Apr. 28, 2013 ? Being pregnant while young is known to protect a women against breast cancer. But why? Research in BioMed Central's open access journal Breast Cancer Research finds that Wnt/Notch signalling ratio is decreased in the breast tissue of mice which have given birth, compared to virgin mice of the same age.
Early pregnancy is protective against breast cancer in humans and in rodents. In humans having a child before the age of 20 decreases risk of breast cancer by half. Using microarray analysis researchers from Basel discovered that genes involved in the immune system and differentiation were up-regulated after pregnancy while the activity of genes coding for growth factors was reduced.
The activity of one particular gene Wnt4 was also down-regulated after pregnancy. The protein from this gene (Wnt4) is a feminising protein -- absence of this protein propels a fetus towards developing as a boy. Wnt and Notch are opposing components of a system which controls cellular fate within an organism and when the team looked at Notch they found that genes regulated by notch were up-regulated, Notch-stimulating proteins up-regulated and Notch-inhibiting proteins down-regulated.
Wnt/Notch signalling ratio was permanently altered in the basal stem/progenitor cells of mammary tissue of mice by pregnancy. Mohamed Bentires-Alj from the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, who led this study explained, "The down-regulation of Wnt is the opposite of that seen in many cancers, and this tightened control of Wnt/Notch after pregnancy may be preventing the runaway growth present in cancer."
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by BioMed Central.
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Journal Reference:
Fabienne Meier-Abt, Emanuela Milani, Tim Roloff, Heike Brinkhaus, Stephan Duss, Dominique S Meyer, Ina Klebba, Piotr J Balwierz, Erik van Nimwegen and Mohamed Bentires-Alj. Parity induces differentiation and reduces Wnt/Notch signaling ratio and proliferation potential of basal stem/progenitor cells isolated from mouse mammary epithelium. Breast Cancer Research, 2013 (in press) [link]
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Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Apr. 29, 2013 ? Smoking prevention in schools reduces the number of young people who will later become smokers, according to a new systematic review published in The Cochrane Library. For young people who have never smoked, these programmes appear to be effective at least one year after implementation.
Smoking causes five million preventable deaths every year, a number predicted to rise to eight million by 2030. It is thought that around a quarter of young people may smoke by age 13-15. With a history spanning four decades, prevention programmes in schools try to tackle smoking at an early age before the habit becomes difficult to break. The systematic review aimed to resolve the uncertainty of whether the programmes are effective in preventing smoking.
The researchers analysed data from 134 studies, in 25 different countries, which involved a total of 428,293 young people aged 5-18. Of these, 49 studies reported smoking behaviour in those who had never previously smoked. The researchers focused on this group because it offered the clearest indication of whether smoking interventions prevent smoking. Although there were no significant effects within the first year, in studies with longer follow up the number of smokers was significantly lower in the groups targeted by smoking interventions than in the control group. In 15 studies which reported on changes in smoking behaviour in a mixed group of never smokers, previous experimenters and quitters, there was no overall long term effect, but within the first year the number smoking was slightly lower in the control group.
"This review is important because there are no other comprehensive reviews of world literature on school-based smoking prevention programmes," said Julie McLellan, one of the authors of the review based at the Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford in Oxford, UK. "The main strength of the review is that it includes a large number of trials and participants. However, over half were from the US, so we need to see studies across all areas of the world, as well as further studies analysing the effects of interventions by gender."
Some smoking interventions aimed to develop social skills and competency or teach students to resist social pressure to smoke. In the longer term, subgroups of programmes that used a social competence approach or a combined social competence and resistance training approach had a significant effect on preventing smoking in young people who had never smoked at the time of the intervention. No effect was shown in studies that used resistance training alone. Equally, no significant effects were detected in those programmes that used information only or that combined tobacco education with wider school and community initiatives.
Booster sessions did not make any difference to the number of young people who went on to smoke. "We might expect booster sessions to reinforce the effects of the original programmes, but our review didn't find any evidence for this overall," said co-author Rafael Perera, also from the Department of Primary Care Health Sciences. "The exception was in studies focusing on general social competence and resistance training, which suggests that the way the curriculum is designed is more important than whether or not booster sessions are provided."
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Journal Reference:
Roger E Thomas, Julie McLellan, Rafael Perera. School-based programmes for preventing smoking. Cochrane Review, 2013 DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD001293.pub3
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Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
DETROIT (AP) -- JPMorgan Chase said Monday that it is giving $1 million to a Detroit nonprofit group to provide educational and other services to low-income families of students at three southwest side public schools, in an effort to improve the quality of life in those neighborhoods.
In addition to its grant to Southwest Solutions, the bank said it has pledged another $500,000 in grants to other Detroit groups.
Southwest Solutions provides human services programs and affordable housing and economic development. The agency will use its grant to expand its Centers for Working Families at Harms and Maybury elementary schools and Western International High School. Centers for Working Families teaches financial stability strategies to low-income families and also develops educational and employment opportunities for them.
The grant money also will be tied to an English language program for parents at two of the Detroit schools and help neighborhood preservation efforts. The agency wants to provide home repair loans or property improvement grants to 115 homeowners, and demolish 30 vacant properties near the three schools.
"We must stabilize families living in high-poverty neighborhoods by providing high quality educational opportunities and by creating job opportunities," said Sarah McClelland, Michigan market president for Chase.
Detroit's southwest side has a large Hispanic population.
An additional $500,000 in grants will assist a number of groups that provide job and financial literacy training, as well as other services, to young people and parents.
The state Department of Human Services will place a "success coach" in Western High School to work with students, staff and parents on issues inside and outside of the school.
The JPMorgan Chase investment and partnerships with the state and other groups fit in with a recently announced Detroit Public Schools 5-year strategic plan to develop quality schools as community hubs.
As part of the plan, the district will offer free pre-kindergarten classes to 4-year-olds in the city and keep some school buildings open to families 12 hours a day, seven days each week.
The district will enforce a stronger attendance policy and increase security in and around its schools.
"We want the school to be the place where not only children, but adults receive education and training, where child care services are offered for infants up to pre-k and senior care may be provided," Roberts said.
LONDON/ATLANTA (Reuters) - British film studio Pinewood Shepperton, home of the James Bond movies, plans to build its first movie, television and music studio in the United States, part of an international expansion strategy launched in 2009.
The owner of Europe's largest film studio, Pinewood said on Monday it would develop 288 acres of land south of Atlanta, Georgia, for a studio facility in a joint venture with River's Rock LLC, an independently managed trust of the Cathy family.
The Cathy family owns the Atlanta-based fried chicken chain Chick-fil-A. It is believed to be their first significant media investment, but no one from Chick-fil-A was available for comment.
Atlanta-area lawyer Douglas Warner, attorney for River's Rock, declined to comment.
Attracting Pinewood is the latest victory for Georgia as it builds itself into a major U.S. production destination. Figures shows that 333 productions were shot in the state last year, boosting public coffers by $3.1 billion, with recent films including "Flight", "X-Men: First Class", and "Fast Five".
Filmmaker and television producer Tyler Perry has a studio in Atlanta, and the popular zombie-themed AMC cable network series "The Walking Dead" is filmed in the southern U.S. state.
Pinewood already owns studios in Canada and Germany and is building facilities in Malaysia and the Dominican Republic. Earlier this month the studio signed a joint venture with Chinese media group Seven Stars, run by media entrepreneur Bruno Wu, to expand its production services into China.
"Georgia has excellent fiscal incentives and a great crew base," Pinewood CEO Ivan Dunleavy said in a statement. "With River's Rock we have a well-resourced partner that is committed to building a first-class studio facility."
Producers can qualify for state income tax credits of up to 30 percent for certain production expenses, according to the Georgia film office.
Under the deal, the land and studio construction costs will be funded by equity from River's Rock and a debt facility from Synovus Bank, with building to begin immediately.
Pinewood will provide the sales and marketing services and own 40 percent of the joint venture that will operate under the Pinewood trademark and be called Pinewood Atlanta.
The Pinewood studio, based outside of London, has been dubbed the home of James Bond with most of the 23 films featuring British spy 007 shot there over the past half century, including last year's box office hit "Skyfall".
Recent films shot at Pinewood include "Jack Ryan" starring Kevin Costner and Chris Pine, and Angelina Jolie's new film "Maleficent". Whether Pinewood might shoot future James Bond films in Georgia was not known.
(Reporting by Belinda Goldsmith and David Beasley; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Chris Reese)
So yeah, efemr is a web app that scrubs tweets after the amount of time you hashtag. Want a tweet gone after five minutes? #5m. Two hours? #2h. You get the gist. More »
So yeah, efemr is a web app that scrubs tweets after the amount of time you hashtag. Want a tweet gone after five minutes? #5m. Two hours? #2h. You get the gist.
Older is wiser: Study shows software developers' skills improve over timePublic release date: 29-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Matt Shipman matt_shipman@ncsu.edu 919-515-6386 North Carolina State University
There is a perception in some tech circles that older programmers aren't able to keep pace with rapidly changing technology, and that they are discriminated against in the software field. But a new study from North Carolina State University indicates that the knowledge and skills of programmers actually improve over time and that older programmers know as much (or more) than their younger peers when it comes to recent software platforms.
"We wanted to explore these perceptions of veteran programmers as being out of step with emerging technologies and see if we could determine whether older programmers are actually keeping up with changes in the field," says Dr. Emerson Murphy-Hill, an assistant professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of a paper on the research. "And we found that, in some cases, veteran programmers even have a slight edge."
The researchers looked at the profiles of more than 80,000 programmers on a site called StackOverflow, which is an online community that allows users to ask and answer programming questions. The site also allows users to rate the usefulness of other users' questions and answers. Users who are rated as asking good questions and providing good answers receive points that are reflected in their "reputation score." The higher an individual's reputation score, the more likely it is that the user has a robust understanding of programming issues.
For the first part of the study, the researchers compared the age of users with their reputation scores. They found that an individual's reputation increases with age, at least into a user's 40s. There wasn't enough data to draw meaningful conclusions for older programmers.
The researchers then looked at the number of different subjects that users asked and answered questions about, which reflects the breadth of their programming interests. The researchers found that there is a sharp decline in the number of subjects users weighed in on between the ages of 15 and 30 but that the range of subjects increased steadily through the programmers' 30s and into their early 50s.
Finally, the researchers evaluated the knowledge of older programmers (ages 37 and older) compared to younger programmers (younger than 37) in regard to relatively recent technologies meaning technologies that have been around for less than 10 years.
For two smartphone operating systems, iOS and Windows Phone 7, the veteran programmers had a significant edge in knowledge over their younger counterparts. For every other technology, from Django to Silverlight, there was no statistically significant difference between older and younger programmers.
"The data doesn't support the bias against older programmers if anything, just the opposite," Murphy-Hill says.
###
The paper, "Is Programming Knowledge Related To Age?," will be presented May 18 at the 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, sponsored by IEEE and ACM in San Francisco, Calif. Lead author of the paper is Patrick Morrison, a Ph.D. student at NC State.
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Older is wiser: Study shows software developers' skills improve over timePublic release date: 29-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Matt Shipman matt_shipman@ncsu.edu 919-515-6386 North Carolina State University
There is a perception in some tech circles that older programmers aren't able to keep pace with rapidly changing technology, and that they are discriminated against in the software field. But a new study from North Carolina State University indicates that the knowledge and skills of programmers actually improve over time and that older programmers know as much (or more) than their younger peers when it comes to recent software platforms.
"We wanted to explore these perceptions of veteran programmers as being out of step with emerging technologies and see if we could determine whether older programmers are actually keeping up with changes in the field," says Dr. Emerson Murphy-Hill, an assistant professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of a paper on the research. "And we found that, in some cases, veteran programmers even have a slight edge."
The researchers looked at the profiles of more than 80,000 programmers on a site called StackOverflow, which is an online community that allows users to ask and answer programming questions. The site also allows users to rate the usefulness of other users' questions and answers. Users who are rated as asking good questions and providing good answers receive points that are reflected in their "reputation score." The higher an individual's reputation score, the more likely it is that the user has a robust understanding of programming issues.
For the first part of the study, the researchers compared the age of users with their reputation scores. They found that an individual's reputation increases with age, at least into a user's 40s. There wasn't enough data to draw meaningful conclusions for older programmers.
The researchers then looked at the number of different subjects that users asked and answered questions about, which reflects the breadth of their programming interests. The researchers found that there is a sharp decline in the number of subjects users weighed in on between the ages of 15 and 30 but that the range of subjects increased steadily through the programmers' 30s and into their early 50s.
Finally, the researchers evaluated the knowledge of older programmers (ages 37 and older) compared to younger programmers (younger than 37) in regard to relatively recent technologies meaning technologies that have been around for less than 10 years.
For two smartphone operating systems, iOS and Windows Phone 7, the veteran programmers had a significant edge in knowledge over their younger counterparts. For every other technology, from Django to Silverlight, there was no statistically significant difference between older and younger programmers.
"The data doesn't support the bias against older programmers if anything, just the opposite," Murphy-Hill says.
###
The paper, "Is Programming Knowledge Related To Age?," will be presented May 18 at the 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, sponsored by IEEE and ACM in San Francisco, Calif. Lead author of the paper is Patrick Morrison, a Ph.D. student at NC State.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
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Public release date: 29-Apr-2013
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