Free Republic

Enlarge Image Young at heart. Cross-sections of mouse ventricles show the visible change in size when old hearts are immersed in young blood. Credit: Francesco Loffredo It's time to turn back the clock on an aging ticker. Drawing on an odd experimental technique invented more than a century ago but rarely done now, researchers have found that a blood-borne protein makes old mouse hearts appear young and healthy again. It's not clear yet whether humans would react the same way, but scientists are hopeful that this discovery may help treat one of the heart's most frustrating ailments. "This is probably...

Scientists flew a plane into high up cirrus clouds and used a sampler that resembled a hair dryer to examine cloud formation © Karl FroydMineral dust that swirls up into the atmosphere from Earth’s surface plays a far more important role in both cloud formation and cloud chemistry than was previously realised. The findings will feed into models of cloud formation and chemistry to help produce more accurate assessments of the role of clouds in climate change.Relatively little is understood about the formation of cirrus clouds, wispy ‘horsetails’ that are made of ice crystals and form at extremely high altitudes...

Researchers harness bacteria to cripple insects that transmit disease. Scientists have engineered mosquitoes to carry a bacterium that confers resistance to the malaria parasite — a long-sought advance that could eventually curb malaria cases in humans. A team led by Zhiyong Xi, a medical entomologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, infected Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes with Wolbachia bacteria to produce insects that could pass the infection on to their offspring. Female mosquitoes that carried Wolbachia also bred with uninfected mates, the researchers report today in Science, swiftly spreading the malaria-blocking bacterium to entire insect populations within eight generations1. “This...

Another large study has failed to find any benefits for fish oil supplements. The Italian Risk and Prevention Study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, enrolled 12,513 people who had not had a myocardial infarction but had evidence of atherosclerosis or had multiple cardiovascular risk factors. The patients were randomized to either a fish oil supplement (1 gram daily of n-3 fatty acids) or placebo. After 5 years of followup, the primary endpoint– the time to death from cardiovascular causes or admission to the hospital for cardiovascular causes– had occurred in 11.7% of the fish oil group versus...

A new study led by researchers from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK has, for the first time, used genome sequencing technology to track the changes in a bacterial population following the introduction of a vaccine. The study follows how the population of pneumococcal bacteria changed following the introduction of the 'Prevnar' conjugate polysaccharide vaccine, which substantially reduced rates of pneumococcal disease across the U.S. The work demonstrates that the technology could be used in the future to monitor the effectiveness of vaccination or antibiotic use against different species of bacterial...

Enlarge Image Deadly powder. New technology could help bomb-sniffing devices spot black powder. Credit: Lord Mountbatten/Wikimedia Commons The Boston marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev reportedly purchased several pounds of black powder explosive before the bombing. Used in fireworks and bullets, the explosive substance is both deadly and widely available. It's also very hard to detect. Now, researchers have modified one bomb-sniffing device to accurately spot very small amounts of black powder, an advance that could make us safer from future attacks. Invented in China as early as the 7th century, black powder is a mixture of charcoal, sulfur,...

Sydney researchers have discovered a new type of immune cell in skin that plays a role in fighting off parasitic invaders such as ticks, mites, and worms, and could be linked to eczema and allergic skin diseases. The team from the Immune Imaging and T cell Laboratories at the Centenary Institute worked with colleagues from SA Pathology in Adelaide, the Malaghan Institute in Wellington, New Zealand and the USA. The new cell type is part of a family known as group 2 innate lymphoid cells (ILC2) which was discovered less than five years ago in the gut and the lung,...

There is not enough evidence to recommend universal screening to find people at risk of suicide, according to a government-backed panel. -- 20 percent to 40 percent of people identified as high-risk would be false positives, according to the researchers.

First-in-humans study introduces next generation cell therapyROCHESTER, Minn. — Translating a Mayo Clinic stem-cell discovery, an international team has demonstrated that therapy with cardiopoietic (cardiogenically-instructed) or "smart" stem cells can improve heart health for people suffering from heart failure. This is the first application in patients of lineage-guided stem cells for targeted regeneration of a failing organ, paving the way to development of next generation regenerative medicine solutions. Results of the clinical trial appear online of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. VIDEO ALERT: Audio and video resources are available on the Mayo Clinic News Network. The multi-center,...

This shows lewy bodies. Brown spots are immunostaining using an antibody specifically recognizing an abnormal form of alpha-synuclein. Clumps of α-synuclein protein in nerve cells are hallmarks of many degenerative brain diseases, most notably Parkinson's disease. "No one has been able to determine if Lewy bodies and Lewy neurites, hallmark pathologies in Parkinson's disease can be degraded," says Virginia Lee, PhD, director of the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research, at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. "With the new neuron model system of Parkinson's disease pathologies our lab has developed recently, we demonstrated that these aberrant clumps in...

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have discovered a new protein that controls the presence of the Vel blood group antigen on our red blood cells. The discovery makes it possible to use simple DNA testing to find blood donors for patients who lack the Vel antigen and need a blood transfusion. Because there has not previously been any simple way to find these rare donors, there is a global shortage of Vel-negative blood. The largest known accumulation of this type of blood donor is found in the Swedish county of Västerbotten, which exports Vel-negative blood all over the world....

A mutation that gives people rock-bottom cholesterol levels has led geneticists to what could be the next blockbuster heart drug. When Sharlayne Tracy showed up at the clinical suite in the University of Texas (UT) Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas last January, the bandage wrapped around her left wrist was the only sign of anything medically amiss. The bandage covered a minor injury from a cheerleading practice led by Tracy, a 40-year-old African American who is an aerobics instructor, a mother of two and a college student pursuing a degree in business. “I feel like I'm healthy as a horse,”...

Our guts are awash in bacteria, and now a new study fingers them as culprits in heart disease. A complicated dance between the microbes and a component of red meat could help explain how the food might cause atherosclerosis. The work also has implications for certain energy drinks and energy supplements, which contain the same nutrient that these bacteria like chasing after. Red meat is considered bad news when it comes to heart health, although studies aren't consistent about how much can hurt and whether it always does. Furthermore, it's not clear which components of meat are doing harm. Various...

Why is there arsenic in your beer? © ShutterstockThe Germans take the purity of their beer seriously. Back in the 16th century the Reinheitsgebot, or beer purity law, specified that the only ingredients that could be used in beer were water, barley and hops. Once it was realised that yeast was involved in the brewing process that was allowed as well. Today, the Provisional German Beer Law allows slightly different components but it certainly doesn't specify that arsenic can be added to the beer. Mehmet Coelhan of the Weihenstephan research centre at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, however, has...

Gut bacteria may convert a nutrient found in red meat into a compound that can damage the heartThe link between red meat and poor heart health has traditionally been blamed on cholesterol, but new evidence suggests this isn't the whole story. US researchers found that carnitine, a nutrient found in red meat, is converted into a metabolite that promotes cardiovascular disease by gut bacteria. This may mean that the popular practice of taking carnitine supplements to build muscle is unwise.‘The cholesterol and saturated fat content of red meat is not sufficient to account for increased cardiac risk,’ says lead author...

Researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have made a discovery in neuroscience that could offer a long-lasting solution to eating disorders such as obesity. It was previously thought that the nerve cells in the brain associated with appetite regulation were generated entirely during an embryo's development in the womb and therefore their numbers were fixed for life. But research published today in the Journal of Neuroscience has identified a population of stem cells capable of generating new appetite-regulating neurons in the brains of young and adult rodents. Obesity has reached epidemic proportions globally. More than 1.4 billion adults...

Study could aid development of more effective vaccines. For the first time, scientists have tracked in a patient the evolution of a potent immune molecule that recognizes many different HIV viruses. By revealing how these molecules — called broadly neutralizing antibodies — develop, the research could inform efforts to make vaccines that elicit similar antibodies that can protect people from becoming infected with HIV. The researchers, led by Barton Haynes of Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina, found that broadly neutralizing antibodies developed only after the population of viruses in the patient had diversified — something that...

U. MISSOURI (US) — Vitamin D supplements can help obese children and teens control their blood-sugar levels, which may help lower their risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.“By increasing vitamin D intake alone, we got a response that was nearly as powerful as what we have seen using a prescription drug,” says Catherine Peterson, associate professor of nutrition and exercise physiology at the University of Missouri. “We saw a decrease in insulin levels, which means better glucose control, despite no changes in body weight, dietary intake, or physical activity.”For the study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers...

Enlarge Image Microbe overhaul. Gastric bypass surgery changes the community of microbes in the gut, and a study suggests the new population might drive weight loss. Credit: Life in View/Science Source Usually, science starts in the lab and then moves to patients. Gastric bypass surgery has taken the opposite path. Originally offered as a radical treatment for severe obesity, the surgery's effects on the digestive system and metabolism have turned out to be far more mysterious and fascinating than anyone expected. Now, a new study probes another of the surgery's effects: its impact on microbes in the gut and...

About 1 in 4 deaths in the United States are due to cancer, but primary tumors are rarely fatal. Instead, it's when tumors metastasize that cancer becomes so deadly. To help patients and physicians make treatment decisions, teams of researchers have been working on various methods to detect cancer's spread – via the bloodstream – before secondary tumors develop. Now, one team reports a nearly perfect method for separating breast cancer cells from blood. They describe their proof-of-concept device in a paper accepted for publication in Biomicrofluidics, a journal of the American Institute of Physics. Detecting and separating circulating tumor...