Body

Using the same technique they developed to document the harmful effects of tobacco products, a team of researchers found that cigarettes made without tobacco or nicotine may be more carcinogenic because they actually induce more extensive DNA damage than tobacco products. The technique has been awarded U.S. patent No. 7,662,565.

Waltham, MA—More than 150 years ago, Darwin proposed the theory of universal common ancestry (UCA), linking all forms of life by a shared genetic heritage from single-celled microorganisms to humans. Until now, the theory that makes ladybugs, oak trees, champagne yeast and humans distant relatives has remained beyond the scope of a formal test. This week, a Brandeis biochemist reports in Nature the results of the first large scale, quantitative test of the famous theory that underpins modern evolutionary biology.

KINGTON, ON – Researchers at Queen's University have developed a new way of performing lab tests that could improve the way doctors manage prostate cancer treatment. It will allow them to identify with unprecedented accuracy losses of a gene called PTEN that is associated with an aggressive group of prostate cancers.

Five times the tensile strength of steel and triple that of the currently best synthetic fibers: Spider silk is a fascinating material. But no one has thus far succeeded in producing the super fibers synthetically. How do spiders form long, highly stable and elastic fibers from the spider silk proteins stored in the silk gland within split seconds? Scientists from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) and the University of Bayreuth have now succeeded in unraveling the secret. They present their results in the current issue of the prestigious scientific journal Nature.

Chemists at New York University and China's Nanjing University have created a DNA assembly line that has the potential to create novel materials efficiently on the nanoscale. Their work is reported in the latest issue of the journal Nature.

"An industrial assembly line includes a factory, workers, and a conveyor system," said NYU Chemistry Professor Nadrian Seeman, the study's senior author. "We have emulated each of those features using DNA components."

The assembly line relies on three DNA-based components.

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should apply the same rigor to evaluating the science behind claims of foods' and nutritional supplements' health benefits as it devotes to assessing medication and medical technology approvals, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine. There are no scientific grounds for using different standards of evidence when evaluating the health benefits of food ingredients and drugs given that both can have significant impacts on people's well-being, said the committee that wrote the report.

Imagine stuffing yourself with a day's worth of food in two hours or less. Imagine feeling disgusted, depressed and guilty once you finally stop. Then imagine doing it again, repeatedly and uncontrollably, once a week or more for months on end.

Forestry access roads can have undesirable outcomes on fish populations living in remote lakes due to increased access, reveals research written by Len Hunt and Nigel Lester of the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, recently published in the journal North American Journal of Fisheries Management.

Choosing "greener" household cleaners, computers, and other consumer products could become as easy as reading a product's label thanks to a movement under way to develop universal guidelines for determining whether chemical products and chemical processes are environmentally friendly. That's the topic of an article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS' weekly newsmagazine.

CINCINNATI—An international team led by a University of Cincinnati (UC) researcher has shown how a bacterial community evolves to survive hostile host defenses in the body.

Amsterdam, 12 May 2010 – Elsevier, a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced it has built a new iPhone application, Scopus Alerts (Lite) (http://tinyurl.com/scopusmob), that gives researchers mobile access to the Searching and Alerting features of Scopus, the world's largest abstract and citation database.

Results of a nationwide telephone survey have shown that the rate of peanut allergies in children more than tripled from 1997 to 2008. The data are reported in the May 12 issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

Probiotics are a group of live microorganisms administered in adequate amounts which confer a beneficial health effect on the host. This bacterial community plays a pivotal role in human nutrition and health by promoting the supply of nutrients, preventing pathogen colonization and shaping and maintaining normal mucosal immunity. While the precise mechanistic basis of the beneficial effects of probiotics is obscure and will most likely vary depending on the strain and species used.

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) responds poorly to chemotherapy owing to MDR. Recent studies have shown the tumors derived from the colon, kidney, or adrenal cortex, and HCC exhibited overexpression of MDR1/P-gp. This overexpression results in a primary MDR phenotype of these cancers. Tumor derived cell lines are one of the most important tools for investigation of the biological mechanisms directly leading to drug resistance in patients.