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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Navy is planning sea trials for a weapon that can fire a low-cost, 23-pound (10-kg) projectile at seven times the speed of sound using electromagnetic energy, a "Star Wars" technology that will make enemies think twice, the Navy's research chief said. Rear Admiral Matthew Klunder, the chief of Naval Research, told a round table group recently the futuristic electromagnetic rail gun had already undergone extensive testing on land and would be mounted on the USNS Millinocket, a high-speed vessel, for sea trials beginning in 2016. "It's now reality and it's not science fiction. It's actually...

The roots of inheritance may extend beyond the genome, but the mechanisms remain a puzzle. When Brian Dias became a father last October, he was, like any new parent, mindful of the enormous responsibility that lay before him. From that moment on, every choice he made could affect his newborn son's physical and psychological development. But, unlike most new parents, Dias was also aware of the influence of his past experiences — not to mention those of his parents, his grandparents and beyond. Where one's ancestors lived, or how much they valued education, can clearly have effects that pass down...

The simple blood test could give early warning within three years The test could speed the search for new drugs that delay or prevent disease Experts are pleased, but it could bring health concerns if no cure is found A simple blood test has been developed that gives healthy elderly people precious early warning they may get Alzheimer’s within the next three years. It is hoped the test, the first to predict accurately who will become ill, could speed the search for new drugs that can delay or even prevent the devastating brain disease. It could eventually lead to widespread...

Over a one-year period, five children in California developed a polio-like illness that caused severe weakness or paralysis in their arms and legs, a new case study reports. In two of the children, their symptoms have now been linked with an extremely rare virus called enterovirus-68. Like the poliovirus, which has been eradicated in the U.S. since 1979 thanks to the polio vaccine, strains of enterovirus in rare cases can invade and injure the spine. These are the first reported cases of polio-like symptoms being caused by enterovirus in the United States. During the last decade, outbreaks of polio-like symptoms...

It's called Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, after the region where almost all the patients have been reported. But the name may turn out to be a misnomer. A new study has found the virus in camels from Sudan and Ethiopia, suggesting that Africa, too, harbors the pathogen. That means MERS may sicken more humans than previously thought—and perhaps be more likely to trigger a pandemic. MERS has sickened 183 people and killed 80, most of them in Saudi Arabia. A couple of cases have occurred in countries outside the region, such as France and the United Kingdom, but...

Forty years ago, a beloved neighbor was bedridden for weeks at a time with a mysterious ailment. She knew only that it involved her liver and that she must never drink alcohol, which would make things worse. It was decades before the cause of these debilitating flare-ups was discovered: a viral infection at first called non-A, non-B hepatitis, then properly identified in 1989 as hepatitis C... --snip-- But with two newly approved drugs and a few more in the pipeline, a new era in treatment of hepatitis C is at hand. These regimens are more effective at curing patients and...

Since they arrived in the Great Lakes in the 1980s, two species of mussels the size of pistachios have spread to hundreds of lakes and rivers in 34 states and have done vast economic and ecological damage. These silent invaders, the quagga and zebra mussels, have disrupted ecosystems by devouring phytoplankton, the foundation of the aquatic food web, and have clogged the water intakes and pipes of cities and towns, power plants, factories and even irrigated golf courses. Now the mussels may have met their match: Daniel P. Molloy, an emeritus biologist at the New York State Museum in Albany...

Molecules can now be designed to target specific small RNAs, opening up a new way to investigate and treat disease © ShutterstockChemists in the US have found a way to predict small molecules that can target short pieces of RNA involved in some diseases, such as cancer. The team’s approach has already met with some success, throwing up a molecule that interferes with a microRNA involved in cancer. This opens up the possibility of treating diseases via a target traditionally seen as ‘undruggable’.MicroRNAs are non-coding lengths of RNA, around 20 nucleotides long, that act as dimmer switches in cells, turning...

The elusive progenitor cells that give rise to innate lymphoid cells—a recently discovered group of infection-fighting white blood cells—have been identified in fetal liver and adult bone marrow of mice, researchers from the University of Chicago report early online in the journal Nature. Innate lymphoid cells (ILCs) are among the first components of the immune system to confront certain pathogens. They have a critical function at mucosal barriers—locations such as the bowel or the lung—where the body comes in direct contact with the environment. Yet they went undetected by researchers studying the immune system for a century. "Scientists tend to...

ATLANTA (CBS Atlanta) – According to a new study, alcohol can boost your immune system. Researchers vaccinated animals and then gave them access to alcohol. Researchers found that the animals that had consumed alcohol also had faster responses to the vaccines.According to Medical News Today, the researchers hope this study leads to a better understanding of how the immune system works, and how to improve its ability to respond to vaccines and infections.Researchers were able to show other data to back their findings. According to UCR Today, moderate alcohol consumption has long been associated with a lower mortality rate.Moderate alcohol...

SCIENTISTS have hailed a historic "turning point" in the search for a medicine that could beat Alzheimer's disease, after a drug-like compound was used to halt brain cell death in mice for the first time. Although the prospect of a pill for Alzheimer's remains a long way off, the landmark British study provides a major new pathway for future drug treatments. The compound works by blocking a faulty signal in brains affected by neurodegenerative diseases. The signal shuts down the production of essential proteins, leading to brain cells being unprotected and dying off. The compound was tested in mice with...

S. Cassagnaud et al., Science Translational Medicine (2013)Big step. A mouse that has the equivalent of achondroplasia (top) doesn’t measure up to an animal that received injections of FGFR3 (bottom). It may sound counterintuitive, but the most common type of human dwarfism results when cells in a child’s bones are overstimulated by growth factors. A mouse study, however, suggests that injecting such children with a molecular decoy that sponges up these factors could treat the condition.People with the form of dwarfism called achondroplasia rarely stand more than 1.5 meters tall. The mutation responsible for the condition ends up stunting the...

U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt Eric T. Sheler/Wikimedia CommonsAdding value. NIH wants to know how genome sequencing could go beyond existing newborn screening tests. In a few years, all new parents may go home from the hospital with not just a bundle of joy, but with something else—the complete sequence of their baby’s DNA. A new research program funded at $25 million over 5 years by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will explore the promise—and ethical challenges—of sequencing every newborn’s genome.The pilot projects build on decades-old state screening programs that take a drop of blood from nearly every newborn’s...

Flu scientists are hoping to vaccinate themselves against another outbreak of a crippling controversy. In a letter published this week by Nature and Science (see p. 612), 22 researchers make their case for launching potentially risky experiments with the H7N9 avian influenza virus, which emerged earlier this year in China and which some scientists fear could spark a deadly human pandemic. The scientists, who mostly work in U.S.-funded labs, also detail the safety and security precautions that they would take to prevent the possibly dangerous viruses they create from escaping from the lab—or falling into the hands of terrorists. In...

By differentiating between bacterial and viral fevers, a new test may help doctors decide whether to prescribe antibiotics. Fevers are a common symptom of many infectious diseases, but it can be difficult to tell whether viruses or bacteria are the cause. By measuring gene activity in the blood of 22 sick children, Gregory Storch, a pediatrician and infectious disease researcher at Washington University in St. Louis and colleagues were able to distinguish bacteria-sparked fevers from ones kindled by viruses. The activity of hundreds of genes changed as the children’s immune systems responded to the pathogens, but the team found that...

Examination of neurological disease research shows pervasive ‘significance bias’. A statistical analysis of more than 4,000 data sets from animal studies of neurological diseases has found that almost 40% of studies reported statistically significant results — nearly twice as many as would be expected on the basis of the number of animal subjects. The results suggest that the published work — some of which was used to justify human clinical trials — is biased towards reporting positive results. This bias could partly explain why a therapy that does well in preclinical studies so rarely predicts success in human patients, says...

She was a 32-year-old aerobics instructor from a Dallas suburb — healthy, college-educated, with two young children. Nothing out of the ordinary, except one thing. Her cholesterol was astoundingly low. Her low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, the form that promotes heart disease, was 14, a level unheard-of in healthy adults, whose normal level is over 100. The reason: a rare gene mutation she had inherited from both parents. Only one other person, a young, healthy Zimbabwean woman whose LDL cholesterol was 15, has ever been found with the same mutation. The discovery of the mutation and of the two women with...

Enlarge Image Monkey business. Young rhesus monkeys that receive human antibrain antibodies in utero act oddly in social situations. Credit: Nancy Collins/Creative Commons "Antibrain" antibodies that slip through the placenta from mother to fetus during pregnancy may account for roughly a quarter of autism cases, a new study suggests. Some scientists say the work could lead to a blood test that accurately predicts whether a mother will bear a child with this immune-triggered form of the disorder—a claim that's raising eyebrows among skeptics. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a range of communication and social deficits estimated to affect 1 in...

Enlarge Mapping out the van der Waals interaction between two atoms. (a) In the experiment of Béguin et al. two atoms are trapped in the foci of two laser beams separated by a distance R. (b) Depending on R, the excitation laser field can couple the ground state |gg of the atomic pair to states containing one atom in the Rydberg state (|gr and |rg, respectively), or to a state with both atoms populating the Rydberg state |rr. The energy of the latter state is strongly shifted because of the van der Waals interaction UvdW between the atoms (see...

Pollution during the 20th century appears to have suppressed North Atlantic hurricanes The Clean Air Act, which has benefited breathing in many American cities over the last few decades, may have worsened the weather in some places. New climate simulations suggest that reducing the level of atmospheric aerosol particles produced by human activity might have been the main cause of a recent increase in tropical storm frequency in the North Atlantic. Aerosol levels have increased since the industrial revolution began, but there have been periods when emissions stalled or fell, such as the Great Depression, World War II and after...