A new international survey – connected to a study taking place at the University of Dundee – reveals that around one in five women would consider having both breasts removed to help reduce their risk of developing breast cancer if told they were at an increased risk of developing the disease.

The survey asked over 1500 women from around the world what choices they would make if told they were at high risk of developing breast cancer. Of the UK women who were questioned, up to one in

People who don’t wear graduated compression stockings when they fly are more than 12 times more likely to develop Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT) than those who do, according to a research review published in the latest Journal of Advanced Nursing.

Researchers analysed the results of nine comparative trials carried out in the UK and Italy on nearly 2,500 flyers over a two-year period.

Each study contained a group wearing knee-length graduated compression stockings and a contr

Scare stories over various aspects of food safety are never far from the headlines, and there is often a mass of conflicting opinion that can make it hard to decide what to believe.

To allay some of this confusion, and in support of National Food Safety Week (13th-19th June), SCI is offering you the chance to have your food queries answered by the experts.

Submit your food-related questions to SCI during National Food Safety Week and you will receive a sensible, straightfo

AN anti-cancer drug could potentially be the first effective treatment for the many thousands of premature births that occur worldwide each year, scientific tests have found.

The drug, which has been used to treat types of cancer including breast, bowel and lung, has been found in the laboratory to control levels of a hormone receptor protein in the womb which is linked with giving birth.

The findings, from a research team at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, should

Diabetic retinopathy has been found in nearly 8 percent of pre-diabetic participants in the Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP), according to a report presented today at the American Diabetes Association’s 65th Annual Scientific Sessions. Diabetic retinopathy, which can lead to vision loss, was also seen in 12 percent of participants with type 2 diabetes who developed diabetes during the DPP. No other long-term study has evaluated retinopathy in a population so carefully examined for the presenc

Size matters when it comes to meal portions in weight-loss diets, according to researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. And consuming convenient, nutritious frozen dinners may be a way to control portion size.

Research dietitians Sandra M. Hannum and LeaAnn Carson, who work in the laboratory of food science and human nutrition professor John W. Erdman, studied how two diet regimens resulted in weight loss in overweight and obese men. Their findings will appea

The mysterious, highly infectious prions, which cause the severe destruction of the brain that characterizes “mad cow disease” and several human brain degenerative disorders, can be rendered harmless in the laboratory by a slight alternation of the three-dimensional conformation or shape of the prion protein’s structure.

The discovery, which opens up new directions for researchers studying the currently untreatable prion diseases in humans and animals, is reported in this we

Mrinal Shah develops technology to construct biosensors more quickly

A University of Houston student has made an award-winning breakthrough in biosensors that could help bioterrorism researchers in their ability to quickly and accurately detect toxic biological agents.

Mrinal Shah, a doctoral student in chemical engineering at UH, has developed new methods in the use of biosensors that could provide one of the first steps in developing a protein-based biosensor that wo

Researchers at Yale have identified a gene that regulates the major immune response in plants, programmed cell death (PCD), according to a recent report in the journal Cell.

To protect themselves from viruses, plants create a zone of dead cells around an infection site that prevents the infection from spreading. Savithramma Dinesh-Kumar, associate professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale and his colleagues discovered how the plants keep from killin

The laws of physics combine with the mutual attraction of two proteins to create the honeycomb pattern of fruit fly eyes, say molecular biologists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. This same combination of forces forms the delicate filtering structures of the mammalian kidney.

The findings, reported in the June issue of Developmental Cell, provide a new understanding of how individual cells find their niche during organ development. They also mean that t

One of the biggest questions in modern oceanography is how animals in the deep sea get enough to eat. Marine biologists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) recently published a paper that helps answer this question, at least for animals that live on the deep seafloor off the coast of Central California. After analyzing hundreds of hours of deep-sea video, Bruce Robison and his colleagues found that “sinkers”—the cast-off mucus nets of small midwater animals called larvacea

A cone snail toxin discovered by Melbourne researchers has proven to have great potential for easing pain and could provide an improved treatment for neuropathic pain associated with diabetes.

Melbourne based company Metabolic Pharmaceuticals Limited recently announced successful results in preclinical trials of the toxin. The company will begin clinical trials in humans this month to firstly test the safety of the toxin in normal males, and later its effectiveness in treating th

Everyone knows that stem cells are controversial. Many people know that stem cells can grow into virtually any cell type found in the body, from a red blood cell to a muscle cell to a brain cell. But no one really knows why stem cells continue to divide and renew themselves long after the point where other cells stop dividing.

Now scientists at Northwestern University and the University of Washington offer one of the first clues as to why stem cells ignore stop signs in the c

Using targeted RNA interference, or RNAi libraries, researchers at Harvard Medical School describe the first large-scale classification of kinase and phosphatase gene families on the basis of their role in apoptosis and cell survival. This study appears in the June issue of Nature Cell Biology.

Jeffrey MacKeigan, former HMS research fellow in cell biology now working at Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, and colleagues utilized RNAi to systematically screen the kinase a

When it comes to the deadly skin cancer melanoma, studying functional tissue rather than cell lines may better provide insight into the disease’s development, according to new research from a Howard Hughes Medical Institute predoctoral fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Though multiple genetic alterations are associated with melanoma development, scientists have not been able to establish a direct causal link between these alterations and human cancer growth.

Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have discovered how a small molecule of RNA called microRNA – a chemical cousin of DNA – helps fine tune the production of a key protein involved in the early development of heart muscle.

The findings, available in the online edition of the journal Nature, may aid scientists in their understanding of how a progenitor cell, or stem cell, decides to become a heart cell, as well as offer researchers a way to predict how other microRN