In spring 2005 a large European research and training network was established to investigate the causes and implications of poor sleep from the medical as well as from the social point of view. This EU-financed sleep research project, named “The biomedical and sociological effects of sleep restriction” will last for four years and is coordinated by Dr. Tarja Porkka-Heiskanen (Stenberg) MD, PhD, at the University of Helsinki, Institute of Biomedicine.

The objective of this sleep restriction

How heavy a man is at the time he is diagnosed with prostate cancer, as well as his history of weight gain, appear to play significant roles in how aggressive his cancer may become, say researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.

While a link between weight and initial development of prostate cancer already has been made, this report, published in the Oct. 1 issue of Clinical Cancer Research, is the first to associate a man’s body mass at different ages and

Increased consumption leads to increase in body mass index of 9 to 14 year olds; puts children at risk for chronic disease later in life

New research shows that adolescents who eat large amounts of fried food away from home are heavier and more likely to have a poor-quality diet. Among 14,355 children surveyed over three years, researchers from the Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention (at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care) found that 9 to 14 year olds w

A new drug is demonstrating impressive results in the fight against malaria, according to a forthcoming paper in the open access journal PLoS Medicine. The study of a malaria control program in South Africa shows how hospital admissions for malaria were dramatically reduced following the introduction of an antimalarial combination called artemether-lumefantrine (AL) and the partial reintroduction of the insecticide DDT. The malaria epidemic has been particularly resurgent in recent years as the pa

A modified technique that uses the eyes as the line of reference means a 50 percent reduction in the time necessary to take MRI images of the fetal brain.

“One of the challenges of imaging the fetal head is that the fetus can move during the study, so it is often difficult to obtain the three different imaging views that best show intracranial anatomy especially when study time is prolonged.” said Keyanoosh Hosseinzadeh, MD, Chief of Body MRI at the University of Pittsburgh Me

A new digital angiography flat panel system reduces the radiation dose to patients undergoing interventional treatment for liver cancer by about one-fourth, a new study shows.

The study compared the radiation dose to patient’s skin during transcatheter arterial embolization, a procedure that blocks the flow of a blood to a tumor. Doses were assessed for 12 patients using a new angiography unit with a digital flat-panel system and 12 using a conventional unit for angiogra

A scientist from the University of Manchester has discovered the first identified droplets of spider blood in a piece of amber up to 20 million years old.

Two droplets of blood, technically known as haemolymph, have been preserved in the amber which also contains the spider – Filistatidae – a family commonly found in South America and the Caribbean.

The droplets are the first identified examples of spider blood ever found in an amber fossil. It is possible the blood cou

Marty Holmes, a landscaper from Stockton, Calif., had never heard of a regulatory T cell before his doctor suggested that it could be the key to helping him survive his cancer.

Holmes recalled that he didn’t bat an eye when the doctors proposed an experimental radiation and drug procedure to help boost these cells, even though it had been tested almost solely in mice. “As long as there was any percentage of hope, I just shot for that,” he said of the decision he made last ye

Even after they have paired with a male, the female North American barn swallow still comparison-shops for sexual partners. And forget personality; the females judge males by their looks — the reddish color of the males’ breast and belly feathers.

If the male’s red breast is not as dark as other males in the population, the female is more likely to leave him and then secretly copulate with another male, according to a Cornell University study featured on the cover of th

Mount Sinai School of Medicine researchers first to discover that a protein can provide the coding information for DNA replication

Since the discovery of the structure of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953, the paradigm for DNA replication has stated that the DNA itself codes for the appropriate pairings for replication. In other words, if a guanine base is on the original strand of DNA then its partner, a cytosine base, will pair to it on the replicated strand. In a

Getting out of the pond is the problem

A “meniscus”–the crescent-shaped and barely visible slope literally at water’s edge–can mean life or death to an insect the size of a speck of dust. Water bugs that tiny must summon the energy to “surf” themselves up the problematic interface between liquid and solid in ponds and other wet places to escape predators or reproduce.

Menisci are all around us, “but we don’t notice them because they’re so small, only a

While a chattering crowd of various species of bacteria is essentially a microbial tower of Babel, certain snippets of their chemical conversation are almost universally understood. HHMI researchers have found that bacteria of different species can talk to each other using a common language – and also that some species can manipulate the conversation to confuse other bacteria.

The interspecies crosstalk and misdirection could have important consequences for human health, said

Dr. Maki Asano and colleagues have discovered a novel protein motif that regulates Drosophila cell cycle progression by targeting the origin recognition complex (ORC1) for degradation by the ubiquitin ligase, APC. The ORC destruction box, or the “O-box” as is it called, may serve a more widespread role in the proteosomal degradation of various cell cycle factors in other eukaryotes, as well.

This work reveals a heretofore unknown mechanism for the degradation of Drosophila ORC1 by the APC

New genes tied to lifespan extension in yeast have been identified by researchers from UC Davis and Harvard Medical School.

Drastically reducing calorie intake, or caloric restriction, is known to extend the lifespan of species including yeast, worms and rodents. Previous research linked a gene called Sir2 with lifespan extension due to caloric restriction, but worms and yeast that lack Sir2 also live longer when put on a tough diet, showing that some other genes must be at work

Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center researchers have linked alterations in a gene, called Rsf-1, to the most deadly ovarian cancers. The scientists say the discovery is the first to establish a role for the gene in ovarian cancer and may lead to a test that can predict, early on, which patients will develop aggressive disease.

“We hope new therapies can be tailored to target Rsf-1, in the same way that Herceptin for breast cancer attacks the Her2/neu gene pathway,” says Tian-Li

3-Dimensional Imaging of Motor Proteins Provides New Insights to Molecular Mechanics of Cell Motility, Muscle Contraction

Scientists from the Burnham Institute for Medical Research and the University of Vermont have captured the first 3-dimensional (3D) atomic-resolution images of the motor protein myosin V as it “walks” along other proteins, revealing new structural insights that advance the current model of protein motility and muscle contraction. The culmination of four years o