Health News

Always the baby of the family

Date: Dec-19-2013
Many parents say when their second child is born that their first child suddenly appears to have grown overnight. Now, researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology have an explanation: until the birth of the new child, those parents were subject to a "baby illusion," routinely misperceiving their youngest child as smaller (and younger) than he or she really was."Contrary to what many may think, this isn't happening just because the older child just looks so big compared to a baby," says Jordy Kaufman of Swinburne University of Technology in Australia.

Cause, not result, of inherited muscle diseases may be nuclei in wrong place

Date: Dec-19-2013
Incorrectly positioned nuclei are not merely a sign but a possible cause of human congenital myopathies, a string of inherited muscle diseases, Victoria Schulman, graduate student at Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences, and Mary Baylies, Ph.D., developmental biologist at the Sloan Kettering Institute of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York City, reported at the American Society for Cell Biology annual meeting in New OrleansThe researchers found that the whimsically named fruit fly gene, Sunday Driver, a.k.a.

Alcohol addiction study employs optogenetics

Date: Dec-19-2013
Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center researchers are gaining a better understanding of the neurochemical basis of addiction with a new technology called optogenetics.In neuroscience research, optogenetics is a newly developed technology that allows researchers to control the activity of specific populations of brain cells, or neurons, using light. And it's all thanks to understanding how tiny green algae, that give pond scum its distinctive color, detect and use light to grow.The technology enables researchers like Evgeny A. Budygin, Ph.D.

Evaluating potential age-promoting compounds

Date: Dec-19-2013
While there are well-established mouse models to identify cancer-causing agents, similar models are not available to readily test and identify age-promoting agents. Recently, a mouse strain (p16LUC mice) was developed that can be used to evaluate the transcription of p16INK4, which is increasingly expressed during aging and in age-associated diseases.

Human evolution gap closed by discovery of 1.4 million-year-old fossil human hand bone

Date: Dec-19-2013
Humans have a distinctive hand anatomy that allows them to make and use tools. Apes and other nonhuman primates do not have these distinctive anatomical features in their hands, and the point in time at which these features first appeared in human evolution is unknown. Now, a University of Missouri researcher and her international team of colleagues have found a new hand bone from a human ancestor who roamed the earth in East Africa approximately 1.42 million years ago. They suspect the bone belonged to the early human species, Homo erectus.

Combating muscle wasting and obesity by tweaking energy consumption

Date: Dec-19-2013
Using a new technique to evaluate working muscles in mice, researchers have uncovered physiological mechanisms that could lead to new strategies for combating metabolism-related disorders like muscle wasting and obesity. The study appears in The Journal of General Physiology.ATP-sensitive potassium (KATP) channels, which link membrane excitability to cell metabolism, are abundant in skeletal muscle and play an important role in regulating muscle function and energy consumption.

DNA unravels in aging cells

Date: Dec-19-2013
Senescent cells, which are metabolically active but no longer capable of dividing, contribute to aging, and senescence is a key mechanism for preventing the spread of cancer cells. A study in The Journal of Cell Biology identifies a common, early marker of senescent cells that could have important implications for tumor suppression and aging-related diseases like Progeria.Senescent cells permanently exit the cell cycle, a process that can be triggered by the cellular changes associated with aging or by other stresses such as the expression of cancer-promoting oncogenes.

Endocrine-disrupting activity linked to birth defects, infertility near fracking sites

Date: Dec-19-2013
A controversial oil and natural gas drilling technique called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, uses many chemicals that can disrupt the body's hormones, according to new research accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's journal Endocrinology.Endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or EDCs, are substances that can interfere with the normal functioning of the endocrine system. EDCs can be found in manufactured products as well as certain foods, air, water and soil. Research has linked EDC exposure to infertility, cancer and birth defects.

Hybrid protein deregulates complement in dense deposit disease

Date: Dec-19-2013
Dense deposit disease is a rare congenital disorder that is associated with complement dysfunction and often results in end stage renal disease within 10 years of the initial diagnosis. A small percentage of dense deposit disease is associated with mutations in the genes encoding factor H or C3 and autoantibody production.In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Peter Zipfel and colleagues at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Products Research and Infection Biology, evaluated an index family that had 2 reported cases of dense deposit disease.

Spontaneous fusion with macrophages empowers cancer cells to spread

Date: Dec-19-2013
Cancer cells that spontaneously fuse with macrophages, the immune system's healthy scavenger cells, play a key role in the metastasis, or spread of the cancer to other areas of the body, according to research presented at the American Society for Cell Biology annual meeting in New Orleans.The researchers, Alain Silk, Ph.D., Melissa Wong, Ph.D.