Researchers funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council have shown one way in which poor nutrition in the womb can put a person at greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes and other age-related diseases in later life. This finding could lead to new ways of identifying people who are at a higher risk of developing these diseases and might open up targets for treatment. The team, from the University of Cambridge and the Medical Research Council (MRC) Toxicology Unit at the University of Leicester, publish their findings today (Friday 6 January) ...

There's new evidence that annual prostate cancer screening does not reduce deaths from the disease, even among men in their 50s and 60s and those with underlying health conditions, according to new research led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. A longer follow-up of more than 76,000 men in a major U.S. study shows that six years of aggressive, annual screening for prostate cancer led to more diagnoses of tumors but not to fewer deaths from the disease. The updated results of the Prostate, Lung, Cancer, Colorectal and Ovarian (PLCO) Cancer Screening ...

The probability of being killed at work is 25 times higher for a coastal fisherman than for an offshore worker, according to a study from the UiS. Seafarers also run a high risk of accidents. Fifteen people died on vessels registered in Norway during 2010, figures from the Norwegian Maritime Directorate (NMD) show. Eight of these were fishermen. Although these statistics show that the number of work accidents went down in 2009-10, the total has remained at a high and stable level for many decades. The number of accidents in maritime transport has moreover increased ...

An insect's internal chemicals can be converted to electricity, potentially providing power for sensors, recording devices or to control the bug, a group of researchers at Case Western Reserve University report. The finding is yet another in a growing list from universities across the country that could bring the creation of insect cyborgs – touted as possible first responders to super spies – out of science fiction and into reality. In this case, the power supply, while small, doesn't rely on movement, light or batteries, just normal feeding. The work is published ...

Linagliptin (trade name: Trajenta®) has been approved since August 2011 to improve blood glucose control ("glycaemic control") in adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus whose elevated blood glucose levels are inadequately controlled by diet and exercise. It is an option for patients who do not tolerate or should not take the usual treatment with the drug metformin. Moreover, linagliptin can be added if treatment with metformin alone is not sufficient. In an early benefit assessment pursuant to the "Act on the Reform of the Market for Medicinal Products" (AMNOG), the German ...

Abiraterone (trade name: Zytiga®) has been approved since September 2011 for men with metastatic prostate cancer that is no longer responsive to hormone therapy and progresses further during or after therapy with the cytostatic drug docetaxel. In an early benefit assessment pursuant to the "Act on the Reform of the Market for Medicinal Products" (AMNOG), the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) examined whether abiraterone offers an added benefit compared with the present standard therapy. IQWiG finds an indication of a considerable added ...

TAMPA, Fla. (Jan. 6, 2012) – A malignancy-risk gene signature developed for breast cancer has been found to have predictive and prognostic value for patients with early stage non-small cell lung cancer. The advancement was made by researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla., who published their study results in a recent issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. According to corresponding author Dung-Tsa Chen, Ph.D., associate member with the Moffitt Biostatistics program, non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) accounts for 80-90 percent of all lung cancers. ...

This week, research was published showing that silk produced by transgenically-engineered silkworms in the laboratory of Malcolm Fraser, Jr., professor of biological sciences at University of Notre Dame, exhibits the highly sought-after strength and elasticity of spider silk. This stronger silk could possibly be used to make sutures, artificial limbs and parachutes. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and highlighted for their breakthrough in the long search for silk with such mechanical properties. The manuscript was published ...

TEMPE, Ariz. - NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity will spend the next few months during the coldest part of Martian winter at Greeley Haven, an outcrop of rock on Mars recently named informally to honor Ronald Greeley, Arizona State University Regents' professor of planetary geology, who died October 27, 2011. Long passionate about exploring the solar system and Mars in particular, Greeley was involved with many missions to the Red Planet, including Mariners 6, 7, and 9, Viking, Mars Pathfinder, Mars Global Surveyor, and the two Mars Exploration Rovers. He was ...

An article in the January issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology summarizes methods for radiation dose optimization in pediatric computed tomography (CT) scans. Approximately seven to eight million CT examinations are performed for various pediatric clinical indications per year in the United States. Justification of clinical indication is the most important aspect of reducing radiation dose with CT scanning. A substantial number of pediatric CT scans lack appropriate justification or can be replaced with other imaging modalities with lower or no ionizing ...

In this special issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, published by SAGE, experts reflect on 2011 and highlight what to look out for in 2012 in the areas of nuclear energy, nuclear weapons, biosecurity, and climate change. Topics that have made the headlines during the previous 12 months, including the increased tension surrounding Iran's nuclear programme, the aftermath of the Fukushima incident, and the state of US policy on climate change, are analyzed in detail in this special issue. At the Doomsday Clock Symposium on January 9-10 in Washington, DC, the Bulletin's ...

There's a 3-D world in our brains. It's a landscape that mimics the outside world, where the objects we see exist as collections of neural circuits and electrical impulses. Now, scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies are using new tools they developed to chart that world, a key step in revolutionizing research into the neurological basis of vision. For the first time, the scientists have produced neuron-by-neuron maps of the regions of the mouse brain that process different kinds of visual information, laying the groundwork for decoding the circuitry ...

Two related studies from Northwestern University offer new strategies for tackling the challenges of preventing and treating diseases of protein folding, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), cancer, cystic fibrosis and type 2 diabetes. To do its job properly within the cell, a protein first must fold itself into the proper shape. If it doesn't, trouble can result. More than 300 diseases have at their root proteins that misfold, aggregate and eventually cause cellular dysfunction and death. The new Northwestern ...

A new UCSF analysis of tobacco industry documents shows that Philip Morris USA manipulated data on the effects of additives in cigarettes, including menthol, obscuring actual toxicity levels and increasing the risk of heart, cancer and other diseases for smokers. Tobacco industry information can't be taken at face value, the researchers conclude. They say their work provides evidence that hundreds of additives, including menthol, should be eliminated from cigarettes on public health grounds. The article is published in PLoS Medicine http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001145 In ...

We generally think that views about how to integrate a diverse society depend on people's positions in that society—that is, whether they're in the racial, religious, or cultural majority or a member of a minority. In the U.S., "people tend to believe that blacks prefer pluralism and whites prefer assimilation," says University of Delaware psychologist Eric Hehman. Assimilation asks minorities—whether newly arrived or historically rooted—to drop their cultural identities and adopt the ways of the majority. Pluralism recognizes and even celebrates minority cultures, which ...

Older people tend to be happier. But why? Some psychologists believe that cognitive processes are responsible—in particular, focusing on and remembering positive events and leaving behind negative ones; those processes, they think, help older people regulate their emotions, letting them view life in a sunnier light. "There is a lot of good theory about this age difference in happiness," says psychologist Derek M. Isaacowitz of Northeastern University, "but much of the research does not provide direct evidence" of the links between such phenomena and actual happiness. In ...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A new University of Florida study shows genomes of a recently formed plant species to be highly unstable, a phenomenon that may have far-reaching evolutionary consequences. Published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study is the first to document chromosomal variation in natural populations of a recently formed plant species following whole genome doubling, or polyploidy. Because many agricultural crops are young polyploids, the data may be used to develop plants with higher fertility and yields. Polyploid ...

Reston, Va. (December 28, 2011) – In a new review of imaging studies spanning more than ten years, scientists find that a method of positron emission tomography (PET) safely and accurately detects dementia, including the most common and devastating form among the elderly, Alzheimer's disease. This research is featured in the January issue of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine. Researchers reviewed numerous PET studies to evaluate a molecular imaging technique that combines PET, which provides functional images of biological processes, with an injected biomarker called 18F-FDG ...

Insurance status doesn't affect the quantity (or value) of imaging services received by patients in a hospital, in-patient setting, according to a study in the January issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology. Approximately 51 million Americans, or 16.7 percent of the population, were without health insurance for some or all of 2009. Lack of insurance is associated with less preventive care, delays in diagnosis and unnecessary deaths. "Americans without health insurance generally receive fewer health care services than those with insurance. Less ...

An article in the forthcoming issue of the Journal of Integrated Pest Management (JIPM) refutes claims by Greenpeace Germany that the western bean cutworm (WBC), Striacosta albicosta (Smith), is "a new plant pest" that was "caused by genetically engineered corn." The Greenpeace Germany report, which was written by author Christoph Then of Testbiotech, offers a "surprisingly simplistic conclusion" regarding the spread of western bean cutworm over the last decade, according to the JIPM authors. In "Genetically Engineered Bt Corn and Range Expansion of the Western Bean Cutworm ...

A biology lab at Washington University has just cracked the structure and function of a protein that plays a key role in the life of a parasite that killed 655,000 people in 2010. The protein is an enzyme that Plasmodium falciparum, the protozoan that causes the most lethal form of malaria, uses to make cell membrane. The protozoan cannot survive without this enzyme, but even though the enzyme has many lookalikes in other organisms, people do not make it. Together these characteristics make the enzyme an ideal target for new antimalarial drugs. The research was published ...

Climate change is having a more profound effect on alpine vegetation than at first anticipated, according to a study carried out by an international group of researchers and published in Nature Climate Change. The first ever pan-European study of changing mountain vegetation has found that some alpine meadows could disappear within the next few decades. Led by researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna, biologists from 13 different countries in Europe analysed 867 vegetation samples from 60 different summits sited in all major European ...

We've all seen the story in the news before. Whether it's the death of a physically fit high school athlete at football training camp in August, or of an elderly woman gardening in the middle of the day in July, heat stroke is a serious, life-threatening condition for which there is no treatment beyond submersion in ice water or the application of ice packs to cool the body to a normal temperature. But, in a new study published today in the journal Nature Medicine, scientists discovered what they believe is one of the first drugs to combat heat stroke. AICAR – an experimental ...

Summertime hail could all but disappear from the eastern flank of Colorado's Rocky Mountains by 2070, according to a new modeling study by scientists from NOAA and several other institutions. Less hail damage could be good news for gardeners and farmers, said Kelly Mahoney, Ph.D., lead author of the study and a postdoctoral scientist at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. But a shift from hail to rain can also mean more runoff, which could raise the risk of flash floods, she said. "In this region of elevated terrain, hail may lessen the risk of ...

A team of scientists, led by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Zacharon Pharmaceuticals, have developed a simple, reliable test for identifying biomarkers for mucopolysaccharidoses (MPS), a group of inherited metabolic disorders that are currently diagnosed in patients only after symptoms have become serious and the damage possibly irreversible. The findings will be published online January 8 in the journal Nature Chemical Biology. MPS is caused by the absence or malfunctioning of a lysosomal enzyme required to break down ...