seen in Europe and North America, rather than those they grew up with, according to a Penn State engineer. However, industrial building materials are often scarce and expensive and alternative, locally sourced, sustainable materials are often a better choice.

Adequate housing is difficult to find in many parts of Africa even for the middle class and wealthy, but it is particularly difficult for the poor, according to an international team of housing specialists.

PHILADELPHIA--(Feb. 12, 2016)--When breast cancer becomes advanced and spreads to other organs, patient survival is drastically reduced, prompting the need to explore the genes that may cause tumor cells to metastasize.

Researchers at UC San Francisco and Johns Hopkins may have found a new way to diagnose Lyme disease, based on a distinctive gene "signature" they discovered in white blood cells of patients infected with the tick-borne bacteria.

Even though it is hard to diagnose, Lyme disease is still the most common vector-borne illness in the United States, with 30,000 cases reported each year to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. With more accurate tests, experts say, the number of people infected could turn out to be 10 times higher.

Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have created a map of the world's chemical landscape, a catalogue of 10,000 chemicals for which there is available safety data that they say can predict the toxicity of many of the 90,000 or more other substances in consumer products for which there is no such information.

Asthma has been associated with a prolonged time to pregnancy and a decreased birth rate in a new clinical observation study.

Published today (12 February, 2016) in the European Respiratory Journal, the research adds to previous studies that have identified a link between asthma and fertility. The evidence so far has been conflicting and many of the studies have either relied on data from questionnaires or small sample sizes.

(SEATTLE - FEB. 11, 2016) - Many patients with cancer find themselves in great financial distress, in part because the costs of cancer-fighting drugs are skyrocketing. Is it possible to create public policy that will rein in these prices and cut patients' out-of-pocket costs?

Not without significant tradeoffs that could reduce patients' access to some cancer medications, says physician, cancer researcher and health economist Dr. Scott Ramsey in a JAMA Oncology editorial.

MIAMI - A recent study provides new evidence that larvae swim faster, straighter and more consistently in a common direction when together in a group. The research led by scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science is the first to observe group orientation behaviors of larval fish.

COLUMBIA, Mo. - Men have many reasons to add high-impact and resistance training to their exercise regimens; these reasons include building muscle and shedding fat. Now a University of Missouri researcher has determined another significant benefit to these activities: building bone mass. The study found that individuals who continuously participated in high-impact activities, such as jogging and tennis, during adolescence and young adulthood, had greater hip and lumbar spine bone mineral density than those who did not.