Body

It is not surprising that people are more willing to participate in a task if it does not require too much effort. What is interesting, however, is the way we determine just how easy a task will be and therefore, how motivated we are to complete it. New research from University of Michigan psychologists Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz investigates how thinking about a task (i.e., how complex or simple it will be) affects our attitude toward the task itself.

BEER-SHEVA, ISRAEL October 30, 2008 -- Researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Beer-Sheva, Israel have demonstrated that treating diabetic animals with alpha-1-antitrypsin (AAT) following an islet transplantation procedure eliminates the inflammation that causes islet transplants to fail. (PNAS Article #08-07627: "Alpha-1-Antitrypsin Monotherapy Induces Immune Tolerance during Islet Allograft Transplantation in Mice") (http://www.pnas.org/content/105/42/16236)

New research from the University of Bristol brings stem cell therapies for heart disease one step closer. The findings reveal that our bodies' ability to respond to an internal 'mayday' signal may hold the key to success for long-awaited regenerative medicine.

PHILADELPHIA – Women who experience severe gestational hypertension may give birth to boys at lower risk for testicular cancer, although the exact reasons why are still unclear, according to a paper published in the November 1, 2008, issue of Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Andreas Pettersson, M.D., a doctoral student at Karolinska Institute in Sweden, said the protective effect of gestational hypertension may be due to the hormones that are released when a placenta malfunctions.

Washington, D.C. – Researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center have discovered a novel way in which breast cancer cells become resistant to tamoxifen, the world's largest-selling breast cancer prevention and treatment drug. They say the findings could provide a way to identify tamoxifen users who are no longer benefiting from the drug, allowing doctors to try another therapy option sooner.

SALT LAKE CITY – University of Utah scientists successfully created a sensitive prototype device that could test for dozens or even hundreds of diseases simultaneously by acting like a credit card-swipe machine to scan a card loaded with microscopic blood, saliva or urine samples.

The prototype works on the same principle – giant magnetoresistance or GMR – that is used to read data on computer hard drives or listen to tunes on portable digital music players.

Olive stones can be turned into bioethanol, a renewable fuel that can be produced from plant matter and used as an alternative to petrol or diesel. This gives the olive processing industry an opportunity to make valuable use of 4 million tonnes of waste in olive stones it generates every year and sets a precedent for the recycling of waste products as fuels.

Potentially hazardous levels of metal ions are present in many commercially available wines. An analysis of reported levels of metals in wines from sixteen different countries, published in the open access Chemistry Central Journal, found that only those from Argentina, Brazil and Italy did not pose a potential health risk owing to metals.

Boston, MA -- The quality of hospitals across the U.S. is inconsistent. To address this issue, the federal government and private organizations have begun to publicly report data, such as how well hospitals treat certain conditions. But until now, there has been no data on how patients themselves feel about the care they received.

African American kidney disease patients in both Canada and the United States are less likely than Caucasian Americans to have access to kidney transplants, but only African-Americans in the United States have worse health outcomes than Caucasians after a transplant is performed, according to a study appearing in the January 2009 issue of the Journal of the American Society Nephrology (JASN). The results could further open the debate about what has driven the disparities seen only in the United States.

ST. PAUL, Minn. – People with pre-existing medical conditions, such as obesity, and vascular problems such as diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol, may experience a delay in being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), or experience an increase in severity of the disease at diagnosis, according to a study published in the October 29, 2008, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

DANVILLE, PA - The use of an antimalarial medication may prevent the onset of diabetes in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, new Geisinger research shows.

Researchers examined the records of 2,093 Geisinger patients who received treatment for rheumatoid arthritis from 2000 to 2008. The study looked at, among other things, use of the medication hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and the development of new cases of diabetes in these patients.

HCQ was developed to treat malaria but it has also been used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases.

Offering another reason why eating red meat could be bad for you, an international research team, including University of California, San Diego School of Medicine professor Ajit Varki, M.D., has uncovered the first example of a bacterium that causes food poisoning in humans when it targets a non-human molecule absorbed into the body through red meats such as lamb, pork and beef.

The natural world behaves a lot like the stock market, with periods of relative stability interspersed with dramatic swings in population size and competition between individuals and species.

While scholars may be a long way from predicting the ins and outs of the economy, University of Calgary biologist Edward McCauley and colleagues have uncovered fundamental rules that may govern population cycles in many natural systems. Their discovery is published today in the prestigious scientific journal Nature.

UC San Diego bioengineers have created the first stable, fast and programmable genetic clock that reliably keeps time by the blinking of fluorescent proteins inside E. coli cells. The clock's blink rate changes when the temperature, energy source or other environmental conditions change, a fact that could lead to new kinds of sensors that convey information about the environment through the blinking rate.

The researchers published their synthetic biology advance in the journal Nature on 29 October, 2008.