- June 10, 2013
- 03:00 PM
- 28 views
Why the shape of nanoparticles matters
by admin in Beaker
A new study involving Sanford-Burnham's Erkki Ruoslahti, M.D., Ph.D., contributing to work by Samir Mitragotri, Ph.D., at the University of California, Santa Barbara, found that the shape of nanoparticles can enhance drug targeting. The study found that rod-shaped nanoparticles—or nanorods—as opposed to spherical nanoparticles, appear to adhere more effectively to the surface of endothelial cells that line the inside of blood vessels.... Read more »
Kolhar, P., Anselmo, A., Gupta, V., Pant, K., Prabhakarpandian, B., Ruoslahti, E., & Mitragotri, S. (2013) Using shape effects to target antibody-coated nanoparticles to lung and brain endothelium. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1308345110
- June 10, 2013
- 10:46 AM
- 45 views
Scientists Integrate LED, Transistor on the Same Chip
by dailyfusion in The Daily Fusion
Engineers from the Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have successfully integrated a light-emitting diode (LED) and a power transistor on the same gallium nitride (GaN) chip. The ability to integrate LED and a power transistor on one chip opens the way to a new generation of LED technology that would be easier to manufacture, cheaper and significantly more energy efficient.... Read more »
Li, Z., Waldron, J., Detchprohm, T., Wetzel, C., Karlicek, R., & Chow, T. (2013) Monolithic integration of light-emitting diodes and power metal-oxide-semiconductor channel high-electron-mobility transistors for light-emitting power integrated circuits in GaN on sapphire substrate. Applied Physics Letters, 102(19), 192107. DOI: 10.1063/1.4807125
- June 10, 2013
- 09:04 AM
- 62 views
Blood Test Sets Therapy for Advanced Cancer Patient
by Agnese Mariotti in United Academics
A recent paper published in Nature reports the employment of blood tests for cancer patients to capture circulating tumor DNA that is subsequently sequenced and analyzed, the goal being to identify mutations and characterize the tumor genomic profile.... Read more »
Murtaza, M., Dawson, S., Tsui, D., Gale, D., Forshew, T., Piskorz, A., Parkinson, C., Chin, S., Kingsbury, Z., Wong, A.... (2013) Non-invasive analysis of acquired resistance to cancer therapy by sequencing of plasma DNA. Nature, 497(7447), 108-112. DOI: 10.1038/nature12065
Forshew, T., Murtaza, M., Parkinson, C., Gale, D., Tsui, D., Kaper, F., Dawson, S., Piskorz, A., Jimenez-Linan, M., Bentley, D.... (2012) Noninvasive Identification and Monitoring of Cancer Mutations by Targeted Deep Sequencing of Plasma DNA. Science Translational Medicine, 4(136), 136-136. DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3003726
Chan, K., Jiang, P., Zheng, Y., Liao, G., Sun, H., Wong, J., Siu, S., Chan, W., Chan, S., Chan, A.... (2012) Cancer Genome Scanning in Plasma: Detection of Tumor-Associated Copy Number Aberrations, Single-Nucleotide Variants, and Tumoral Heterogeneity by Massively Parallel Sequencing. Clinical Chemistry, 59(1), 211-224. DOI: 10.1373/clinchem.2012.196014
Leary, R., Sausen, M., Kinde, I., Papadopoulos, N., Carpten, J., Craig, D., O'Shaughnessy, J., Kinzler, K., Parmigiani, G., Vogelstein, B.... (2012) Detection of Chromosomal Alterations in the Circulation of Cancer Patients with Whole-Genome Sequencing. Science Translational Medicine, 4(162), 162-162. DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3004742
- June 10, 2013
- 07:18 AM
- 72 views
BDSM Practices Are Actually Healthy
by Andrew Porterfield in United Academics
Researcher at Tilburg University has found that instead, people who practice these behaviors in the bedroom (at least) are actually quite psychologically healthy... Read more »
Wismeijer AA, & van Assen MA. (2013) Psychological Characteristics of BDSM Practitioners. The journal of sexual medicine. PMID: 23679066
- June 10, 2013
- 05:37 AM
- 105 views
How to Measure Female Desire
by The Neurocritic in The Neurocritic
A Sexual Laboratory of One's Own, aka A Clean Well-Lighted Place for SexPsychophysiologic studies of sexual response should be done in a comfortable, well-designed laboratory to minimize subject anxiety and discomfort (Woodard & Diamond, 2009, Fig. 5). How do scientists measure the physiological aspects of sexual arousal in women? A 2009 paper by Woodard and Diamond reviewed 45 years of research using instruments that measure female sexual function. These devices include the vagina........ Read more »
Bloemers, J., Gerritsen, J., Bults, R., Koppeschaar, H., Everaerd, W., Olivier, B., & Tuiten, A. (2010) Induction of Sexual Arousal in Women Under Conditions of Institutional and Ambulatory Laboratory Circumstances: A Comparative Study. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 7(3), 1160-1176. DOI: 10.1111/j.1743-6109.2009.01660.x
Woodard, T., & Diamond, M. (2009) Physiologic measures of sexual function in women: a review. Fertility and Sterility, 92(1), 19-34. DOI: 10.1016/j.fertnstert.2008.04.041
- June 10, 2013
- 04:39 AM
- 54 views
Asthma increases risk of ADHD?
by Paul Whiteley in Questioning Answers
Asthma increasing the risk of ADHD? With a title like that derived from the paper by Mu-Hong Chen and colleagues* I couldn't resist posting an entry about it. Indeed the paper has one or two of the elements that I've come to love over my couple of years of blogging; in that we have two seemingly disparate conditions - one physiological, one behavioural - yet within the confines of the old 'correlation does not equal causation' quote, some possibility of a connection.Breathe @ Wikipedia &nbs........ Read more »
Chen MH, Su TP, Chen YS, Hsu JW, Huang KL, Chang WH, Chen TJ, & Bai YM. (2013) Asthma and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a nationwide population-based prospective cohort study. Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines. PMID: 23730913
- June 10, 2013
- 04:35 AM
- 49 views
Shining a light on the intuition of homicide detectives
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
"Just one more thing ..."
Dishevelled, diminutive and deep in thought, the TV detective Columbo would often bring a cigar-bearing hand to his forehead. You could almost hear the cogs whirring. Like so many other fictional detectives he had a brilliant intuitive sense, largely mysterious, almost magical. The same can be said for the puzzle-solving skills of real-life homicide detectives, whose thought processes have received little research attention. Now psychologist Michelle Wright has shone........ Read more »
Wright, M. (2013) Homicide Detectives' Intuition. Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling. DOI: 10.1002/jip.1383
- June 10, 2013
- 03:57 AM
- 286 views
The SAT-ACT Score Map
by nooffensebut in The Unsilenced Science
Using multiple regression, I animate state college entrance exam scores controlled for state participation levels and test preference. Then, I review a study on “noncognitive predictors” of college outcomes, which might eventually replace the SAT and ACT.... Read more »
Schmitt N, Keeney J, Oswald FL, Pleskac TJ, Billington AQ, Sinha R, & Zorzie M. (2009) Prediction of 4-year college student performance using cognitive and noncognitive predictors and the impact on demographic status of admitted students. The Journal of applied psychology, 94(6), 1479-97. PMID: 19916657
- June 10, 2013
- 01:58 AM
- 202 views
Living fossils can evolve quickly
by Mostly Open Ocean in Mostly Open Ocean
The evolution of living fossils is not unusual. The odd thing about them is that they have ancient origins and are, today, not very diverse groups. Sturgeon are ray-finned fishes in the family Acipenseridae, which are known from almost 200 million year old fossils. Fossils that are recognisably similar to modern sturgeons appear about 100 million years ago. There are 23 (but maybe a few more) modern species in the Acipenseridae, which is probably fairly similar to their historical diversity. A s........ Read more »
Rabosky, D., Santini, F., Eastman, J., Smith, S., Sidlauskas, B., Chang, J., & Alfaro, M. (2013) Rates of speciation and morphological evolution are correlated across the largest vertebrate radiation. Nature Communications. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2958
- June 10, 2013
- 12:04 AM
- 35 views
Room for Improvement: Laws Regarding Traumatic Brain Injuries in Youth Sports
by Jane McDevitt in Sports Medicine Research (SMR): In the Lab & In the Field
Take Home Message: In the United States, traumatic brain injury laws reflect a uniform, but not scientifically proven consensus about return to play time, who makes the return to play decisions, and the best delivery method to distribute educational information. None of the laws target injury prevention.
Forty-four states and Washington DC passed legislation to reduce the overall impact of traumatic brain injuries. However, there are no studies comparing the content of the laws with the curre........ Read more »
Harvey HH. (2013) Reducing traumatic brain injuries in youth sports: youth sports traumatic brain injury state laws, january 2009-december 2012. American Journal of Public Health, 103(7), 1249-54. PMID: 23678903
- June 9, 2013
- 09:30 PM
- 61 views
Toward an algorithmic theory of biology
by Artem Kaznatcheev in Evolutionary Games Group
When you typically think of computer scientists working on questions in biology, you probably picture a bioinformatician. Although bionformatics makes heavy use of algorithms and machine learning, and its practitioners are often mildly familiar with computational complexity (enough to know that almost everything they study is NP-complete), it doesn’t really apply computational thinking to understand […]... Read more »
Pais, D., & Leonard, N. (2013) Adaptive network dynamics and evolution of leadership in collective migration. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena. DOI: 10.1016/j.physd.2013.04.014
- June 9, 2013
- 06:31 PM
- 28 views
Françoise Barré-Sinoussi visits the Centre for Virus Research
by Andrew Shaw in Virus Musings
Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, the discoverer of HIV, visits the Centre for Virus Research in Glasgow.... Read more »
Barre-Sinoussi, F., Chermann, J., Rey, F., Nugeyre, M., Chamaret, S., Gruest, J., Dauguet, C., Axler-Blin, C., Vezinet-Brun, F., Rouzioux, C.... (1983) Isolation of a T-lymphotropic retrovirus from a patient at risk for acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). Science, 220(4599), 868-871. DOI: 10.1126/science.6189183
- June 9, 2013
- 01:05 PM
- 68 views
Is Your Work Giving you IBS?
by Aurametrix team in Irritable Bowel Blog
All jobs come with health risks. Some risks are obvious in the short-term, others seem very minor but with plenty of negative long-term consequences. Such as weight gain or irritable bowel syndrome. ... Read more »
Nojkov B, Rubenstein JH, Chey WD, & Hoogerwerf WA. (2010) The impact of rotating shift work on the prevalence of irritable bowel syndrome in nurses. The American journal of gastroenterology, 105(4), 842-7. PMID: 20160712
Okami, Y. (2013) Irritable bowel syndrome in Chinese nursing and medical school students—Related lifestyle and psychological factors. Open Journal of Gastroenterology, 03(01), 55-63. DOI: 10.4236/ojgas.2013.31009
- June 9, 2013
- 01:04 PM
- 45 views
Ghosts of the Appalachians or the Missing Actors?
by David Steen in Living Alongside Wildlife
When we pass through the Appalachian Mountains along its vast extent
from the humid southeast of Alabama and Georgia to the cold and barren of Nova
Scotia and Newfoundland, we cannot help but marvel of its beauty and
extensiveness. Unlike its western cousin, the Rocky Mountains, which is a mixture of forested ranges imbedded in
a matrix of lowland shrub and grass ... Read more »
Laundré JW. (2010) Behavioral response races, predator-prey shell games, ecology of fear, and patch use of pumas and their ungulate prey. Ecology, 91(10), 2995-3007. PMID: 21058559
RIPPLE, W., & BESCHTA, R. (2004) Wolves and the Ecology of Fear: Can Predation Risk Structure Ecosystems?. BioScience, 54(8), 755. DOI: 10.1641/0006-3568(2004)054[0755:WATEOF]2.0.CO;2
- June 9, 2013
- 12:30 PM
- 44 views
Atomic identity checks
by Joerg Heber in All That Matters
It become pretty much a routine, albeit an expensive one, to use transmission electron microscopes for imaging atoms in a crystal. But what has often been missing from those images is a crucial bit of information, the identity of the chemical element that has been looked at. Of course, the grey scales in the contrast […]... Read more »
Urban, K., Mayer, J., Jinschek, J., Neish, M., Lugg, N., & Allen, L. (2013) Achromatic Elemental Mapping Beyond the Nanoscale in the Transmission Electron Microscope. Physical Review Letters, 110(18). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.185507
- June 9, 2013
- 12:00 PM
- 42 views
Four (Wrong) Ways To Interpret Links Between Genes and Education
by Psych Your Mind in Psych Your Mind
Last week Science published a neat little paper examining links between specific human DNA sequences and educational attainment. The paper, which is a bit shorter than the list of authors who worked on the project, examined a total sample of more than 120,000 participants who had their entire genome sequenced for a number of small clusters of repeating nucleotides (single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs). They then examined all the SNPs and their associations with the level of educational att........ Read more »
Rietveld, C. A. (2013) GWAS of 126,599 individuals identifies genetic variants associated with educational attainment. Science. info:/
- June 9, 2013
- 01:32 AM
- 81 views
The touching things about dogs
by Cobb & Hecht in Do You Believe In Dog?
Hi Julie,(source: The Blue Dog)WOW! May was a seriously jam-packed month for dogs! I'm just as amazed as you are that it's already June. I think I'm in denial, although June means lots of fun things happening, like the SPARCS conference, so maybe it's actually OK that it's here.I loved your last post. So much great information - thank you for sharing! You mentioned how you avoid touching dogs if they don't want to interact and that got me thinking about a sense I haven't written about yet. ........ Read more »
McGreevy Paul D., Righetti Joanne, & Thomson Peter C. (2005) The reinforcing value of physical contact and the effect on canine heart rate of grooming in different anatomical areas. Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People , 18(3), 236-244. DOI: 10.2752/089279305785594045
Coppola Crista L., Grandin Temple, & Enns R. Mark. (2006) Human interaction and cortisol: Can human contact reduce stress for shelter dogs?. Physiology , 87(3), 537-541. DOI: 10.1016/j.physbeh.2005.12.001
Hennessy Michael B., Voith Victoria L., Hawke Jesse L., Young Travis L., Centrone Jason, McDowell Angela L., Linden Fran, & Davenport Gary M. (2002) Effects of a program of human interaction and alterations in diet composition on activity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis in dogs housed in a public animal shelter. Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 221(1), 65-91. DOI: 10.2460/javma.2002.221.65
Bergamasco Luciana, Osella Maria Cristina, Savarino Paolo, Larosa Giuseppe, Ozella Laura, Manassero Monica, Badino Paola, Odore Rosangela, Barbero Raffaella, & Re Giovanni. (2010) Heart rate variability and saliva cortisol assessment in shelter dog: Human–animal interaction effects. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 125(1-2), 56-68. DOI: 10.1016/j.applanim.2010.03.002
O'Haire Marguerite. (2010) Companion animals and human health: Benefits, challenges, and the road ahead. Journal of Veterinary Behavior: Clinical Applications and Research, 5(5), 226-234. DOI: 10.1016/j.jveb.2010.02.002
- June 8, 2013
- 07:43 PM
- 88 views
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Women with Bulimia Nervosa
by Tetyana Pekar in Science of Eating Disorders
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is 3-5 times more prevalent in individuals with bulimia nervosa (BN) than those without (Dansky et al., 1997). However, the relationship between PTSD and BN–in particular, how PTSD might affect or moderate bulimic symptoms–remains largely unexplored. In a recent study, Trisha Karr and colleagues followed 119 women (20 with PTSD and BN, and 99 with BN only) for 2-week period to investigate whether participants with comorbid PTSD + BN dif........ Read more »
Karr, T., Crosby, R., Cao, L., Engel, S., Mitchell, J., Simonich, H., & Wonderlich, S. (2013) Posttraumatic stress disorder as a moderator of the association between negative affect and bulimic symptoms: an ecological momentary assessment study. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 54(1), 61-69. DOI: 10.1016/j.comppsych.2012.05.011
- June 8, 2013
- 06:21 PM
- 74 views
I gut a feeling!
by Shelly Fan in Neurorexia
I bet you don’t think about the 100 trillion microbugs thriving in your gut too much. Neither did I, until I started reading up on the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) at a conference last week. Several fun facts that came out from the project: For every human cell, there are 10-100 times of microbe living […]... Read more »
Diaz Heijtz R, Wang S, Anuar F, Qian Y, Björkholm B, Samuelsson A, Hibberd ML, Forssberg H, & Pettersson S. (2011) Normal gut microbiota modulates brain development and behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108(7), 3047-52. PMID: 21282636
Foster JA, & McVey Neufeld KA. (2013) Gut-brain axis: how the microbiome influences anxiety and depression. Trends in neurosciences, 36(5), 305-12. PMID: 23384445
- June 8, 2013
- 04:53 PM
- 63 views
International Team on Keck Observatory Strengthens Big Bang Theory
by Perikis Livas in Tracing Knowledge
An international team of scientists using the most powerful telescope on Earth has discovered the moments just after the Big Bang happened more like the theory predicts, eliminating a significant discrepancy that troubled physicists for two decades.
... Read more »
Steve Jefferson. (2013) International Team on Keck Observatory Strengthens Big Bang Theory. W.M. Keck Observatory. info:/
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