Body

5, 2010 – Metabolic syndrome (MetS) is made up of unhealthy cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors including abdominal obesity, high levels of triglycerides, low level of HDL-cholesterol, elevated blood pressure, and elevated fasting glucose level as defined by the American Heart Association/ National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (AHA/NHLBI). According to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 1999?, approximately 36% of the U.S. adult population has MetS.

Four new Neotropical plant species in the hyperdiverse genus Solanum (Solanaceae), which includes plants as diverse as the deadly nightshade as well as the more palatable tomato have been published in the open access online-only journal PLoS ONE by Dr. Sandra Knapp of the Natural History Museum, London. Although several thousand new plant species are described each year, this paper represents a botanical pioneer: it is the first to be published in an online-only journal whilst adhering to the strict botanical code that sets out how new species can be named.

Annual heart disease and stroke rates in China will rise by up to 73 percent by 2030, given an aging population and other increased risk factors, without policies and prevention efforts aimed at controlling blood pressure and smoking, according to research from Columbia University Medical Center published in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, an American Heart Association journal.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---Travel from the tropics to the poles, and you'll notice that the diversity of mammals declines with distance from the equator. Move from lowland to mountains, and you'll see diversity increase as the landscape becomes more varied. Ecologists have proposed various explanations for these well-known "biodiversity gradients," invoking ecological, evolutionary and historical processes.

DALLAS – May 6, 2010 – Nausea in pregnant women tends to fade after the first three months, but during the second and third trimesters it can be a sign of flu, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have found in a study of expectant women who sought medical care.

A combination of antiviral drugs may be needed to combat the drug resistance that rapidly develops in potentially deadly hepatitis C infections, a new study using sophisticated computer and mathematical modeling has shown.

The field of biosensing has recently found an unlikely partner in the quest for increased sensitivity: coffee rings. The next time you spill your coffee on a table, look at the spot left after the liquid has evaporated, and you'll notice it has a darker ring around its perimeter that contains a much higher concentration of particles than the center.

New research by scientists at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) and The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center could make it easier for patients to use a family of promising experimental cancer therapeutics known as small interfering RNA (siRNA).

Engineered artificial proteins that mimic the elastic properties of muscles in living organisms are the subject of an article in Nature magazine to be released May 6.

Cancer researchers at Princess Margaret Hospital (PMH) have discovered that the ovarian hormone progesterone plays a pivotal role in altering breast stem cells, a finding that has important implications for breast cancer risk.

University of British Columbia researchers have cast artificial proteins into a new solid biomaterial that very closely mimics the elasticity of muscle.

The approach, detailed in the current issue of the journal Nature, opens new avenues to creating solid biomaterials from smaller engineered proteins, and has potential applications in material sciences and tissue engineering.

The May edition of the Journal of Thoracic Oncology features a study aimed to clarify expression patterns of a novel cancer biomarker, CD24, in non-small cell lung carcinomas (NSCLC) and to correlate the findings to clinicopathologic variables, such as performance status, age, gender and prognostic significance. Furthermore, the results associated CD24 expression with the new (seventh) edition of the TNM staging. In summary, the study concluded that high expression of CD24 was a negative independent prognostic factor for progression free and cancer-specific survival in NSCLC.

A prescription drug already approved to treat genital warts and skin cancer may have a new use in boosting the effectiveness of future vaccines for bacterial and viral diseases, such as hepatitis C and HIV (the AIDS virus). These findings appear in ACS' Molecular Pharmaceutics, a bi-monthly journal.