In rats, stress hormones lower threshold for aggression and aggression raises stress hormones; data may lead help to break the cycle of violence
Scientists may be learning why it’s so hard to stop the cycle of violence. The answer may lie in the nervous system. There appears to be a fast, mutual, positive feedback loop between stress hormones and a brain-based aggression-control center in rats, whose neurophysiology is similar to ours. It may explain why, under stress, humans ar
Giving flu vaccine to toddlers in the spring and fall guards against infection and is easier on parents than the fall schedule of two doses administered a month apart, found researchers from Duke University Medical Center and the University of Washington.
The study compared the immune response in toddlers aged six to 23 months who received a flu shot in the spring and one in the fall, to the response of those who received fall shots separated by one month. The Centers for Disease C
A study by Cornell University researchers finds that when young adults are served larger portions from one week to the next they overeat by almost 40 percent. Eating larger portions over time could account for the growth of the American girth over the past 20 years, the researchers say.
“The more food we served to the college-student volunteers in our eating study, the more they ate,” says David Levitsky, professor of nutritional sciences and of psychology at Cornell. “Since we k
The first genetic instruction manual of a diatom, from a family of microscopic ocean algae that are among the Earth’s most prolific carbon dioxide assimilators, has yielded important insights on how the creature uses nitrogen, fats, and silica to thrive.
The diatom DNA sequencing project, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and conducted at the DOE Joint Genome Institute, provides insight into how the diatom species Thalassiosira pseudonana prospers in the marine en
What happens to painkillers, antibiotics and other medicines after their work is done, and they end up in the wastewater stream? The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is using laboratory experiments to help answer this question by studying what happens to pharmaceuticals when they react with chlorine–a disinfectant commonly used in wastewater treatment.
Scientists around the world often find drugs in water samples taken from streams and other waterways, but li
For the very first time, the genetic make-up of a planktonic marine alga has been sequenced. During this process, a team of international scientists found unexpected metabolic pathways in the diatom Thalassiosira pseudonana. The results will be published in the scientific journal ‘Science’ this week.
The fact that Thalassiosira pseudonana operates a urea cycle, has been a special discovery. Up to now, this metabolic pathway for ammonia detoxification was known only from the liver c
Leukemia, or cancer of the bone marrow, strikes some 700 Belgians each year. Medical science has been at a total loss regarding the origin or cause of some forms of this disease − including T-cell acute lymphatic leukemia, or T-ALL. But now, researchers from the Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (VIB), connected to the Catholic University of Leuven, have discovered the possible cause of the disease in 6% of the T-ALL patients. The scientists have found small circular DNA fra
A team of Texas A&M University and Louisiana State University scientists conducted a research cruise in late August to the “dead zone” – a region in the northern Gulf of Mexico that suffers from low oxygen and results in huge marine losses – and much to their surprise, the “dead zone” area had either moved or had disappeared completely.
Steven DiMarco, associate professor in the Department of Oceanography and leader of the team, found that some areas that were previously hypoxic – a
GVG may reduce addictive effects of ’huffing’
A new study by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory suggests that vigabatrin (a.k.a. gamma vinyl-GABA or GVG) may block the addictive effects of toluene, a substance found in many household products commonly used as inhalants. These results broaden the promise of GVG as a potential treatment for a variety of addictions. The study will be published in the December 1, 2004 issue of Syn
A well-known enzyme present in the skin and other tissues turns out to be a molecule-sized motor that extracts its fuel from the road it runs on, according to researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Their discovery appears in the Oct. 1 issue of Science.
The enzyme, MMP-1, is a member of a group of enzymes that breaks down collagen, a fibrous substance that constitutes the foundation of the extracellular matrix that supports the cells in the body’
The probability of acute appendicitis is very low if there is no distinctly apparent appendix on the CT scan, and in the absence of any secondary CT signs of appendicitis, says a study by researchers from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.
For the study, the researchers analyzed the CT scans of 366 patients with abdominal pain who were referred to rule out the diagnosis of appendicitis. In 46 of the patients, the a
MR imaging is significantly better than mammography in detecting additional breast cancers in women who have already been diagnosed with the disease–an important finding that could ultimately affect the treatment of a significant fraction of new breast cancer patients, a new study shows.
The study (The Italian Trial for Breast MR in Multifocal/Multicentric Cancer, promoted by The Italian Society of Medical Radiology) included 90 women who had been diagnosed with breast cancer. So
A study published today in the American Gastroenterological Association’s journal Gastroenterology concludes that patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus who require long-term insulin therapy are at a significantly increased risk for colorectal cancer.
Results of this retrospective cohort study, conducted on 24,918 people with type 2 diabetes, suggest that those who received more than three years of insulin therapy during the follow-up period of the study have more than three t
Plants and animals living together in communities don’t rub shoulders too closely because evolution has caused them to compromise on key life measures, say ecologists at Imperial College London and Royal Holloway, University of London, writing in the journal Science today (1 October).
The researchers suggest a new basis for explaining how communities of species assemble: they have to give up being good at everything and ’trade off’ their life histories. ’Life histo
CT-guided radiofrequency ablation (RFA) is effective in easing the symptoms of lung tumors that cannot be removed by surgery, and enhancement pattern and changes in the size of the tumor as shown on CT are the most important factors for determining whether that ablation has been successful, according to a pair of independent studies in the October 2004 issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology.
For the first study, researchers from Caserta’s S. Sebastiano Hospital in Ita
Scientists have discovered a DNA sequence that causes the destabilization, and hence decay, of the protooncogene bcl-2 (B-cell lymphoma/leukemia-2). Because the overexpression of bcl-2 is associated with cancer, this discovery may lead to new therapeutic strategies for treating the disease.
The research appears as the “Paper of the Week” in the October 8 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, an American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology journal.
Bcl-2 i
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