Researchers at Children's Hospital Los Angeles have discovered that by targeting a particular receptor, chemotherapy-resistant cancer cells can be killed in an acute form of childhood leukemia, offering the potential for a future treatment for patients who would otherwise experience relapse of their disease.

Nora Heisterkamp, PhD, and colleagues at The Saban Research Institute of Children's Hospital Los Angeles have discovered that by targeting the B-cell activating receptor (BAFF-R), chemotherapy-resistant precursor B acute lymphoblastic leukemia cells (pre-B ALL) can be selectively killed in vivo and in vitro. Results will be published on May 13 in Molecular Cancer Therapeutics.

Though numbers are difficult to estimate, advocates believe one in three women around the world have experienced physical or sexual violence from a partner.

It's difficult to be sure so a few countries, notably the United States, have introduced screening program in healthcare settings to try and see what works. The results in BMJ found no evidence to support domestic violence screening.

Last year, people began wondering why part of the sun was missing.  What had happened was that changes to the magnetic field were allowing hot plasma to fly off into space toward Earth, creating a coronal hole.

Coronal holes are actually happening less right now, because we are experiencing a solar maximum. During this portion of the recurring cycle, the number of coronal holes decreases. During solar max, the magnetic fields on the sun reverse and new coronal holes appear near the poles with the opposite magnetic alignment.

A research team from the Friedman Brain Institute of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has published evidence which finds that subtle changes of inhibitory signaling in the reward pathway can change how animals respond to drugs such as cocaine.

The authors say this is the first study to demonstrate the critical links between the levels of the trafficking protein, the potassium channels' effect on neuronal activity and a mouse's response to cocaine.   

The authors investigated the role of sorting nexin 27 (SNX27), a PDZ-containing protein known to bind GIRK2c/GIRK3 channels, in regulating GIRK currents in dopamine (DA) neurons on the ventral tegmental area (VTA) in mice.

Many young people know not to drive while drunk but in the wave of health claims and legislative endorsements of marijuana, the message is being lost that you will still be impaired if you are high.

Male college students who report using marijuana in the month before they were surveyed had a high prevalence of driving under its influence and of riding with a marijuana-using driver - more than double that of driving or riding after alcohol use, say researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences and University of Washington pediatrics department.