Body

In a discovery that holds promise for future drug development, scientists have detected for the first time how nature performs an impressive trick to produce key chemicals similar to those in drugs that fight malaria, bacterial infections and cancer.

Primary investigator Yan Jessie Zhang, an associate professor of molecular biosciences at The University of Texas at Austin, Pinghua Liu from Boston University and Lixin Zhang from the Chinese Academy of Science report their findings today in the journal Nature.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- MIT engineers have designed magnetic protein nanoparticles that can be used to track cells or to monitor interactions within cells. The particles, described today in Nature Communications, are an enhanced version of a naturally occurring, weakly magnetic protein called ferritin.

WASHINGTON, D.C., November 2, 2015 - Climate change hasn't been kind to the Arctic Circle, as evidenced by the decrease of seasonal ice in the area and the encroachment of temperate species. One way to monitor impacts to the ecosystem is by observing the changes in occurrence or distribution of sea birds and marine mammals.

We tend to think of the immune system as guarding us against bacteria, viruses and assorted foreign invaders, but this system has some other surprising roles. Weizmann Institute researchers have now identified a small subtype of immune cells that appears to prevent metabolic syndrome: obesity, high blood pressure, and high levels of blood sugar and cholesterol.

It's getting closer to winter, and all of a sudden you need a new HVAC system that'll cost $5,000. You've got the money in a savings account. Will you spend that money, or pay with a high-interest credit card instead? According to a study in the Journal of Marketing Research, if you have earmarked those savings for a "responsible" purpose, you are probably going to preserve them and pull out the costly plastic.

When Toyota or Chrysler recalls one of its models, the news spreads all over social media, with most consumers bad-mouthing the recalled model. But it turns out that the bad-mouthing is not limited to the offending vehicles. According to a new study in the Journal of Marketing Research, much of the negative chatter extends or "spills over" to rival models, impugning them in the process as well.

Are you are one of the many consumers who prefer domestic to foreign products, even when the domestic products are lower in quality and cost more? Why is that? As a new study in the Journal of International Marketing explains, you are exhibiting what is known as consumer ethnocentrism--a thirty-year-old concept, says the study, whose conceptual boundaries and measurement need to be extended.

In an age in which personal data is routinely collected about each and every one of us, we are in-creasingly remote-controlled. "Many choices that people consider their own are already determined by algorithms," argue Prof. Dirk Helbing and Dr. Evangelos Pournaras from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) in a commentary published in the latest edition of the science journal Nature.

Suppose there were signs in a restaurant bathroom telling customers that they must wash their hands. Would customers obey them? It really depends on the tone of the sign and whether the message praises or scolds, says a forthcoming study in the Journal of Marketing Research. According to the study, to persuade customers to behave in a certain way, businesses should praise with an assertive tone and scold with a non-assertive tone.

Of the hundreds of genes that can be mutated in a single case of melanoma, only a handful may be true "drivers" of cancer. In research that appeared today in Nature Genetics, a Weizmann Institute of Science team has now revealed one of the drivers of a particularly deadly subset of melanomas - one that is still seeing a rise in new cases. This gene is a newly identified member of a group of genes called tumor suppressor genes. It is mutated in some 5.4% of melanomas.

Bethesda, MD (Nov. 2, 2015) -- Leading scientists have joined together and called for an interdisciplinary, public-private initiative focused on the microbiome. The American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) applauds this call for a formal approach to understanding microbial communities critical to all ecosystems, particularly the human body.

Beijing, Oct. 30, 2015: Cardiovascular Innovations and Applications (CVIA), a new journal affiliated with the Great Wall-International Congress of Cardiology, was introduced today at the opening ceremony of GWICC by Congress Chairman Prof. Changsheng Ma.

C. Richard Conti, MD, past president of the American College of Cardiology and former Editor of Clinical Cardiology, was appointed Editor-in-Chief of the new journal and has published its first issue to coincide with the 26th GW-ICC meeting in Oct. 2015 in Beijing, China.

Canadian entomologists have reported the first appearance of Aedes japonicus -- an invasive, disease-carrying mosquito -- in western Canada. Members of the species were found in a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia.

Researchers from the University of Southampton have established that eggs have a protective 'checkpoint' that helps to prevent DNA damaged eggs being fertilised.

Damage to an egg's DNA can result in infertility, birth defects and miscarriages. This damage can occur as a result of the natural ageing process and also as a result of women taking certain types of medication following chemotherapy, or radiotherapy.

New research published in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology shows that male and female mice respond differently to inflammation at the cellular level. Specifically, in male mice the spleen acts as a source of white blood cells, while in females this is not the case. This discovery suggests that human studies are necessary to determine if current medical practices, which treat men and women generally the same, should be altered to reflect sex-specific differences.