Studies might improve understanding of leading cause of mental retardation in girls By studying gene mutations in patients with the complex set of behavioral and neurological symptoms that accompany Rett syndrome, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Huda Zoghbi and her colleagues at Baylor College of Medicine have designed a mouse model that faithfully recapitulates the disease down to its distinctive hand-wringing behavior. The development of the mouse, reported in the July

Pregnancy complications and maternal cardiovascular risk: opportunities for intervention and screening? BMJ Volume 325, pp 157-60 Recent evidence suggests that women with a history of complications in pregnancy may be at increased risk of diabetes and heart disease in later life. Researchers in this week’s BMJ suggest that these women should be screened and given relevant health education. Women who develop diabetes during pregnancy (a condition known as gestational diabetes) are

A drug widely used to treat patients with heart failure is as effective for black patients as it is for white patients, according to researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.

The results of this analysis do not support the hypothesis that black patients with heart failure may not respond as well to angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors as white patients with heart failure, said Dr. Daniel Dries, lead author of the study in today’s issue of the Journal of the Americ

When a man is first diagnosed with prostate cancer, the initial visit to the doctor becomes a blur. Complex decisions about treatment now face the patient, yet formulating adequate questions is often difficult. Further clouding the picture is the tendancy of some physicians to only recommend treatment options in which they specialize. To empower patients facing these difficult and complex decisions, Temple University’s College of Engineering and the Fox Chase Cancer Center (FCCC), armed

Material could be used to make better filters, more efficient sensors, and faster catalysts

For the first time, scientists have created a material with a gradient of gold nanoparticles on a silica covered silicon surface using a molecular template. The material, which was developed at North Carolina State University (NCSU) and tested at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National

Bacteria prefer milk chocolate to dark chocolate and will swim towards it on an agar plate, so teachers have found out this week (15-19 July) at a summer school run by the Society for General Microbiology at the University of Reading. The experiment is one of a series of A-level practicals currently being produced for teachers by the Society.
“We have developed the chocolate experiment to show that bacteria can detect a food source and swim towards it – a process called chemotaxis. But we’ve see