Body

December 28, 2015 CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - To create treatments for a disease without any, scientists need to study and understand the driving forces behind the faulty biology. Today, researchers at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine announced the first-ever evidence-based description of the neuronal protein clumps thought to be important in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, a fatal neurodegenerative condition.

Dublin, Ireland, Dec. 28th, 2015 - A team of geneticists from Trinity College Dublin and archaeologists from Queen's University Belfast has sequenced the first genomes from ancient Irish humans, and the information buried within is already answering pivotal questions about the origins of Ireland's people and their culture.

Transmissible cancers -- cancers which can spread between individuals by the transfer of living cancer cells -- are believed to arise extremely rarely in nature. One of the few known transmissible cancers causes facial tumours in Tasmanian devils, and is threatening this species with extinction. Today, scientists report the discovery of a second transmissible cancer in Tasmanian devils. The discovery, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, calls into question our current understanding of the processes that drive cancers to become transmissible.

ATLANTA--The body can control inflammatory response triggered by invasions of microbial pathogens, such as bacteria and viruses, a discovery that could lead to the development of new therapeutic agents for uncontrolled inflammation, according to researchers at Georgia State University.

December 28, 2015 - Could hypnosis help to reduce the psychological trauma associated with "awake craniotomy" for brain cancers? A new "hypnosedation" technique offers a new alternative for patients undergoing awake surgery for gliomas, suggests a study in the January issue of Neurosurgery, official journal of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, published by Wolters Kluwer.

December 28, 2015 - The presence of myopia, or nearsightedness, significantly affects the muscles used in focusing the lens of the eye--a finding with important implications for the development of "accommodating" implanted intraocular lenses (IOLs) that can adjust to different visual distances, reports a study in the January issue of Optometry and Vision Science, official journal of the American Academy of Optometry.

AUGUSTA, Ga. - Diabetes is the leading cause of kidney failure, and scientists have found that infusing just a small dose of a cytokine, thought to help cause that failure, can instead prevent or reverse it.

The cytokine IL-17A has long been considered a classic promoter of inflammation, which plays a major role in progression of diabetes-related kidney disease, or diabetic nephropathy, said Dr. Ganesan Ramesh, kidney pathologist at the Vascular Biology Center at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University.

NDIANAPOLIS -- A proof-of-concept, phase 2 trial by an international research team has found promising results for a myostatin antibody in treating the decline in muscle mass and power associated with aging.

Captivating with their bright, vivid and brilliantly metallic bodies, the cuckoo wasps are also fascinating with their curious lifestyle, which has given them this common name. However, in terms of their taxonomic grouping, they have been quite problematic due to similarities between species and a wide range of variations within them.

The bacterium B. cereus had so far been considered to be exclusively endospore-forming. In response to harsh conditions, the bacteria form protective endospores enabling them to remain dormant for extended periods. When conditions are more favourable, the endospores reactivate to become fully functioning bacteria.

Atlanta -- Dec. 26, 2016 -- Survivors of cancer pay thousands of dollars in excess medical expenditures every year, with the excess financial burden varying by age and cancer site, according to a new American Cancer Society study. The study, appearing early online in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, says targeted efforts will be important to reduce the economic burden of cancer.

Eating too much is typically considered one of the prime culprits of obesity. A new study published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, looked specifically at overconsumption of "healthy" foods which consumers often perceive as less filling. The researchers successfully found evidence to support their hypothesis that when people eat what they consider to be healthy food, they eat more than the recommended serving size because they associate "healthy" with less filling.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - A songbird species that flourishes on the salmon-rich side of dams in the western United States struggles when it tries to nest on the side closed off from the fish and the nutrients they leave behind.

But the songbird and the rest of the divided ecosystem rebounds, faster than some experts expected, when dams come down and rivers are allowed to resume their natural flow.

Australian scientists have for the first time revealed how malaria parasites cause an inflammatory reaction that sabotages our body's ability to protect itself against the disease.

The discovery opens up the possibility of improving new or existing malaria vaccines by boosting key immune cells needed for long-lasting immunity. This could even include vaccines that have previously been ineffective in clinical trials.

DALLAS - Dec. 24, 2015 - Molecular biologists at UT Southwestern Medical Center have identified a gene called NORAD that helps maintain the proper number of chromosomes in cells, and that when inactivated, causes the number of chromosomes in a cell to become unstable, a key feature of cancer cells.