Exercise is an important part of staying healthy and reducing the societal cost of health care. We tend to stop exercising when our bodies signal that we are tired or fatigued. Previously, it was thought that fatigue happened when our energy store became depleted or when the waste products from producing energy accumulated in our muscles causing cramp.
However, research on patients suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome or “Yuppie Flu” has shown that fatigue occurs even though their abilit
It is common that babies are born with fetal fat and develop red spots on their skin. Pediatricians have always explained this as a passing and normal skin reaction in newborn children. Now Giovanna Marchini at the Karolinska Hospital, Sweden, together with her research team, has discovered that this is a sign of a powerful immune defense system.
Fully 2000 years ago in Mesopotamia, an area roughly corresponding to today’s Iraq, doctors described spots on the skin of newborn babies as benign
Researchers who are now at Georgetown University’s Lombardi Cancer Center have identified a gene that promotes metastases, the spread of cancer cells through the body. This new understanding of how cancer metastasizes, linking a gene product and migration of cancer cells, may lead to therapies to stop this spread. The results of the study are published in the May 2003 issue of the journal Molecular Biology of the Cell. An advance copy of the paper can be viewed after the embargo is lifted at htt
Dartmouth researchers report in the March 1 issue of Cancer Research they have discovered an effective combination therapy to treat tumors. In the journal, which is a publication of the American Association for Cancer Research, the researchers report that administering light-activated, or photodynamic, therapy (PDT) immediately before radiation therapy appears to kill tumors more effectively than just the sum of the two treatments.
“Our study shows that the close combination of the two trea
Northern Australia has been invaded by one of the world’s worst species of ant, which could affect human health and damage the environment, agriculture, and the economy.
“This little Yellow Crazy ant will destroy our culture, our land, our life,” says Balupalu Yunupingu, Dhimurru senior ranger, north-east Arnhem Land.
The Yellow Crazy ant is recognised by the Global Invasive Species Programme as one of the world’s worst invaders, and represents a major environmental and ec
In order for the body to grow, reproduce and remain cancer free, the cells of the body must have a mechanism for both detecting DNA damage and a feedback mechanism for telling the rest of the cell’s machinery to stop what it’s doing until the damage may be fixed. This feedback mechanism relies on checkpoints during different stages of the cell’s division cycle. Eric Brown and David Baltimore at the California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, CA) have now further defined how the ATR k
Infants accustomed to sleeping on their backs who are then placed to sleep on their stomachs or sides are at an increased risk for SIDS-greater than the increased SIDS risk of infants always placed on their stomachs or sides. The study, conducted by Kaiser Permanente in Northern and Southern California and supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders (NIDCD), appears in the current issue of
Adding composted biosolids rich with iron, manganese and organic matter to a lead-contaminated home garden in Baltimore appears to have bound the lead so it is less likely to be absorbed by the bodies of children who dirty their hands playing outside or are tempted to taste those delicious mud pies they “baked” in the backyard.
The garden soil in the study is similar to potentially hundreds of thousands of yards contaminated with lead in Baltimore and other inner cities, according to Sally
The timing of treatment may be a key factor in whether hormone replacement therapy (HRT) can slow heart vessel disease, report researchers from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and Tufts-New England Medical Center in the winter issue of Menopausal Medicine.
“Mounting evidence points to the conclusion that HRT can help prevent heart vessel disease – if the therapy begins around the time that the body stops making its own estrogen,” said Thomas B. Clarkson, D.V.M., of Wake Forest.
Researchers at Cedars-Sinai’s Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute are working to develop a non-surgical approach to brain cancer that uses radiation and the injection of specially cultured bone marrow cells into the tumor. The combination sets in motion a local and systemic immune response to kill surviving tumor cells.
The novel approach has provided promising results in a study on rats, described in the March 3 issue of the Journal of Immunotherapy. Human trials are expected to beg
p> Using a sensitive new imaging instrument on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, researchers at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., have discovered a large and surprisingly dense gas cloud sharing an orbit with Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.
Stretching millions of miles around Jupiter, the donut-shaped cloud, known as a “torus,” is believed to result from the uncommonly severe bombardment of ion radiation that Jupiter sends toward Europa. That radiatio
It is not known what genes turn leaves yellow in the fall. However, scientists at Umeå Plant Science Center, Umeå University, and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (KTH) have managed to identify more than 2,400 genes that take part in the process.
One of the most magnificent pageants of nature every year is when trees take on their autumn colors. Scientists have long known that these colors appear when the green pigment chlorophyll is broken down at the same time as the yellow c
For the first time, scientists have identified and analyzed single grains of silicate stardust in the laboratory. This breakthrough, to be reported in the Feb. 27 issue of Science Express, provides a new way to study the history of the universe.
“Astronomers have been studying stardust through telescopes for decades,” said first author Scott Messenger, Ph.D., senior research scientist in the Laboratory for Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. “And they have derived models of wha
Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a powerful new technique for deciphering biological information encoded in the human genome. Called “phylogenetic shadowing,” this technique enables scientists to make meaningful comparisons between DNA sequences in the human genome and sequences in the genomes of apes, monkeys, and other non-human primates. With phylogenetic shadowing, scientists c
Dartmouth Medical School geneticists studying the biological clock have opened yet another window into the role of an unusual form of RNA known as antisense that blocks the messages of protein-encoding genes.
They found that antisense RNA appears to regulate core timing genes in the circadaian clock that drives the 24-hour light-dark cycle of Neurospora, a model organism better known as bread mold.
The results are reported in the February 27 Nature by Drs. Jennifer Loros and Jay C.
Research is key step in detoxifying endosulfan toward improving soil and water quality
Scientists at the University of California, Riverside report in the Journal of Environmental Quality (JEQ) that they have isolated microorganisms capable of degrading endosulfan, a chlorinated insecticide widely used all over the world and which is currently registered to control insects and mites on 60 U.S. crops. JEQ, established in 1972, is published jointly by the American Society of Agronomy,
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