Health News

5 Tips On Fatherhood Based On Recent Research

Date: Jun-10-2013
As Father's Day draws near, psychologist Jeff Cookston says dads should ask their children for a little more feedback than they might get with the yearly greeting card. Just being a good parent may not be good enough, said Cookston, professor of psychology at San Francisco State University, who has studied fatherhood extensively...

How Birds Lost Their Penises Has Potential To Improve Understanding Of Malformations

Date: Jun-10-2013
In animals that reproduce by internal fertilization, as humans do, you'd think a penis would be an organ you couldn't really do without, evolutionarily speaking. Surprisingly, though, most birds do exactly that, and now researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology have figured out where, developmentally speaking, birds' penises have gone. It turns out that land fowl, which have only rudimentary penises as adults, have normally developing penises as early embryos...

Health Challenges For Cancer Survivors Posed By Rural Living

Date: Jun-10-2013
Cancer survivors who live in rural areas aren't as healthy as their urban counterparts, according to new research from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. Kathryn E. Weaver, Ph.D., assistant professor of social sciences and health policy at Wake Forest Baptist, said that this study, which builds on previous research showing that rural cancer survivors suffer worse health after cancer, looks at the role of health behaviors, such as smoking and physical inactivity...

Mouse Brain Cells Coaxed To Regenerate Cells Lost In Huntington's Disease

Date: Jun-10-2013
Researchers have been able to mobilize the brain's native stem cells to replenish a type of neuron lost in Huntington's disease. In the study, which appears in the journal Cell Stem Cell, the scientists were able to both trigger the production of new neurons in mice with the disease and show that the new cells successfully integrated into the brain's existing neural networks, dramatically extending the survival of the treated mice...

Nine Hallmarks Of Aging

Date: Jun-10-2013
For some species, living twice as long in good health depends on no more than a few genes. When this fact was revealed by studies on worms three decades ago, it ushered in a golden age of ageing studies that has delivered numerous results, but also sown some confusion. The prestigious journal Cell is now publishing an exhaustive review of the subject that aims to set things straight and "serve as a framework for future studies." All the molecular indicators of ageing in mammals - the nine signatures that mark the advance of time - are set out in its pages...

How Bacterial Growth Responds To Temperature Change Revealed By Metabolic Model Of E. coli

Date: Jun-10-2013
Bioengineers at the University of California, San Diego have developed a computational model of 1,366 genes in E. coli that includes 3D protein structures and has enabled them to compute the temperature sensitivity of the bacterium's proteins. The study, published in the journal Science, opens the door for engineers to create heat-tolerant microbial strains for production of commodity chemicals, therapeutic proteins and other industrial applications. Students of microbiology learn early that bacterial growth is temperature sensitive...

Surveillance And Vaccine Strategies Suggested By Studies Showing How Bird Flu Viruses Could Adapt To Humans

Date: Jun-10-2013
Bird flu viruses are potentially highly lethal and pose a global threat, but relatively little is known about why certain strains spread more easily to humans than others. Two studies published by Cell Press in the journal Cell identify mutations that increase the infectivity of H5N1 and H7N9 viruses through improved binding to receptors in the human respiratory tract. The findings offer much-needed strategies for monitoring the emergence of dangerous bird flu strains capable of infecting humans and for developing more effective vaccines...

Differences In Visual Function As A Cause Of Dyslexia Eliminated By Brain Imaging Study

Date: Jun-10-2013
A new brain imaging study of dyslexia shows that differences in the visual system do not cause the disorder, but instead are likely a consequence. The findings, published in the journal Neuron, provide important insights into the cause of this common reading disorder and address a long-standing debate about the role of visual symptoms observed in developmental dyslexia. Dyslexia is the most prevalent of all learning disabilities, affecting about 12 percent of the U.S. population...

For Chromosome Stability - Molecular VELCRO

Date: Jun-10-2013
The genome is full of sequence repetitions. Sequence motif is added after sequence motif, sometimes more than a hundred times. Erratically it seems. And these sequence motifs bind proteins that control transcription factors in regions of the genome where no transcription should occur. A conundrum. Nicolas Thoma, group leader at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, and his team together with the team of David Shore at the University of Geneva, have now been able to give an answer and assign a function to this seeming inconsistency...

Stopping Tumor Survival In Low-Oxygen Environments

Date: Jun-10-2013
As tumors grow, their centers are squeezed of oxygen. And so tumors must flip specific genetic switches to survive in these hypoxic environments. A series of studies funded to do only basic science and published in the journal Cell report the serendipitous discovery of a druggable target necessary for the survival of tumors in these low-oxygen environments...