A new study by a team of researchers from the University of Notre Dame provides an important new insight into how cancer cells are able to avoid the cell death process. The findings may reveal a novel chemotherapeutic approach to prevent the spread of cancers.

Metastasis, the spread of cancer from one organ to other parts of the body, relies on cancer cells’ ability to evade a cell death process called anoikis, according to Zachary T. Schafer, Coleman Assistant Professor of Cancer Biology at Notre Dame. Metastasizing cancer cells are able to block anoikis, which normally results from detachment from the extracellular matrix. However, Schafer notes that the molecular mechanisms that cancer cells detached from the extracellular matrix use to survive have not been well understood. Read More

An international team of researchers from the University of Notre Dame’s Eck Institute for Global Health and Imperial College London has recently published its work on a malaria-filaria co-transmission model, where the same mosquito transmits both diseases together. Found in large areas of sub-Saharan Africa, one mosquito genus, Anopheles, carries both the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum and the microfilarial worm Wuchereria bancrofti, which causes lymphatic filariasis, which can develop into elephantiasis.

According to lead researcher Edwin Michael, professor of biological sciences specializing in epidemiology at the University of Notre Dame, “This has major implications for the transmission of each disease in endemic settings, and, of course, for developing better control interventions that ensure that removal of one disease does not have a profound (a worse health impact) outcome for diseases caused by the other pathogen.” Read More

An image of the NGC 1015 galaxy that hosted supernova 2009ig

Astronomers have discovered light echoing off material surrounding a recent supernova explosion, SN 2009ig. The dust and gas that are reflecting the light are so close to the eruption center that it is likely related to the progenitor star. This discovery supports the theory that exploding white dwarfs become unstable from matter donated by large, non-degenerate stars.

The light echo seen from SN 2009ig is only the sixth discovered from a type Ia supernova, and it is the most luminous of the echoes. Read More

The University of Notre Dame is among seven leading academic institutions that will participate beginning this fall in Semester Online, the first education consortium to offer online, for-credit courses from top colleges and universities.

Notre Dame joins Boston College, Brandeis University, Emory University, Northwestern University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Washington University in St. Louis in the consortium, in partnership with 2U, an industry leader in creating online academic experiences for top universities.

“Semester Online provides a new educational experience of the highest quality, as rigorous as traditional on-campus instruction,” said Thomas G. Burish, Notre Dame’s provost. “The consortium offers innovative undergraduate courses from world-class research universities along with small discussion groups, personal engagement with leading professors, and full credit towards one’s degree. Notre Dame is pleased to join 2U and the outstanding consortium schools in this exciting venture." Read More

Women who engage in “fat talk” — the self-disparaging remarks girls and women make in relation to eating, exercise or their bodies — are less liked by their peers, a new study from the University of Notre Dame finds.

Led by Alexandra Corning, research associate professor of psychology and director of Notre Dame’s Body Image and Eating Disorder Lab, the study was presented recently at the Midwestern Psychological Association annual conference.

Although fat talk has been thought of by psychologists as a way women may attempt to initiate and strengthen their social bonds, Corning’s research finds that fat-talkers are liked less than women who make positive statements about their bodies. Read More

Where you are and what you’re doing increasingly play key roles in how you search the Internet. In fact, your search may just conduct itself.

This concept, called “contextual search,” is improving so gradually the changes often go unnoticed, and we may soon forget what the world was like without it, according to Brian Proffitt, a technology expert and adjunct instructor of management in the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.

Contextual search describes the capability for search engines to recognize a multitude of factors beyond just the search text for which a user is seeking. These additional criteria form the “context” in which the search is run. Recently, contextual search has been getting a lot of attention due to interest from Google. Read More

Mothers who have experienced childhood abuse, neglect or other traumatic experiences show an unwillingness to talk with their children about the child’s emotional experiences, a new study from the University of Notre Dame shows.

According to the study, which was presented at the Society for Research in Child Development 2013 Biennial Meeting in Seattle, a sample of low-income mothers who had experienced their own childhood traumas exhibited ongoing “traumatic avoidance symptoms,” which is characterized by an unwillingness to address thoughts, emotions, sensations or memories of those traumas. This avoidance interfered with mothers’ ability to talk with their children about the child’s emotions, leading to shorter, less in-depth conversations; those mothers also used closed-end questions that did not encourage child participation.

“Traumatic avoidance symptoms have been shown to have a negative impact on the cognitive and emotional development of children,” said Kristin Valentino, Notre Dame assistant professor of psychology who specializes in the development of at-risk and maltreated children. Read More

A team from the University of Notre Dame has been awarded a $50,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps) award to perform a commercialization assessment of a diagnostic technology that resulted from prior NSF-funded research coming out of the Advanced Diagnostics and Therapeutics Initiative (AD&T). The I-Corps program was established in 2011 to help jump-start a national innovation ecosystem by providing entrepreneurial training to more effectively move technologies out of the lab and into the marketplace.

I-Corps teams are composed of a principal investigator who has a funding track record with the NSF; an entrepreneurial lead, which can be a student or junior researcher having significant experience in the technology as well as entrepreneurial aspirations; and a business mentor who has experience transitioning technologies to the market. Read More

Researchers for the first time have identified Earth-sized planets within the habitable zone of a Sun-like star. Images of the star taken by University of Notre Dame astrophysicist Justin Crepp rule out alternative explanations of the data, confirming that five planets orbit Kepler-62, with two located in the habitable zone. The results were published in Science magazine today.

“A five-planet system with planets of 1.41 and 1.61 Earth-radii in the habitable zone of a K2V star has been detected with the Kepler spacecraft and validated with high statistical confidence,” the paper reports. Those two, named Kepler-62 e and f, are the outermost of the five observed planets and receive a solar flux from the star similar to that received from the Sun by Venus and Mars. Their size suggests that they are either rocky, like Earth, or composed mostly of solid water. Read More

According to a new study from the University of Notre Dame, a particular style of thinking that makes people vulnerable to depression actually can be “contagious” to others and increase their symptoms of depression six months later.

The study, conducted by Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gerald Haeffel is published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science.

Research on depression has shown that people who interpret stressful life events as the result of factors they can’t change and as a reflection of their own deficiency are more vulnerable to depression. This “cognitive vulnerability” has been shown to be such a potent risk factor for depression that it can predict who is likely to experience a depressive episode in the future, even if they have never been depressed before. Read More