Body

ANAHEIM, March 29, 2011 — After tackling the chemistry of coffee, tea, fruit juices, soda pop, beer, wine and other alcoholic beverages, why not take on the ultimate challenge, the Mount Everest of cocktails, what may be the most chemically complex cocktail in the world, the Bloody Mary? And in this the International Year of Chemistry (IYC), why not include its global offspring, the International Mary?

ANAHEIM, March 29, 2011 — Scientists today reported development of bacteria that serve as mobile pharmaceutical factories, both producing disease-fighting substances and delivering the potentially life-saving cargo to diseased areas of the body. They reported on this new candidate for treating diseases ranging from food poisoning to cancer — termed "bacterial dirigibles" — at the 241st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, being held here.

BOSTON--By "distracting" cancer proteins from their usual activity, scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women's Hospital have caused cells in a rare, lethal form of cancer to begin behaving like normal cells -- one of the longest-standing, and most rarely achieved, goals of cancer research. The study's findings are published online by the journal Cancer Research and will appear later in a print issue.

Superlenses earned their superlative by being able to capture the "evanescent" light waves that blossom close to an illuminated surface and never travel far enough to be "seen" by a conventional lens. Superlenses hold enormous potential in a range of applications, depending upon the form of light they capture, but their use has been limited because most have been made from elaborate artificial constructs known as metamaterials.

Durham, NC —The most toxic, brightly colored members of the poison frog family may also be the best athletes, says a new study.

ANAHEIM, March 29, 2011 — With millions of adults and children avoiding nutritious foods because of the bitter taste, and gagging or vomiting when forced to take bitter liquid medicines, scientists today reported an advance toward a high-tech version of Mary Poppins' solution. It's not a spoonful of sugar to help the stuff go down, they reported at the 241st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), but a new and improved "bitterness blocker."

WASHINGTON—A new study has revealed widespread reductions in the greenness of Amazon forests caused by the last year's record-breaking drought.

"The greenness levels of Amazonian vegetation -- a measure of its health -- decreased dramatically over an area more than three and one-half times the size of Texas and did not recover to normal levels, even after the drought ended in late October 2010," says Liang Xu of Boston University and the study's lead author.

Protein aggregation, generally associated with Alzheimer's and mad cow disease, turns out to play a significant role in cancer. In a paper published in Nature Chemical Biology, Frederic Rousseau and Joost Schymkowitz of VIB, K.U.Leuven and Vrije Universiteit Brussel describe that certain mutations of p53, an important tumor suppressor, cause the protein to misfold in a way that the proteins start to aggregate. This not only disrupts the protective function of normal p53, but of other related proteins as well.

p53 plays a central role in protection against cancer

Researchers at Queen's University Belfast have issued a stark warning about the future of the Irish hare and the threat it faces from the European 'brown' hare, which has set up home in Mid-Ulster and West Tyrone.

Dr Neil Reid from Quercus (Queen's University's Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science), said: "In March 2011, the Northern Ireland Assembly voted to outlaw hare coursing in Northern Ireland to protect the future of the Irish hare. But our native hare remains vulnerable to another serious threat – that of the invading European hare."

They tell a story, these bleached bones that gleam in the sun in Yellowstone National Park.

Bones on landscapes like Yellowstone may provide detailed accounts of how animal populations have changed over the last few decades or even century, scientists have found.

"The skeletons of long-dead animals lying on landscapes provide critical insights into our understanding of ecosystem history, especially how populations have changed," says biologist Joshua Miller of Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.

Foetal loss is a common phenomenon in domestic horses after away-mating, according to Luděk Bartoš and colleagues, from the Institute of Animal Science in the Czech Republic. When mares return home after mating with a foreign stallion, they either engage in promiscuous mating with the home males to confuse paternity, or, failing that, the mares abort the foal to avoid the likely future infanticide by the dominant home male. The study is published online in the Springer journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Just as a company creates new, better versions of a product to increase market share and pad its bottom line, an international team of researchers led by Brown University has found that plants tinker with their design and performance before flooding the environment with new, improved versions of themselves.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center have developed a new drug called AT-406 with potential to treat multiple types of cancer.

A study, published this week in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, showed that AT-406 effectively targets proteins that block normal cell death from occurring. Blocking these proteins caused tumor cells to die, while not harming normal cells. The researchers believe the drug could potentially be used alone or in combination with other treatments.

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Women with osteoporosis in their hip suffer menopause two years earlier than healthy women, a study conducted at the University of Granada says. Additionally, although further study is required, researchers have found at least three genetic markers associated with osteoporosis in the hip in postmenopausal women.

Philadelphia, PA, 29 March, 2011 – The Canadian Cardiovascular Society and Canadian Heart Rhythm Society have produced the first-ever comprehensive guidelines on the use of genetic testing in the clinical management of inherited heart rhythm disorders, released in the March/April issue of the Canadian Journal of Cardiology (http://www.onlinecjc.ca/) published by Elsevier.