Philadelphia, PA, July 19, 2016 - A new report in Biological Psychiatry reports that brain alterations in infants at risk for autism may be widespread and affect multiple systems, in contrast to the widely held assumption of impairment specifically in social brain networks.

Autism is diagnosed based on impairments in social and communication behaviors. These symptoms tend to emerge in the second year of life, but identifying abnormalities in early infancy could help researchers understand how autism develops and potentially allow clinicians to predict the disorder before it emerges.

Today, a negative correlation is observed in the amount of rainfall in north-western Africa and north-western Europe. If a humid winter climate prevails in north-western Europe, the climate in north-western Africa is dry. Due to melting ice sheets, this correlation was reversed in the early Holocene period; this resulted in both regions being humid respectively dry at the same time. Radical climate change occurred. The researchers have published their report in the current edition of Nature Geoscience.

Climate determined by opposing atmospheric pressures

(PHILADELPHIA) - Over 90 percent of prostate cancers are detected at a curable stage, with men more likely to die of other diseases than from this cancer. Although patients with localized, low-risk prostate cancer have treatment options: active surveillance, also called watchful waiting, in which the cancer is monitored periodically to detect any changes, or active treatment with surgery and radiation. This choice is challenging, because medical science cannot reliably identify those men who are at risk for developing aggressive disease and may benefit from active treatment. Nonetheless, most men diagnosed with localized, low-risk prostate cancer choose active treatment.

Retailers want perfect produce, leading to wastage occurring throughout the food supply chain. They also seek low prices, leading to industrialization of processes.

Chimeric antigen receptor T cells (CAR T cells) are a promising immunotherapy approach to cancer treatment in which a patient's own immune cells attack tumors by targeting an identifying marker, or antigen, that is displayed at high levels on cancerous cells. However, CAR T cells that target a single antigen have had mixed results in clinical trials, which may be due to ongoing variability in the antigens that tumors display. In this month's issue of the JCI, a team led by Nabil Ahmed at Baylor College of Medicine demonstrated that CAR T cells that were engineered to target two different tumor antigens were more effective at controlling tumors in an animal model than typical CAR T cells, which target a single antigen.

No need to head to the movie theater or download the video game app: Angry Birds can be found right in your backyard this summer--if you live in the suburbs, that is.

Virginia Tech researchers recently found that birds that live in suburban areas exhibit significantly higher levels of territorial aggression than their country counterparts. The results were recently published in Biology Letters.

Whitehead Institute scientists have created a checklist that defines the "naive" state of cultured human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). Such cells can mature into almost any cell type and more closely resemble the unique molecular features of pluripotent cells in the early human embryo than adult stem cells. Since the late 1990s, scientists have been very interested in working with naive stem cells, but they have been more hope than promise; they don't even have a common definition of what makes a cell truly naive.

Scientists have discovered the switch to harness the power of cord blood and potentially increase the supply of stem cells for cancer patients needing transplantation therapy to fight their disease. 
Stem cells were first discovered in Toronto in 1961 at the
Princess Margaret Cancer Centre
 by Drs. James Till and Ernest McCulloch, a discovery that launched a new field of science and formed the basis of all stem cell research that continues to this day. 

Clear communication between a doctor and patient is essential, especially when patients with advanced cancer wish to participate in decision-making about their medical treatment options, and trade-offs between quality and quantity of life emerge. A new study in JAMA Oncology finds that most of these patients report far more optimistic expectations for survival prognosis than their oncologists, due to patients' misunderstanding of their oncologists' clinical judgment.

"Previous research shows that patients, families and clinicians tend to either avoid prognosis-related conversations altogether or discuss prognosis in unbalanced ways," says first author Robert Gramling, M.D., M.Sc., Holly and Bob Miller Chair in Palliative Medicine at the University of Vermont.