How Economic Changes Affect Disease
“Plop!” You drop one in the pot of boiling coconut milk. The delicate aroma of wings and fur rise into the air. While not everyone’s ideal food choice, the Chamorro people of Guam regard the flying fox – a type of bat that can grow up to a four foot wingspan – as a delicacy. Mostly consumed by men, the entire animal, including the fur and all the insides, are eaten during social gatherings and certain important events. Women sometimes eat the
The world AIDS conference last month offered a large dose of grim news about the disease and its precursor, HIV.
But a new university study suggests that there is at least one glimmer of hope.
In a recent article in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, researchers report that social activism in groups such as ACT UP may have a positive effect on the way people with AIDS and HIV cope with their medical and psychological problems.
The research team found that i
Complex physical learning may help children overcome some mental disabilities that result from prenatal alcohol consumption by their mothers, say researchers whose experiments led to increased wiring in the brains of young rats.
In their study, infant rats were exposed to alcohol during a period of brain development (especially in the cerebellum) that is similar to that of the human third trimester of pregnancy. In adulthood, the rats improved their learning skills during a 20-day regimen o
You`d be forgiven for thinking that an American predicted anti-matter. Or that it only existed in Star Trek. In fact, it was Paul Dirac, a Bristol born physicist, who predicted the stuff that propels starships in science fiction movies and who has also influenced much of our modern day technology, for example, computers. Today, 8 August is the centenary of Dirac`s birth. The Institute of Physics celebrates Dirac`s life and legacy in 2002, with six Manga (japanese cartoon-style) posters.
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An international team of scientists has discovered a hormone that can significantly decrease the appetite, reducing the amount of food eaten in a day by a third.
The research, published today in Nature, shows how scientists from Imperial College London, with assistance from Oregon Health and Sciences University, USA, and the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, Australia, discovered the novel action of hormone PYY3-36.
PYY3-36 is normally released from the gastro-intestinal tract a
Corn, the preferred staple crop in many countries, requires large amounts of nitrogen for its growth. Usually fertilizer is necessary to sustain good yields. A Penn State graduate student, Ylva Besmer, is trying to find ways to improve corn yield for subsistence farmers in Zimbabwe without fertilizer.
“The government of Zimbabwe no longer provides a subsidy for fertilizer, resulting in significantly lower corn yields” says Besmer, a doctoral candidate in ecology. “The old-fashion use of legu
Computer predictions of the effects of commercial sea-sand dredging on coastal erosion, produced by an international team headed by Dr Alan Davies of the University of Wales, Bangor`s School of Ocean Sciences, will play a key role in developing new European Guidelines for siting commercial sand dredging activities.
Increased demand for North Sea sand is anticipated, both for use as beach and sand dune nourishment and to meet demand for sand from large-scale European construction projects. Sa
A study team led by experts at the University of Southampton has found that there is no significant risk to the public from radioactive contamination from the Atomic Weapons Establishments at Aldermaston and Burghfield in West Berkshire.
The three-year environmental radioactivity project, carried out by the University’s Geosciences Advisory Unit at the Southampton Oceanography Centre, examined over 600 soil and other samples from a wide variety of locations and environments.
Doctor
Rich and Inspiring Experience with NGC 300 Images from the ESO Science Data Archive
A series of wide-field images centred on the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 300, obtained with the Wide-Field Imager (WFI) on the MPG/ESO 2.2-m telescope at the La Silla Observatory, have been combined into a magnificent colour photo.
These images have been used by different groups of astronomers for various kinds of scientific investigations, ranging from individual stars and nebulae in NGC 300, to distant gal
The overuse of antibiotics not only leads to more resistant strains of infection, but, according to new research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, antibiotics also may be adversely affecting zooplankton, tiny organisms that underpin the health of all freshwater ecosystems.
In the last decade, European and American researchers have found more evidence that lakes and streams are tainted by common drugs, ranging from caffeine to anticancer agents.
This pollution, says Colleen
Cornell University potato breeders are donating a disease-resistant potato to Russia in an effort to help combat aggressive strains of potato late blight that are threatening to devastate the nation’s essential small farms.
The Cornell-developed New York 121 potato, which also is able to fend off golden nematodes, scab and potato virus Y (PVY), will be given to Dokagene Technologies, a company specializing in producing pathogen-free seed in Russia, in a meeting and a field trip in Mosc
Dartmouth Medical School geneticists have found a molecular shortcut from light reception to gene activation in their work to understand biological clocks. Their research has revealed that the protein called White Collar-1 does double duty: it perceives light and then, in response to light, directly turns on a key gene called frequency, which is a central component of the clock.
Biological clocks are molecularly driven and are set, or synchronized, by the daily cycles of light and dark. Usin
Study suggests promising new insights for men with early-stage disease
A fat-laden diet and high calcium consumption are both well-known suspected risk factors for prostate cancer. However, new findings from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center suggest that fat and calcium themselves may not cause prostate cancer, as previously thought, but instead may fuel its progression from localized to advanced disease.
While high intake of dietary fat and calcium is associated wi
Researchers at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health have found that aspirin use may decrease the incidence of pancreatic cancer, possibly through its anti-inflammatory effects. The study will be published in the Aug. 7 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
For seven years, lead author Kristin Anderson, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the School of Public Health, and her colleagues followed a group of postmenopausal women from Iowa who were part of the Iowa
After two years of stubborn persistence, scientists at Johns Hopkins have determined the 3-D structure of part of a protein called HER3, which should speed efforts to interfere with abnormal growth and cancer.
“It took us more than two years to interpret the data and get HER3’s structure,” says Dan Leahy, Ph.D., a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a professor of biophysics in Hopkins’ Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences. “Now that we have it, it might take only
A strong and unexpected correlation between large numbers of howler monkeys and elevated counts of birds on islands created by a Venezuelan hydroelectric project has Duke University scientists looking for explanations. They say their discovery represents a prime example of the unexpected ecological insights that the science all-too-often yields.
The scientists’ working hypothesis is that excess plant-eating monkeys found on some of the smallest islands counterintuitively spur extra tre
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