Low levels of the “sunshine” vitamin D appear to increase a child’s risk of anemia, according to new research led by investigators at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. The study, published online Oct. 10 in the Journal of Pediatrics, is believed to be the first one to extensively explore the link between the two conditions in children.
A substance in breast milk that neutralizes HIV and may protect babies from acquiring HIV from their infected mothers has been identified for the first time by researchers at Duke Medicine.
States across the country have started to implement the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM). But, according to a National Science Foundation-funded study, a large majority of middle school math teachers point to the new high-stakes tests and teacher evaluations associated with the CCSSM as challenges for implementing the new standards. In fact, most teachers reported that the content of these new state assessments and the teacher evaluation systems aligned with the CCSSM will ultimately drive their classroom practices. These are among other findings released as part of a new survey, conducted by researchers from the University of Rochester, Western Michigan University, Michigan State University, and Washington State University Tri-Cities in April and May 2013, that examines how teachers perceive the new standards, CCSSM-related assessments, and the teacher evaluation process linked to the new standards.
A new Department of Energy grant will fund research to advance an additive manufacturing technique for fabricating three-dimensional (3D) nanoscale structures from a variety of materials.
Cell biologists have discovered that message-relaying proteins inside cells always initiate the cellular projections that act as hands to help cells "crawl." The messenger protein network was known to be required for directional movement but scientists now know that it can self-activate spontaneously to direct random movement as well.
Johns Hopkins researchers used suction to learn that individual “molecular muscles” within cells respond to different types of force, a finding that may explain how cells “feel” the environment and appropriately adapt their shapes and activities.
Researchers at the Duke Cancer Institute have developed a tool for doctors to forecast the potential survival of individual patients, enabling faster, more accurate information on whether to try additional rounds of treatment or seek clinical trials.
When financial gain depends on cooperation, we might expect that people would put aside their differences and focus on the bottom line. But new research suggests that people’s racial biases make them more likely to leave money on the table when a windfall is not split evenly between groups.
Harvest, an open-source, highly interactive software toolkit introduced by a team of informatics experts and researchers, enables biomedical researchers to explore their data without having to become specialized database technicians.
Researchers have developed a new technology to sort human cells according to their stiffness, which might one day help doctors identify certain diseases in patients, according to a new study.
Johns Hopkins researchers say that by measuring levels of certain proteins in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), they can predict when people will develop the cognitive impairment associated with Alzheimer’s disease years before the first symptoms of memory loss appear.
Though worlds apart, four unrelated families have been united in a medical mystery over the source of a rare inherited disorder that results in their children being born with abnormal brain growth and severe functional impairments.
Mayo Clinic researchers have found a surprising occupational hazard for teachers: progressive speech and language disorders. The research, recently published in the American Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease & Other Dementias, found that people with speech and language disorders are about 3.5 times more likely to be teachers than patients with Alzheimer’s dementia.
Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and Montefiore Medical Center have received a $25 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the Harold and Muriel Block Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (ICTR) at Einstein and Montefiore. The two institutions received their initial Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) from the NIH in 2008 to launch this joint collaboration.
Contradicting long-standing conventional wisdom, results of a Johns Hopkins-led analysis of data previously gathered on more than 3,000 family caregivers suggests that those who assist a chronically ill or disabled family member enjoy an 18 percent survival advantage compared to statistically matched non-caregivers.
The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society has awarded Thomas J. Kipps, MD, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, with a 5-year, $6.25 million Specialized Center of Research program grant to support research on chronic lymphocytic leukemia.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins have succeeded in making flattened, football-shaped artificial particles that impersonate immune cells. These football-shaped particles seem to be better than the typical basketball-shaped particles at teaching immune cells to recognize and destroy cancer cells in mice.
Children who undergo transplants of solid organs have a high risk of developing advanced kidney disease, according to a new national study. The findings reinforce the importance of continued screening of kidney function in these children.
An international consortium co-led by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Australia has identified four genetic variants associated with an increased risk of esophageal cancer and its precursor, a condition called Barrett’s esophagus.
A study led by Robert N. Weinreb, chairman and Distinguished Professor of Ophthalmology at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, has received a $6.4 million, 5-year grant from the National Eye Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, to elucidate the genetics of glaucoma in persons of African descent.
A protein that is increased by endurance exercise has been isolated and given to non-exercising mice, in which it turned on genes that promote brain health and encourage the growth of new nerves involved in learning and memory, report scientists from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School.
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” goes the playground rhyme that’s supposed to help children endure taunts. But a new study suggests that there’s more going on inside our brains when someone snubs us – and that the brain may have its own way of easing social pain.
A new paper published in the journal Climate Dynamics suggests that ‘unpredictable climate variability’ behaves in a more predictable way than previously assumed. The paper’s authors, Marcia Wyatt and Judith Curry, point to the so-called ‘stadium-wave’ signal that propagates like the cheer at sporting events whereby sections of sports fans seated in a stadium stand and sit as a ‘wave’ propagates through the audience.
Using the Food and Drug Administration's Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), a hospital electronic health records database, and an animal model, a team of researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai report that by adding a second drug to the diabetes drug rosiglitazone, adverse events dropped enormously. That suggests that drugs could be repurposed to improve drug safety, including lowering the risk of heart attacks.
Using mice, lab-grown cells and clues from a related disorder, Johns Hopkins researchers have greatly increased understanding of the causes of systemic sclerosis, showing that a critical culprit is a defect in the way certain cells communicate with their structural scaffolding. They say the new insights point the way toward potentially developing drugs for the disease, which affects approximately 100,000 people in the United States.
Researchers at The Johns Hopkins University working in a novel mouse model of Stiff Skin Syndrome have made key discoveries that may have broad implications for future scleroderma therapy.
Johns Hopkins researchers say they have pinpointed a site in a highly developed area of the human brain that plays an important role in the subconscious recognition of which way is straight up and which way is down.
A recently published study suggests that exposure to social stress not only impairs a mother’s ability to care for her children but can also negatively impact her daughter’s ability to provide maternal care to future offspring.
Indiana University School of Medicine emergency medicine faculty hope to improve the way childhood asthma is medically managed in Marion County through an innovative program that incorporates the skills and flexible schedules of specially trained Indianapolis Emergency Medical Services paramedics.
For years scientists have been working to fundamentally understand how nanoparticles move throughout the human body. One big unanswered question is how the shape of nanoparticles affects their entry into cells. Now researchers have discovered that under typical culture conditions, mammalian cells prefer disc-shaped nanoparticles over those shaped like rods.
Ohio State University has been granted a new multi-year, multi-million dollar Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) to continue turning basic science discoveries into life-saving medical advances. Ohio State is part of a national CTSA network of more than 60 academic medical institutions which collaborate to improve human health.
In a stroke of good luck, Drexel's Dr. Tracy Quirk captured detailed measurements of water level and salinity at a range of coastal wetland sites, even as they were overtaken by Hurricane Sandy. After the storm, she began working on an intensive year-long project, funded by the National Science Foundation, to evaluate ecosystem processes in New Jersey’s salt marshes before, during, and for a year following Hurricane Sandy. Quirk is beginning to analyze findings from the study now.
SUNY Downstate Medical Center's Sheryl Smith, PhD, has published new findings demonstrating a reproducible pathology that may help shed light on anxiety and mood volatility in methamphetamine dependence.
On a molecular level, you have more in common with shower curtain mold or the mushrooms on your pizza than you might think. Humans and fungi share similar proteins, a biological bond that makes curing fungal infections difficult and expensive. Now for the first time in 20 years, researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center have discovered a new compound that could be developed as an antifungal drug to treat histoplasmosis and cryptococcosis, two types of fungal infections that are naturally drug-resistant.
A pair of researchers at Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey has been awarded nearly $2.5 million dollars from the National Institutes of Health to further study in their respective laboratories. X.F. Steven Zheng, PhD, was awarded $1.65 million to examine an activating mechanism of the mTOR protein, which is a central controller of cell growth and metabolism. Darren R. Carpizo, MD, PhD, was awarded nearly $800,000 to further explore the effects of a compound identified in Dr. Carpizo’s laboratory found to restore tumor suppressor function of a mutated p53 gene in cancer cells.
A global hunt for genes that influence heart disease risk has uncovered 157 changes in human DNA that alter the levels of cholesterol and other blood fats – a discovery that could lead to new medications.
An Indiana University cancer researcher and his colleagues have discovered new therapeutic targets and drugs for certain types of leukemia or blood cancer.
Mitochondria are the power plants of cells, manufacturing fuel so a cell can perform its many tasks. These cellular power plants also are well known for their role in cell suicide. Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of Padua-Dulbecco Telethon Institute in Italy have shown that mitochondria remarkably also orchestrate events that determine a cell’s future, at least in the embryonic mouse heart. The new study identifies new potential genetic culprits in the origins of some congenital heart defects.
Whitehead Institute researchers have discovered that the protein product of the gene MECP2, which is mutated in about 95% of Rett syndrome patients, is a global activator of neuronal gene expression. Mutations in the protein can cause decreased gene transcription, reduced protein synthesis, and severe defects in the AKT/mTOR signaling pathway.
Genetics experts from The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia are among the leaders of a major international collaboration researching why patients with chromosome 22q11.2 deletion syndrome have a higher risk of schizophrenia.
Johns Hopkins researchers, working with mice, say they have identified a chemical compound that reduces the risk of dangerous, potentially stroke-causing blood vessel spasms that often occur after the rupture of a bulging vessel in the brain.
Researchers at NYU and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research have identified the mechanism that plays “traffic cop” in meiosis. Their findings shed new light on fertility and may lead to greater understanding of the factors that lead to birth defects.
A new study has found that “waviness” in forests of carbon nanotubes dramatically reduces their stiffness. Instead of being a detriment, the waviness may make the nanotube arrays more useful as thermal interface material for conducting heat away from integrated circuits.
Locust swarms may seem like a distant chapter from history, but these devastating insects still present a major threat in today’s world. A team of scientists from Arizona State, Colorado State, McGill and Yale universities are launching a new collaborative project to learn how human behavior, market forces and ecological systems interact over time to affect the outcomes of locust swarms.
New research shows that humans distinguish the difference between fine textures, such as silk or satin, through vibrations, which are picked up by two separate sets of nerve receptors in the skin and relayed to the brain.
By detailing a process required for repairing DNA breakage, scientists at the Duke Cancer Institute have gained a better understanding of how cells deal with the barrage of damage that can contribute to cancer and other diseases.
Scott Hansen, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Therapeutics on the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute, has won a prestigious New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health.
Researchers say it’s clear that some cases of autism are hereditary, but have struggled to draw direct links between the condition and particular genes. Now a team at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Tel Aviv University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology has devised a process for connecting a suspect gene to its function in autism.
A $2 million NSF grant will support development of a unique approach to making extremely compact and highly efficient antennas and electronics. The new technology will use principles derived from origami paper-folding techniques to create complex structures that can reconfigure themselves.
A problem developing more efficient organic LED light bulbs and displays is that much of the light is trapped within the light-emitting diode, or LED. University of Utah physicists believe they have solved the problem by creating a new organic molecule that is shaped like rotelle – wagon-wheel pasta – rather than spaghetti.
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