Body

STANFORD, Calif. — If a big bunch of your brain cells suddenly went rogue and decided to become fat cells, it could cloud your decision-making capacity a bit. Fortunately, early in an organism's development, cells make firm and more-or-less permanent decisions about whether they will live their lives as, say, skin cells, brain cells or, well, fat cells.

Physical ill-health is rife among the severely mentally ill in Britain, according to new research published today by the University of East Anglia (UEA).

In a study of almost 800 patients with severe mental illness such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, two-thirds were found to be overweight or obese, and a disproportionate number suffered from diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and raised cholesterol.

The results of the two-year project in Kent are published today in the peer-reviewed journal BMC Psychiatry.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Romping clumps of misfolded proteins are prime suspects in many neurological disorders including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease. Those diseases are devastating and incurable, but a team of biologists at Brown University reports that cells can fix the problems themselves with only a little bit of help. The insight suggests that there are more opportunities to develop a therapy for protein misfolding than scientists had thought.

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is characterized by unexplained and debilitating tiredness and is associated with headaches, disrupted sleep, muscle pain and difficulty in concentrating. New research published by BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Medicine shows that ethnicity, depression, lack of exercise or social support, and social difficulties are major risk factors for CFS.

A team of scientists from Princess Margaret Hospital have created an organic nanoparticle that is completely non-toxic, biodegradable and nimble in the way it uses light and heat to treat cancer and deliver drugs. (A nanoparticle is a minute molecule with novel properties).

AUSTIN, Texas—Global warming is clearly affecting plants and animals, but we should not try to tease apart the specific contribution of greenhouse gas driven climate change to extinctions or declines of species at local scales, biologists from The University of Texas at Austin advise.

Camille Parmesan, Michael C. Singer and their coauthors published their commentary online this week in Nature Climate Change.

Measuring the levels of small molecules in the blood may be able to identify individuals at elevated risk of developing type 2 diabetes as much as a decade before symptoms of the disorder appear. In a report receiving advance online release in Nature Medicine, a team led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers describes finding that levels of five amino acids not only indicated increased diabetes risk in a general population but also could differentiate, among individuals with traditional risk factors such as obesity, those most likely to actually develop diabetes.

• Tiny Locked Nucleic Acid (LNA) based compounds, which are 8-mer LNA oligonucleotides, successfully inhibit entire microRNA families, providing potential new approach for treating a variety of diseases, including cancer, viral infections, cardiovascular and muscle diseases
• Data show high affinity and target specificity of tiny LNA-based compounds enabled functional inhibition of entire microRNA families in a range of tissues without off-target effects

San Diego, Calif., USA – Today, during the 89th General Session & Exhibition of the International Association for Dental Research, held in conjunction with the 40th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental Research and the 35th Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association for Dental Research, lead researcher C. Paganellii will present a poster titled "Influence of Pulp Extraction Technique on DPSCs Quality and Quantity."

(Edmonton) Patients with kidney cancer who had their entire organ removed were more likely to have more renal complications and poorer health after surgery, compared to those who had only part of their kidney removed, a study has shown.

A team of scientists from the University of Oxford, U.K. have taken lessons from Adam Smith and Charles Darwin to devise a new strategy that could one day slow, possibly even prevent, the spread of drug-resistant bacteria. In a new research report published in the March 2011 issue of GENETICS (http://www.genetics.org), the scientists show that bacterial gene mutations that lead to drug resistance come at a biological cost not borne by nonresistant strains.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Since the passage of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act in 2009, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has met the ambitious implementation deadlines set forth in the law, the agency said Wednesday at a congressional briefing hosted by the American Association for Cancer Research.

(Boston) – Paul Duprex, PhD, and Elke Mühlberger, PhD, both associate professors of microbiology at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM), recently co-authored a commentary about viruses for Microbiology Today, the monthly publication of the Society of General Microbiology, which is the largest microbiological society in Europe. The article focuses on the history of viruses and vaccines and gives their perspective on what is necessary to evolve to the next era of virology research.

March 18, 2011, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan — Canada is delivering on its commitment to help the world's most vulnerable, thanks to new developments which will provide an affordable, reliable, and stable treatment for malaria that will save millions of lives, especially those of women and children in Africa. The Honourable Gary Goodyear, Minister of State for Science and Technology, along with Mr. Brad Trost, Member of Parliament for Saskatoon–Humboldt, announced the breakthrough today and highlighted the Government's research support.

"There is of course a very close relationship between the moment at which pollen is released by plants and the data gathered by the traps used to measure these grains, but this is not always the case", Rafael Tormo, a botanist from the University of Extremadura and co-author of the paper, tells SINC.