Body

Blacksburg, Va. – From shells to bones, the skeletons of organisms contain small amounts of impurity elements such as magnesium. Because the levels of these elements provide important clues to past environments, a considerable effort has focused on understanding how to relate impurity contents to the ancient environments in which an organism lived.

The nonessential amino acid glycine has been shown to be anti-inflammatory in several animal injury models. Recent studies demonstrated that dietary glycine protected both the lung and liver against lethal doses of endotoxin in rat or other animals and improved graft survival after liver transplantation. The influence of dietary glycine on oxidant-induced or cholestatic liver injury was not known.

Significant increases in surgical capacity or diverting patients to other jurisdictions are the best ways to deal with excessive wait times for hip and knee replacement surgery – a leading symbol of underfunding in Canada's healthcare system.

TACE has been widely accepted as a choice of treatment for advanced HCC. CT perfusion is a non-invasive and reproducible technique for assessing perfusion changes due to TACE therapy for locally advanced HCC. However, there are few reports on the application of this technique in evaluating the efficacy of TACE based on quantitative analysis of perfusion parameters.

ETT assessment is used to diagnose diseases, such as gastroesophageal reflux, dysphagia, esophagitis, and achalasia. These studies are commonly performed in conjunction with scintigraphic and manometric techniques, despite the use of ionizing radiation and catheters, for each of these additional techniques, respectively. Recently, several types of assessments were performed using the biomagnetic technique, including the assessment of gastric emptying time. These studies are particularly useful because they have the advantage of being non-invasive and do not use ionizing radiation.

It is believed that the generation of an exaggerated intestinal immune response to otherwise innocuous stimuli along with generation of oxygen free radicals plays a key role in the pathophysiology of UC. However, no disease-specific treatment for UC has yet emerged. Vitamin E is a major lipophilic antioxidant in cellular membranes with excellent antioxidant activities which protects membrane lipids from peroxidation by scavenging not only chain carrying peroxyl radicals but also singlet oxygen and superoxide anion radicals.

Scientists at the Helmholtz-Zentrum für Infektionsforschung (HZI) in Braunschweig, Germany have achieved an important advance in better understanding metabolic pathways in bacteria and their use. Using computer models, the "System and Synthetic Biology" working group, headed up by Vítor Martins dos Santos, calculated the genetic changes that are necessary for increasing the production of biosynthetics in the Pseudomonas putida bacteria. Experiments in the laboratory subsequently confirmed the results.

The question whether a common European position on advance directives, or "living wills" is ethically required and practically feasible was discussed at a recent workshop organised by the European Science Foundation (ESF). Just as a conventional will allows people to specify how they would like their property to be distributed after their death, so a living will is supposed to determine what medical treatment people would like to receive in the event of illness when they are still alive but of unfit mind to decide at the time.

Half of all food allergies are not food allergies at all. This is what Cornelia S. Seitz et al., allergologists from Würzburg University, concluded in a study with 419 patients, as presented in the current edition of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2008; 105[42]: 715-23).

http://www.aerzteblatt.de/v4/archiv/pdf.asp?id=61998

Humanitarian aid workers responding to devastating flooding in Honduras have received assistance from space, with satellite images of affected areas provided rapidly following activation of the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters.

Tens of thousands of people have been displaced and 33 lives have been claimed by floods and landslides brought on by a tropical depression that hit the Central American country on 16 October.

A system of presumed consent for organ donation - where people have to opt out of donating their organs when they die - is the best way to tackle a growing waiting list for transplant.

That is the opinion of Dr John Troyer, an expert in organ donation and the illegal trade of body parts, who has recently joined the University of Bath's Centre for Death & Society.

PHILADELPHIA (October 30, 2008) – According to new research from the Monell Center, the degree of change in blood triglyceride levels following a fatty meal may indicate susceptibility to diet-induced obesity. The findings open doors to new methods of identifying people, including children, who are at risk for becoming obese.

Triglycerides are a form of fat that is transported in the blood and stored in the body's fat tissues. They are found in foods and also are manufactured by the body.

University of Delaware scientists, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Arizona and South Dakota State University, have identified unusual differences in the natural mechanisms that turn off, or "silence," genes in corn.

The discovery, which was made by comparing the impact of inactivating a gene that occurs in both corn and in the much-studied laboratory plant Arabidopsis, provides new insight into how one of the world's most important crops protects itself from mutation-causing mobile DNA elements and viruses.

Scientists in Italy have found bacteria in the root of a tropical grass whose oils have been used in the cosmetic and perfumery industries. These bacteria seem to promote the production of essential oils, but also they change the molecular structure of the oil, giving it different flavours and properties: termicidal, insecticidal, antimicrobial and antioxidant.

The sabertooth cat (Smilodon fatalis), one of the most iconic extinct mammal species, was likely to be a social animal, living and hunting like lions today, according to new scientific research. The species is famous for its extremely long canine teeth, which reached up to seven inches in length and extended below the lower jaw.