PHILADELPHIA — How a T cell decides to make protein X, Y, or Z can have profound effects for fighting foreign invaders or staving off dire autoimmune reactions. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have identified…
Monarch butterflies appear to use medicinal plants to treat their offspring for disease, research by biologists at Emory University shows. Their findings were published online Oct. 6 in the journal Ecology Letters.
“We have shown that some species…
Jerusalem, October 4, 2010 — Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have discovered a group of substances in the body that play a key role in controlling bone density, and on this basis they have begun development of a drug for prev…
PITTSBURGH — Computer vision systems can struggle to make sense of a single image, but a new method devised by computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University enables computers to gain a deeper understanding of an image by reasoning about t…
Richard Lamb and his post doctoral fellow Virginie Mieulet, in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, may be able to explain why proper nutrition is so vital in fighting infection.
They have discovered an amino acid, called arginine, is required to …
Gamblers who think they have a “hot hand,” only to end up walking away with a loss, may nonetheless be making “rational” decisions, according to new research from University of Minnesota psychologists. The study finds that because humans are making …
A gene that belongs to a family of genes implicated in heart disease has been found to be essential for male fertility but has no impact on female fertility, researchers at U of T, along with colleagues in New York and Japan, have discovered.
Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have shown that a novel chemical permits greater amount of insulin-producing islet cells to survive freezing intact. Additionally, the researchers reported, these cells appear to be better able to secrete insulin in response to glucose after they are thawed, in contrast to currently available techniques. The discovery could represent an important step forward in making islet cell transplants a viable treatment option for patients with diabetes, they said.
Progesterone and estrogen appear to have a positive effect on lung function and reduce the symptoms of asthma, according to a report published by University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH) researchers in the March issue of Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, the scientific journal of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. “We found that women’s lung function and asthma symptoms improve when estrogen and progesterone levels are raised, both naturally during certain times in the menstrual cycle and with the administration of oral contraceptives or hormone replacement therapy,” said one of the study’s lead researchers.
Candian astronomers say that detecting microscopic meteors from other solar systems could provide clues about the formation of planets like Earth. Dust streams from our sun’s stellar neighbours consist of tiny grains of pulverized rock ejected from a disk of dust and debris that commonly surrounds young stars, says Joseph Weingartner, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics. According to Professor Norman Murray, associate director of CITA and co-author of the study, “if we can detect these grains and trace them back to the star system that they came from, we’d have very good evidence of planet formation going on in that system.” Weingartner presented the study Jan. 6 at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, Wash.
New understanding of the changes in brain chemistry caused by chronic cocaine use has suggested a novel treatment that could reduce the intense craving that forms the core of cocaine addiction. “Our studies show that administration of an existing drug ? n-acetyl cysteine, which is used to treat cystic fibrosis and several other disorders ? reverses the changes in brain chemistry that appear to cause cocaine craving,” said David A. Baker, a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Peter W. Kalivas at the Medical University of South Carolina.