Scientists have developed a technique which can be used to reveal the strength of bones, allowing doctors to more accurately estimate the risk of bone fracture.

According to research published online in the Journal of Bone Mineral Research, scientists have developed a laser imaging technique which can more fully assess the strength of bones, a technique the scientists hope can be used to predict the likelihood of young women developing osteoporosis in later life.

Dr Edwar

“Early diagnosis guarantees therapeutic success in breast cancer”, claimed doctors Fernando Martínez Regueira and Luis Pina, specialists in de Mammary Pathology at the University Hospital.

Breast cancer is the most common tumour amongst the female population. In recent years its prevalence has increased considerably without the reasons thereof being very clear, although lifestyle changes such as first pregnancy taking place at a later age or the reduction in the period of breast-f

Drug Discovery at Dundee

The Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s largest medical charities, has awarded £8.1 million over 5 years to a team of six scientists at the University of Dundee to help discover new drugs to treat some of the world’s most neglected tropical diseases.

The grant awarded to Professor Mike Ferguson, Professor Alan Fairlamb, Professor Bill Hunter, Professor Ian Gilbert, Professor Julie Frearson and Dr Daan van Aalten, all based within the School of L

Targeted cancer treatment without the added trauma of surgery or lengthy chemotherapy could be available to consumers in as little as 5 years according to new scientific research

Treatment could benefit NHS as a whole by reducing the cost in the long term of treating cancer patients

Treatment benefits the majority of Cancers unlike Herceptin which only works for Breast Cancer
Scientists at the University of Dundee have demonstrated that

For the health challenges facing developing countries, the numbers alone are staggering. Every day, 40,000 people –enough to fill a sports stadium — die from preventable infectious diseases and malnutrition. Entire generations of human potential are perishing.

Given the scope of these challenges, is there a way for developing countries to solve health disparities and bootstrap these efforts into economic growth? In an article published recently in the journal Science, Biodesig

Little evidence exists to support the widespread use of bronchodilators to treat children and adults with cystic fibrosis, according to a new systematic review of published research.

“Recurrent wheeze and breathlessness are common in people with cystic fibrosis, and bronchodilators are commonly prescribed,” according to lead author Clare Halfhide, M.D., of the Royal Liverpool Children’s Hospital in England. “Despite their wide-scale and often long-term use, there is limited ob

The expression of two specific genes is almost completely downregulated in ovarian cancer tumours. An extensive analysis of gene expression in ovarian cancer tumour cells has revealed this important finding, which should be an aid to early diagnosis. The insights gained by the research at the Medical University of Vienna with the support of the Austrian Science Fund FWF are also central to a recently launched EU project aimed at optimising ovarian cancer diagnosis.

Some 63,000

The parts of the genetic make-up that are thought to determine an individual’s maximum possible longevity, so-called telomeres, are inherited from the father but not the mother. This is shown by a research team at Umeå University in the coming issue of the U.S. scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Telomeres are genetic material with repetitive content at the ends of DNA, and their main function is believed to be to protect the rest of the genetic

Over the past ten years, separate outbreaks of the deadly Zaire strain of Ebola virus (ZEBOV) have killed hundreds of humans and tens of thousands of great apes in Gabon and the Republic of Congo–which harbor roughly 80% of the last remaining wild gorilla and chimpanzee populations. In a new study, Peter Walsh, Roman Biek, and Leslie Real combined genetic data with information on the timing and location of past ZEBOV outbreaks to support the hypothesis that a “consistently moving wave of ZEBOV inf

An EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne) team led by professor Melody Swartz has demonstrated for the first time that the presence of very slow biological flows affects the extracellular environment in ways that are critical for tissue formation and cell migration. Their results will appear online the week of October 24 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A major challenge for tissue engineering is to identify the essential environmental ingredients that

Many baffled parents have wondered whether their teenagers would ever stop growing. The answer is obvious, but researchers have never really quite understood just how an organism determines when it has reached its optimal size and growth should cease.

Now University of Washington biologists studying the physiology of Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly, have discovered an organ that assesses the size of the juvenile and signals when it has reached a critical weight t

Clinically annotated results are publicly available online

The International Genomics Consortium’s (IGC) Expression Project for Oncology (expO) today announced that it has collected its 1,000th frozen cancer specimen, which exceeds original expectations for the project while marking a milestone that is recognized by researchers, industry and academia. Gene expression analysis with clinical information on hundreds of these specimens is now publicly available online.

Researchers have identified a gene in mosquitoes that helps the insects to fight off infection by the Plasmodium parasite, which causes malaria in humans. Anopheles mosquitoes transmit the malaria parasite to nearly 550 million people worldwide each year with these cases resulting in more than 2 million deaths annually. The protective gene was identified in a study conducted by a team of investigators from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Malaria Research Institute, the Im

An enzyme inside a bacterium that grows in the soil of potato fields can — in a split second — break down residues of a common powerful pesticide used for killing worms on potatoes, researchers have found.

That may be expensive for farmers but lucky for the environment because University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill scientists have now discovered that if that particular enzyme weren’t there, it would take 10,000 years for just half of the widely used pesticide to decompo

A human red blood cell is a dimpled ballerina, ceaselessly spinning, tumbling, bending, and squeezing through openings narrower than its width to dispense life-giving oxygen to every corner of the body. In a paper published in the October issue of Annals of Biomedical Engineering, which was made available online on Oct. 21, a team of UCSD researchers describe a mathematical model that explains how a mesh-like protein skeleton gives a healthy human red blood cell both its rubbery ability to stret

’Nature’ article says gold catalysts achieve cleaner, more efficient oxidation

The selective oxidation processes that are used to make compounds contained in agrochemicals, pharmaceuticals and other chemical products can be accomplished more cleanly and more efficiently with gold nanoparticle catalysts, researchers have reported in Nature magazine.

A team of 13 U.K. researchers and one U.S. researcher reported in the Oct. 20 issue of the British journal that the carbon-