Commercial fishing practices can reduce genetic diversity in fish populations, possibly threatening their productivity and adaptability to environmental change, new research has found.

An Australian zoologist now at the University of Melbourne, along with colleagues from the United Kingdom and New Zealand, was the first to record a decline in the genetic diversity of a commercially exploited marine species.

Their findings, published in the latest volume of the “Proceedings of the

Clinical trials of a new anticancer drug combination carried out by researchers at Newcastle University show that it has potential to almost double the life expectancy of sufferers of Mesothelioma – a form of lung cancer which affects around 1,700 people in the UK every year – according to a report published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Mesothelioma is a cancer of the pleura – the membranes that lines the inside of the chest and the outside of the lungs. It differs from other types

In recent years, laboratory discoveries have led to the development of new drugs designed to target and attack cancer cells, leaving healthy ones intact. One key weapon in this arsenal of new therapies is called Herceptin, a drug that is currently used to treat breast cancer and works by targeting a specific protein that controls cell growth called HER-2/neu. But despite the drug’s effectiveness, tumors shrink in only the small percentage of breast cancer patients whose cancer cells express an o

Your outlook on life not only may help you live longer, but it appears to have an impact on your quality of life. Mayo Clinic researchers say that optimists report a higher level of physical and mental functioning than their pessimist counterparts.

“The wellness of being is not just physical, but attitudinal,” said Toshihiko Maruta, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic Department of Psychiatry and Psychology in Rochester and the principal author of the study, which appears in the August issue of Mayo C

Investment from the White Rose Technology Seedcorn Fund (WRTSF) – the venture capital fund owned by the universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York (UK) – has funded the completion of a series of significant technical milestones in the development of a new family of `immunologically-rational` adjuvants for vaccines, which are materially very different from the existing adjuvants based on aluminium salts and bacterial cell wall components.

Sheffield-based life science company Adjuvantix Ltd is

Researchers from the University of Chicago have identified a gene defect that causes the development of leukemia in children with Down syndrome. The discovery, scheduled for Advance Online Publication on Nature Genetics’s website on 12 August, could speed diagnosis and provide a new target for therapy.

Children with Down syndrome are 10 to 20 times as likely as unaffected children to develop leukemia. They most commonly develop a type known as acute megakaryoblastic leukemia (AMKL), wh

Two articles in the latest issue of Critical Care reveal how intensive care therapy may be beneficial in the short but not in the long term. Being treated in intensive care units may help critically ill patients survive but the quality of life – if they survive – is often severely impaired. It is unclear whether this impairment is a complication of the illness or a complication of therapy.

Many intensive care doctors believe the battle has been won once a patient leaves the intensive care u

Birds may have a basic understanding of physics, recent research by Oxford zoologists suggests. In an article to be published in Science this week [Thursday], the researchers report the findings of an experiment in which New Caledonian crows bent wires to make hooks appropriate to retrieve food from a cylinder. This is the first time any animal has been found to show some understanding of cause and effect, and to make a new tool for a specific task.

The experiment built on a chance observat

Injecting a patient’s bone-marrow cells into their legs could help repair damaged circulatory systems in those with limb ischaemia, suggest authors of a trial in this week’s issue of THE LANCET.

Lower limb ischaemia is due to narrowing of the arteries and is a common condition, which if left untreated can lead to gangrene, amputation, and sometimes death. The disorder is usually associated with chronic peripheral arterial disease and can result in severe leg pain at rest and walking, as well

Findings from a Research Letter in this week’s issue of THE LANCET provide support for the idea that children who grow up on farms have fewer allergies because they are exposed to more microbes than other children.

Farmers’ children are known to be less prone to allergies than children who do not grow up on farms, but the exact reason is not known. Previous work has shown a circumstantial link between exposure to bacteria and reduced allergy; Dr Roger Lauener and colleagues from Zurich Unive

The emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria has become a serious public-health concern, and, accordingly, scientists are investigating new classes of antimicrobials for their efficacy against disease-causing bacteria. One developing area of study involves antimicrobial peptides derived from insects. Recent studies have identified the protein target in bacteria of these antimicrobial peptides and suggested that the peptides are not toxic to mammalian cells including those of humans, rai

Researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) have located two genes that give hepatitis A virus (HAV) its virulent properties. The team, led by Suzanne Emerson, Ph.D., also has discovered that deliberately weakened HAV can quickly revert to its naturally occurring, infection-causing form. To be published in the September 1 issue of Journal of Virology, and appearing online this week, these findings indicate that making an improved vaccine for HAV will be a very dif

Working together at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, medical physicists and clinicians have developed a new procedure that treats spinal tumors and relieves patient discomfort faster that current treatments. Called intensity-modulated spinal radiosurgery, this technique pinpoints a tumor’s location to deliver a powerful dose of radiation that avoids healthy areas of the spinal cord, kidneys, and lungs. This research was presented last month at the annual meeting of the American Association for Ph

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

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

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