Smokers carrying a newly found genetic marker are 5-10 times more likely to fall victim to the disease than other smokers; 120 times more than nonsmokers who don’t carry the marker

Scientists at the Weizmann Institute have discovered a new genetic risk factor that increases the susceptibility of smokers to lung cancer.

Published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, the findings show that smokers who carry the newly discovered genetic marker are around 120 times

A new University of Colorado at Boulder study of Jupiter’s moon Europa may help explain the origin of the giant ice domes peppering its surface and the implications for discovering evidence of past or present life forms there.

Assistant Professor Robert Pappalardo and doctoral student Amy Barr previously believed the mysterious domes may be formed by blobs of ice from the interior of the frozen shell that were being pushed upward by thermal upwelling from warmer ice underneath. Europa

The first line of defense used by the human blood-brain barrier in response to bacterial meningitis is described by researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine in a study published in the September 2, 2003 issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation. The scientists also describe two bacterial factors specific to the meningitis pathogen that thwart the normal protective role of the blood-brain barrier, leading to serious infection.

Composed of a layer

Dale Greiner and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts have developed a protocol for achieving stem cell transplantation that is not limited by significant patient side-effects and may not necessarily require that donor blood, bone marrow or whole organs are a “match” with the recipient –- characteristics that make these new procedures highly attractive for development and use in clinical human transplantation.

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) are parent cells in the bone marrow that

Markus Neurath and fellow researchers at the University of Mainz, Germany, have characterized the interaction between intestinal bacteria and dendritic cells (DCs) that may provide an explanation for the clinical symptoms of Crohn disease that only occur in specific regions of the gut.

The authors used transgenic mice to investigate the expression of the p40 subunit of IL-12 and IL-23. The authors demonstrate that p40 is expressed by a newly identified subset of DCs at greater levels in the

The latest discovery of a large asteroid moving through our Solar System puts a spotlight on the studies of these and other wandering celestial objects by the European Space Agency.

Some astronomers have predicted that this newly discovered object could hit the Earth on 21 March, 2014, but now data indicate that the chances of it doing so are really very small – less than one in 909,000.

However, scientists continue to monitor these objects which could give clues to the orig