Scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a quick and simple way to investigate the sugar coating that surrounds bacteria and plays a role in infection and immunity.
The sugars coating bacteria can change very quickly during the course of an infection, cloaking the bacteria from the immune system of their host. Previous techniques for studying the sugars were too slow to catch these rapid changes.
“There’s a growing recognition of the importance of
Researchers at a trio of universities have found that reactivating a specific memory does not affect associated or related memories, adding to our understanding of how memories are stored and influenced. The study appears in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study’s authors are Jacek Debiec and Joseph LeDoux of New York University’s Center for Neural Science, Valérie Doyère of NYU and Université Paris-Sud, and Karim Nader, a psychology professo
Cognitive neuroscientists have shown that babies have an abstract numerical sense, as demonstrated by their ability to match the number of voices they hear to the number of faces they expect to see. This numerical perception across senses demonstrates that babies have a truly abstract sense of numerical concepts — and not just one that is a function of a particular sense — even before they learn to speak. Previous experiments on this topic have yielded conflicting and equivocal results, sai
A University of Illinois scientist studying how membranes wrinkle has discovered a novel system for on-demand drug delivery.
Sahraoui Chaieb, a professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, has created temperature-sensitive capsules that can release drugs on demand. The capsules, which can range in size from 10 to 100 microns, can be tuned to deliver drugs at different rates. Chaieb reports his findings in the Feb. 17 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.
Most people would not choose the sex of their child if given the option, according to a new nationwide survey. The study is the first to examine the demand and preferences for sex selection among the U.S. general population.
“We found that only 8 percent of people would use pre-implantation sex selection for non-medical reasons,” said Dr. Tarun Jain, assistant professor of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at University of Illinois at Chicago and senior author of the report
Very thin but hardy, unblemished skin and slow developing gills appear to be keys to survival for newly hatched Antarctic notothenioids, a group of fish whose adults thrive in icy waters because of antifreeze proteins (AFPs) in their blood.
Such adaptations are important, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign say, because the larval fish of at least two species of notothenioids that inhabit the Ross Sea at McMurdo Sound and Terra Nova Bay surprisingly lack
A drug widely available in Europe and Canada – but not the United States – dramatically eases one of the most disabling symptoms of Huntington’s disease, involuntary writhing movements known as chorea, according to a study in the Feb. 14 issue of the journal Neurology.
The medication, tetrabenazine, is currently being reviewed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. If approved, the medication would be the first authorized by the agency expressly for the treatment of Hunting
Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) – shock treatment –improves quality of life in patients with major depression, and that improved quality of life continues for six months, according to a report in the February Journal of Affective Disorders.
The study was conducted in seven hospitals in New York City – two private psychiatric hospitals, three community hospitals and two academic medical centers, said W. Vaughn McCall, M.D., M.S., the lead author and professor and chairman of the D
Humans and chimps share most of their genes, yet they differ dramatically in many ways—their walk, the sizes of their brains and their capacities for speech and language, for example.
Scientists would like to know how and when such differences arose, and new research from the University of Michigan shows how one process—gene loss—may have figured in.
The work, by a group led by associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology Jianzhi Zhang, is reported i
More pediatricians should counsel children and their parents about preventing skin cancer, according to dermatology researchers from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. A review of research literature confirmed that prevention should begin in childhood, yet found that the topic is discussed at less than 1 percent of well-child visits.
“Children should be encouraged to use sunscreen, wear appropriate clothing and avoid both the strongest midday sun levels and indoor tann
Diuretics reduce the risk of death, delay heart deterioration and improve exercise capacity in patients with congestive heart failure, a new review of studies shows.
Although widely used for quick relief of CHF symptoms — cough, shortness of breath and swelling in the feet, legs and ankles — up until now it was not known whether diuretics had a more substantial effect in treating CHF.
“The available data from several small trials show that in patients with chronic heart
Assertive and even aggressive human behavior could explain why shark attacks worldwide dipped last year, continuing a five-year downward trend in close encounters with the oceanic predators, new University of Florida research suggests.
Greater safety precautions and in-your-face responses to confrontations with sharks went a long way in reducing the total number of attacks from 65 in 2004 to 58 in 2005 and fatalities from seven to four, said George Burgess, director of the Interna
Discovery suggests potential treatment for regenerating nerve tissue after stroke
Researchers at the University of Minnesota Medical School have discovered a new population of cells in human umbilical cord blood that have properties of primitive stem cells.
Umbilical cord blood is generally known to contain hematopoietic stem cells that can only produce cells found in blood. The new findings, however, identify a small population of cord blood cells with the characterist
Scientists at Georgia Tech have created technology capable of detecting trace amounts of biological or chemical agents in a matter of seconds, much faster than traditional methods, which can take hours or up to a day. The system uses reusable hydrogel microlenses so small that millions of them can fit on a one-inch-square plate. It could greatly enhance the ability of authorities responding to a biological or chemical weapons attack as well as increase the speed of medical testing. The researc
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a tabletop accelerator that produces nuclear fusion at room temperature, providing confirmation of an earlier experiment conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), while offering substantial improvements over the original design.
The device, which uses two opposing crystals to generate a powerful electric field, could potentially lead to a portable, battery-operated neutron generator for a variet
Every year, East Coast fever destroys the small farmer’s dream of escaping poverty in Africa. Killing more than a million cattle and costing some $200 million annually, this tick-borne disease rages across a dozen countries in eastern and central Africa. Now, an international team of scientists has taken the first major step toward a vaccine to prevent East Coast fever. Their work, published in the February 13-17 early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, s
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