Studies and Analyses

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

Studies of cirrus clouds by some 450 scientists may lead to improved forecasts of future climate change. During July in southern Florida, scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. will join others to investigate high tropical cirrus clouds composed of tiny ice crystals.The researchers hope to determine how the clouds form, how they limit the amount of sunlight reaching the surface of the Earth and how they trap heat rising from the surface and lower atmos

Popeye was right — eat your spinach. In fact, add some fresh-cut apples to that spinach salad.

Two new animal studies by researchers at the University of South Florida Center for Aging and Brain Repair and James A. Haley Veterans Hospital bolster a growing body of evidence that certain fruits and vegetables may protect the brain against the ravages of age. The complementary research papers appear in today’s issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

“If these pre-clinical fin

One or two drinks a day can raise the risk of developing hypertension in some men, according to two Japanese studies. The studies, published in the July issue of Alcohol: Clinical Experience and Research, found that men who had as few as one or two glasses of alcohol on a regular basis had a much higher incidence of hypertension than those who did not drink at all. Several U.S. studies have found that moderate drinking habits can actually decrease the risk of heart disease. A

Field Museum scientists describe “loop and pull” in Nature Snakes are known to swallow their prey whole, which limits the size of what they can eat. But now scientists have discovered that a species of snake can tear apart its prey. This snake loops its body around a crab to hold one end while using its mouth to pull off legs or rip the crab’s body into pieces. This “loop and pull” method allows a snake to eat crabs that are relatively huge – far too large to swallow whol

Patients with osteoarthritis of the knee who underwent placebo arthroscopic surgery were just as likely to report pain relief as those who received the real procedure, according to a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Baylor College of Medicine study published in the July 11 New England Journal of Medicine. The researchers say their results challenge the usefulness of one of the most common surgical procedures performed for osteoarthritis of the knee. “The fact that the effecti