According to a study published in the Jan. 18 issue of the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, fecal occult blood test (FOBT) performed in-office as part of a digital rectal examination failed to detect potentially cancerous colon growths 95 percent of the time. Furthermore, an at-home FOBT was found to detect cancerous polyps less than 24 percent of the time. The entire study population received follow-up colonoscopies, regardless of whether they received digital FOBT or the at-home stool
New Awareness Campaign Says “It’s Not Too Late” to Prevent the Disease
About 40 percent of adults ages 40 to 74 – or 41 million people – have pre-diabetes, a condition that raises a person’s risk for developing type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and stroke. Studies show that while adults over 60 are at increased risk for type 2 diabetes, losing a small amount of weight and increasing physical activity is especially effective in reducing that risk among this age group.
‘Evil Twin’ hotspots: the latest security threat to web users, according to wireless internet and cyber crime experts at Cranfield University, academic partner of the Defence Academy of the UK.
Dr Phil Nobles, wireless internet and cyber crime expert at the university, will be speaking at the wireless crime event at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre – the UK’s only venue for adults to discuss controversial science – on Thursday 20 January 2005 from19.00-20.30. He will explain t
The GAIKER Technological centre is designing a project, together with the Catalysis and Petrochemical Institute of the CSIC, The Bilbao School of Industrial Engineers and the University of Malaga, aimed at obtaining biofuels from a renewable source of energy. To this end, an attempt to develop a process of heterogeneous catalysis has been undertaken, with new catalysts that enable the obtaining of automotive biodiesel from recycled oils or from crops from energy crops.
The project for ob
VLT Finds Young, Very Low Mass Objects Are Twice As Heavy As Predicted
Thanks to the powerful new high-contrast camera installed at the Very Large Telescope, photos have been obtained of a low-mass companion very close to a star. This has allowed astronomers to measure directly the mass of a young, very low mass object for the first time.
The object, more than 100 times fainter than its host star, is still 93 times as massive as Jupiter. And it appears to be almost twice
Heart patients with gastrointestinal complications should use low doses of aspirin combined with drugs that treat stomach ulcers rather than taking the anti-platelet drug Plavix, which has been thought to reduce bleeding ulcers, according to a gastroenterologist at UT Southwestern Medical Center and the Dallas Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
Physicians are challenged in treating heart patients who may be at high-risk for gastrointestinal bleeding from aspirin or other nonsteroidal
The first study to examine the probability of HIV infection per act of heterosexual sex among a population with multiple sexual partners has found that uncircumcised men have more than twice the risk of acquiring HIV than do circumcised men.
In the study, published in the Feb. 15 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, now available online, Jared Baeten and colleagues from the United States and Kenya collected detailed sexual data from a group of male Kenyan truckers and, us
Watching flies fly may not seem like high-tech science, but for researchers using the Western Hemisphere’s most brilliant X-rays, located at the Advanced Photon Source at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, it not only helps explain how insects fly but also may someday aid in understanding human heart function.
The researchers, from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), Caltech and the University of Vermont, merged two distinct technologies
For the giant Australian cuttlefish, mating is a complicated undertaking complete with fighting, sneaking, and deception. In this week’s issue of the journal Nature, Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) senior scientist Roger Hanlon and his colleagues demonstrate that for this species, deception while mating pays off.
Hanlon and his team present behavioral and genetic data demonstrating that small male cuttlefish that dramatically alter their appearance to look like females are highly
New research suggests that climate warming may be occurring even faster than previously recognised
A long standing puzzle that has haunted climate researchers looking at the fate of carbon stored in the world’s soils, has now been resolved. The research suggests that climate warming may be occurring even faster than previously recognised.
The international team of researchers, led by Bristol University and reporting in Nature [20 January 2005], show that an apparent
A novel antiviral treatment combining nanoparticle and gene silencing technologies thwarts attacks of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) — a virus associated with severe bronchitis and asthma, an animal study by University of South Florida researchers found. The study was reported in the January 2005 issue of the journal Nature Medicine.
RSV infects lung cells and can be life-threatening in very young children, the elderly and those with compromised immune systems. No vaccine or w
Researchers now have a much better picture of how follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), one of the most frequently used fertility drugs, works, and with it new ideas for creating a new generation of oral medications to treat infertility.
The exquisite detail of the images produced by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator Wayne A. Hendrickson and colleague Qing Fan begins to tell for the first time how the FSH hormone attaches to a key segment of its receptor on the ce
How do insects smell? Badly, according to a new study, if they lack a certain kind of protein critical to their ability to detect and interpret pheromones – the insect equivalent of “smelling.”
Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have discovered how a protein, called an olfactory binding protein, links incoming pheromone signals and specific nerve cells in an insect’s brain, which in turn translate those signals. Pheromones are chemical signals given off by animal
Cells have protein associated with embryonic development, limb regeneration
A year ago, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers discovered that the spleen might be a source of adult stem cells that could regenerate the insulin-producing islets of the pancreas. In a follow-up to that unexpected finding, members of the same team now report that these potential adult stem cells produce a protein previously believed to be present only during the embryonic development of mam
Australian researchers (Thursday 20 January) announced that they have used pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) to avoid a couple having a baby suffering from rhesus factor[1] disease – the potentially fatal condition caused by incompatibility between a baby’s blood and that of its mother.
Their pioneering work resulted in the birth of a healthy baby girl in November 2003 to a couple who had previously had one child severely affected by Rh disease.
Writing in
Scientists from Indiana University Bloomington and seven other institutions have unearthed skeletal fossils of a human ancestor believed to have lived about 4.5 million years ago. The fossils, described in this week’s Nature (Jan. 20), will help scientists piece together the mysterious transformation of primitive chimp-like hominids into more human forms.
The fossils were retrieved from the Gona Study Area in northern Ethiopia, only one of two sites to yield fossil remains o
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