(Press-News.org) Obesity is a chronic metabolic disorder that affects half a billion people worldwide. Managing obesity is difficult, as many patients rebound to their pre-treatment weight. There is a hypothesis that chronic weight gain causes the body to adopt a state that supports excess weight. In a study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers led by Malcolm Low at the University of Michigan challenged this hypothesis by developing a mouse model of obesity where the proopiomelanocortin (Pomc) gene in the hypothalamus can be turned on and off. With Pomc turned off, the mice ate heavily and became obese. Low and colleagues turned Pomc back on at different time points after the mice became obese and found that the effectiveness of this genetic rescue declined as the longer the mice stayed obese. In a companion commentary, Joel Elmquist of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center discusses the impact of this research on the development of strategies to halt the obesity epidemic.
### END
Reaching the point of no return: Early intervention in a mouse model of obesity
2012-10-24
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
84 million stars and counting
2012-10-24
Using a whopping nine-gigapixel image from the VISTA infrared survey telescope at ESO's Paranal Observatory, an international team of astronomers has created a catalogue of more than 84 million stars in the central parts of the Milky Way. This gigantic dataset contains more than ten times more stars than previous studies and is a major step forward for the understanding of our home galaxy. The image gives viewers an incredible, zoomable view of the central part of our galaxy. It is so large that, if printed with the resolution of a typical book, it would be 9 metres long ...
A 84-million star color-magnitude diagram of the Milky Way bulge
2012-10-24
Astronomy & Astrophysics published the first analysis of a catalog of 84 million individual stars in the Milky Way bulge as a part of the VVV ESO public survey. This gigantic data set allows building the largest, deepest, and most accurate color-magnitude diagram ever produced, containing more than ten times more stars than any previous study.
The bulge of the Milky Way is a large central concentration of ancient stars that is predominantly observed from the southern hemisphere. Understanding the formation and evolution of the bulge is fundamental for deciphering the ...
Herbal and dietary supplements can adversely affect prescribed drugs says extensive review
2012-10-24
A number of herbs and dietary supplements (HDS) can cause potentially harmful drug interactions, particularly among people receiving medication for problems with their central nervous or cardiovascular systems.
Those are the key findings of an extensive research review published in the November issue of IJCP, the International Journal of Clinical Practice.
Researchers examined 54 review articles and 31 original studies. They found that the greatest problems were caused by interactions between prescribed drugs and HDS that included ingredients such as St John's Wort, ...
Mouse model exposes a new type of T cell to target melanoma
2012-10-24
October 24, 2012, New York, NY – Cancers arise in the body all the time. Most are nipped in the bud by the immune response, not least by its T cells, which detect telltale molecular markers—or antigens—on cancer cells and destroy them before they grow into tumors. Cancer cells, for their part, evolve constantly to evade such assassination. Those that succeed become full-blown malignancies. Yet, given the right sort of help, the immune system can destroy even these entrenched tumors.
In the October 22nd issue of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, researchers led by ...
A new take on the Midas touch -- changing the color of gold
2012-10-24
Red gold, green gold – a ground-breaking initiative has found a way of changing the colour of the world's most iconic precious metal.
A University of Southampton team have discovered that by embossing tiny raised or indented patterns onto the metal's surface they can change the way it absorbs and reflects light – ensuring our eyes don't see it as 'golden' in colour at all.
The finding results from a major initiative funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) targeting the development of a new generation of nanotechnology-enabled materials. ...
The majority of roadkill amongst vertebrates in Catalonia are in protected areas
2012-10-24
Amphibians are the vertebrate group that is more likely to become roadkill in Catalonia, even more so than reptiles, mammals and birds. This is the case according to an international team of scientists who have concluded that highly protected areas are home to more cases of animal death on the roads.
Our network of roads is considered one of the main threats to fauna survival. Researchers at the universities of Barcelona (UB), Porto (Portugal) and Uppsala (Sweden) have studied the number of vertebrate deaths on 820 kilometres of road in North Eastern area of Spain and ...
New insights into membrane-assisted self-assembly
2012-10-24
"In our current paper we present new computational results that explore how membranes may influence crucial biological processes", explains Richard Matthews, Lise-Meitner-Fellow at the University of Vienna and first author of the study. The focus of the investigation is the self-assembly of microscopic particles, the formation of structures or patterns without human intervention. More specifically, the effect of the interactions between membranes and proteins, which can influence the formation of ordered structures in cells, is considered.
Self-assembly has become a hot ...
Study: Flame retardant 'Firemaster 550' is an endocrine disruptor
2012-10-24
The flame-retardant mixture known as "Firemaster 550" is an endocrine disruptor that causes extreme weight gain, early onset of puberty and cardiovascular health effects in lab animals, according to a new study spearheaded by researchers from North Carolina State University and Duke University.
Firemaster 550 is made up of four principal component chemicals and is used in polyurethane foam in a wide variety of products, ranging from mattresses to infant nursing pillows. The flame-retardant mixture was developed by Chemtura Corp., and was first identified by the research ...
Voice prostheses can help patients regain their lost voice
2012-10-24
Help is on the way for people who suffer from vocal cord dysfunction. Researchers are developing methods that will contribute to manufacturing voice prostheses with improved affective features. For example, for little girls who have lost their voices, the improved artificial voice devices can produce age-appropriate voices, instead of the usual voice of an adult male. These advances in artificial voice production have been made possible by results achieved in a research project led by Professor Samuli Siltanen, results that are good news indeed for the approximately 30,000 ...
Unearthing a hidden dietary behavior
2012-10-24
Though it was identified as a disorder as early as the 14th century, pica, or the eating of non-food items, has for years believed to be all but non-existent in a few corners of the globe – a 2006 study that reviewed research on pica found just four regions – the South of South America, Japan, Korea and Madagascar –where the behavior had never been observed.
A new Harvard study, however, is showing that pica – and particularly geophagy, or the eating of soil or clay, is far more prevalent in Madagascar, and may be more prevalent worldwide, than researchers previously ...