Ancient Egyptians believed in properly equipping a body for the afterlife, and not just through mummification. A new study reveals that King Tutankhamun eased his arduous journey with a stash of red wine.

Spanish scientists have developed the first technique that can determine the color of wine used in ancient jars. They analyzed residues from a jar found in the tomb of King Tut and found that it contained wine made with red grapes.

This is the only extensive chemical analysis tha

Whether depression is linked to having an under-active thyroid gland has been debated for many years. Research published in BMC Psychiatry this week suggests that some patients with depression may be suffering from a subtle autoimmune thyroid condition, which could hinder their recovery. The study also suggests that physicians could use indicators of thyroid function to predict patients’ responsiveness to antidepressants. As inpatients with depression often undergo routine thyroid tests, th

Proteomics screen identifies novel prostate cancer target

The Burnham Institute’s Jeffrey Smith, Ph.D. has discovered that orlistat, commonly prescribed as an anti-obesity drug, has a positive side-effect: it inhibits cancer growth. Dr. Smith made this discovery using an activity-based proteomics screening technique developed in his laboratory that makes it possible to identify active targets and simultaneously screen for their inhibitors. These results will be published in the j

Alcohol-exposed babies respond more slowly to their environment, and take longer to calm down Most of the research on prenatal alcohol exposure has been conducted with children.
A new study uses heart-rate data collected from six-month-old babies to examine the effects of alcohol consumption during pregnancy.
Even as early as infancy, slower processing speeds and arousal-regulation problems are apparent. Most of the research on arousal and attention deficits ca

A new set of guidelines for lowering blood pressure has been published by the British Hypertension Society (BHS) today. Their main recommendation is that most people with hypertension should be on two blood pressure lowering drugs rather than one.

The guidelines which are aimed at UK doctors, are published in summary form in the BMJ today (12 March), and represent best practice in treating UK patients for hypertension.

People with a blood pressure higher than 140/90 (mm Hg) are cl

Dental caries, the disease that causes tooth decay, is infectious, and the mutans streptococci bacteria have long been identified as the primary disease-causing agents. Thanks to numerous scientific advances, tooth decay is not as rampant as it once was, but it is still five times more common in children than asthma and seven times more common than hay fever. And about 25% of the population (in the United States) carries about 80% of the disease burden. So dental caries is still a serious problem, es

Nanotechnology is about making improved products by building them from components hundreds of times smaller than a human blood cell. But how do you put things together at such a tiny scale? One way is to create the right conditions, so that they assemble themselves.

For example, a new method for producing uniform, self-assembled nanocells has been developed by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Reported in the March 10 issue of the Journal of the Americ

Findings have potential implications for the use of stem cells to treat neurological diseases

A UC Irvine study on cell growth in the adult brain may provide important clues to the potential use of stem cells in the treatment of memory-related diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

The study shows for the first time how newborn neurons in the adult brain grow and integrate into the area involved with learning and memory. The findings may prove significant because these new neuron

A research team at The Hospital for Sick Children (Sick Kids) led by Dr. Howard Lipshitz has discovered that a protein previously linked to mammalian embryo implantation, as well as tumour metastasis, plays similar roles in fruit fly development. This research is reported in the featured article in the March 9, 2004 issue of the scientific journal Current Biology.

“We were surprised to find such high evolutionary conservation of the structure, expression and function of these proteins – cal

The anti-microbial activity of promising peptides shown in laboratory studies to kill several medically important fungi, some of which are resistant to current drugs, can be enhanced further by protecting the peptides from enzymes programmed to destroy them, University at Buffalo oral biologists have found.

A protease inhibitor cocktail containing compounds that inactivate the enzymes that normally would degrade the small pieces of protein enabled the potential treatments for oral infections

In recent years, scientists have unearthed a trove of subterranean microbial oddities, bugs that live and thrive in bizarre and extreme environments, and that accomplish remarkable feats to survive there.

Now, the flooded depths of an abandoned iron mine in southwestern Wisconsin have yielded yet another novelty: microbes that produce nanometer-scale crystals of extraordinary length. The discovery of the willowy microscopic crystals may open a broad new window to human understanding of bio

Results of research from Hong Kong in this week’s issue of THE LANCET suggests that severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) without pneumonia could be common among populations affected by SARS outbreaks.

SARS has now affected 30 countries in five continents, with more than 8400 cases and more than 910 deaths. A novel virus, the SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV), is known to be the causative agent. Despite this knowledge, seroprevalence studies and mass screening for detection of possible subcl

The process of educating young people on the prevention of eating disorders needs to start as early as middle-school, emphasizes Danny J. Ballard, a Texas A&M University health education professor.

Ballard, who specializes in women’s health and school health education, said that 5 to 10 million women and a million men in the United States suffer from some type of eating disorder or borderline condition that could lead to an eating disorder. She says the two most common eating disorders

Scientists at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and Howard Hughes Medical Institute have found mutations in a gene linked to the progression of colon and other cancers. The research findings, published online in the March 11 issue of Science, may lead to new therapies and diagnostic tests that target this gene.

The gene in which the mutations have been found, called PIK3CA, is part of a family of genes encoding lipid kinases, enzymes that modify fatty molecules and direct cells to grow

There are genetic differences between epilepsy patients that decide on whether medical treatment is successful or not. This is the result of a major study at the Vienna General Hospital. These new insights form the basis for an epilepsy therapy tailor-made for the needs of each individual patient. This study will be presented to the scientific community at the end of May at the largest European congress on epilepsy that will be taking place in Vienna this year.

As much as three percent of th

Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas have discovered a major mechanism to explain normal and abnormal smooth muscle growth, a finding that could help in the development of novel therapeutics for disorders like hypertension and asthma.

Their work appears in today’s issue of Nature.

Smooth muscle cells are essential for the formation and function of the cardiovascular system, as well as many internal organs such as the stomach, intestine, bladder and uterus. Abno