A crucial piece of the puzzle into how the eye becomes wired to the brain has been revealed by scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., and UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.

In findings published in today’s edition of Neuron, the researchers report that a certain class of Eph receptors and ephrin ligands – proteins that cause cells to either repel or attract each other – control how nerve connections from the developing eye form maps that pre

A new gene shown to be essential for pollen production in flowering plants has been discovered by scientists at Penn State University. A paper describing the team’s discovery of the gene, whose activity they found is necessary for the formation of cells required for pollen production, will be published in the 1 August 2002 issue of the journal Genes and Development.

“This research is the first indication that a specific kind of protein known as a receptor-linked protein kinase, which resul

A gene thought to keep a single X chromosome turned on in mice plays no such role in humans, Johns Hopkins researchers report in the August issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics.

The finding is likely to relegate the disproven gene to relative obscurity, at least in humans, says Barbara Migeon, M.D., of the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine, whose laboratory found the human version of the gene in 2001. It also moves the search for the gene from the X chromosome to the

If you have had a bad nosebleed recently, think back over the last few days. Have you been taking Viagra? If so, it is worth mentioning it to your doctor, say surgeons writing in the August Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Lucy Hicklin and colleagues at St George’s Hospital in London describe two case histories where very severe nosebleeds followed Viagra-enhanced sexual activity, and suggest possible reasons why the two could be connected.

A six-hour nosebleed

The

Excessive use of ‘reliever’ inhalers for asthma is linked to a significantly increased risk of dying from the disease, finds research in Thorax.

The researchers based their findings on over 96,000 patients diagnosed with asthma whose details had been entered anonymously onto the General Practice Research Database between 1994 and 1998.

They calculated the relative risk of dying from asthma – risk for someone with taking a particular medication, compared with someone not taking that

While extreme obesity has been associated with heart failure, until now, data have been limited regarding the influence of overweight and lesser degrees of obesity on the risk of this disease. According to a new study supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), excess body weight is strongly and independently associated with an increased risk of heart failure. This risk, which increases continuously with increasing degrees of body weight, is 34 percent higher for overweight in

Researchers from the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse and the University of California, San Francisco, have found evidence that methadone treatment programs are effective platforms for providing tuberculosis (TB) preventive therapy to substance abusers. In the study, methadone treatment combined with directly observed TB preventive therapy improved adherence to and completion of TB preventive therapy by injection drug abusers.

Previous research has shown t

Fruit rinds provide new clues about crop domestication

Distinctly sculptured opaline phytoliths in soil and plant remains tell archaeologists which plants were present thousands of years ago. However, the production and purpose of these tiny glassy structures common in plant tissues is poorly understood. Dolores Piperno at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama and colleagues predict that a single genetic locus controls both lignin and phytolith production in sq

Male patients who suffer from obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) — the inability to breathe properly during sleep — produce lower levels of testosterone, resulting in decreased libido and sexual activity, according to researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. Previous studies had indicated that male sleep apnea patients had reported decreased libidos but the studies were unable to establish a scientific link. The current study, reported in the July issue of The Journal of Clinical End

A team of researchers from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) has discovered a way to use adult bone marrow stem cells to form new blood vessels in the eye or to deliver chemicals that will prevent the abnormal formation of new vessels.

This technique, which involves injecting the stem cells into the eye, could potentially be used to stimulate vessel growth and address inherited degenerations of the retina in the first instance, and in the second, to treat ocular diseases resulting from

Optical properties could prove useful in biomedical, nanoelectronic applications

Add fluorescence to the growing list of unique physical properties associated with carbon nanotubes — the ultrasmall, ultrastrong wunderkind of the fullerene family of carbon molecules.

In research detailed in the current issue of Science magazine, a team of Rice University chemists led by fullerene discoverer and Nobel laureate Richard Smalley describes the first observations of fluorescence

Burning eyes, burning lungs, skin rashes and other symptoms of illness have been found in a study of residents living near land fertilized with Class B biosolids, a byproduct of the human waste treatment process.

This study is the first linking adverse health effects in humans to the land application of Class B biosolids to be published in a medical journal. It was co-authored by David Lewis, a UGA research microbiologist also affiliated with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)&#

The Department of Nutrition and Bromatology of the Faculty of Pharmacy of Gasteiz, University of the Basque Country, is studying the action mechanism of fluoxetine in genetically fattened rats (Zucker fa/fa). Due to fluoxetine, those rats eat 50 % less. Therefore, the bodies put on less weight and the size of different fat tissues is reduced.
Antidepressants of the type of fluoxetine reduce appetite. More exactly, fluoxetine affects on neuropeptides that regulate appetite. Hence, it is believed

You are less likely to have allergies if:
you have older siblings (especially brothers);
you rarely washed your face and hands as a child;
you have had gastric infections with microorganisms that originated in faeces;
you were brought up on a farm with animals;
you keep a dog;
the dust in your home is contaminated with bacteria;
or you lived in Communist country rather than western Europe. You are more like to be allergic if

Roman A. Amosov and a team of Russian scientists from the Central Institute for Geological Exploration of Non-ferrous and Noble Metals, Institute of Paleontology, Russian Academy of Sciences, and from the Institute of Microbiology, Russian Academy of Sciences, led by, have managed to simulate in the laboratory the process of precipitation of gold which in the natural geothermal wells is promoted by blue-green algae (cyanobacteriae).

For the purposes of the experiment Vladimir Orleans

The next step in understanding what the human genome is telling us, especially

Despite some cosmetic differences, we all have the same genetic makeup that evolved from primitive man. Unfortunately, the genes that were in place before the advent of the earliest civilizations were not designed to carry individuals through today’s typical age span, now approximately eight decades of wear and tear. Additionally, the multiple genetic mutations that could survive in ancient times more than