Body

ST. PAUL, Minn. – A new study shows that older people's mental skills start declining years before death, even if they don't have dementia. The study is published in the August 27, 2008, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

A Temple University study finds fat in obese patients is "sick" when compared to fat in lean patients.

When our bodies don't work properly, we say we're sick. A study published in the September issue of Diabetes finds that the same could be said for fat tissue found in obese patients. The cells in their fat tissue aren't working properly and as a result, are sicker than cells found in lean patients' fat tissue.

AMES, Iowa -- Iowa State University researcher Robert Jernigan believes that his research shows proteins have controlled motions.

Most biochemists traditionally believe proteins have many random, uncontrolled movements.

Coventry, United Kingdom – August 27, 2008 – A new study in the journal Industrial Relations reveals that employee well-being is dependent upon the rank of an individual's wage within a comparison group, as opposed to the individual's absolute pay.

STANFORD, Calif. - Scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine are shedding light on how type-1 diabetes begins.

Doctors have known the disease is caused by an autoimmune attack on the pancreas, but the exact trigger of the attack has been unclear. Now, a new study in mice implicates the immune signal interferon-alpha as an early culprit in a chain of events that upend sugar metabolism and make patients dependent on lifelong insulin injections.

Storrs, CT – August 27, 2008 – One of the hopes of having diverse campus environments is that the daily interaction with students from different backgrounds will promote interracial understanding and friendship. A new study in the journal Social Science Quarterly found that campus racial and ethnic diversity is important in predicting friendship heterogeneity, and that minorities have higher predicted friendship diversity than whites.

Coventry, United Kingdom – August 27, 2008 – A new study in the journal Industrial Relations reveals that employee well-being is dependent upon the rank of an individual's wage within a comparison group, as opposed to the individual's absolute pay.

CHAPEL HILL – Although many women quit smoking during pregnancy to protect their unborn children from the effects of cigarettes, half of them resume the habit within a few months of giving birth.

By shedding light on the factors that enable the other half to put down that cigarette for good, a study by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill could lead to programs designed to help women quit and stay quit.

UPTON, NY -- Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, in collaboration with colleagues at Cornell University, Tokyo University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Colorado, have uncovered the first experimental evidence for why the transition temperature of high-temperature superconductors -- the temperature at which these materials carry electrical current with no resistance -- cannot simply be elevated by increasing the electrons' binding energy.

BY TWEAKING a naturally occurring enzyme, chemists have created a molecule that could flush a cocaine overdose out of the body before it can cause irreparable damage to the central nervous system.

If the enzyme works in humans, it would be the first therapy to remove the drug from a user's body. Currently, doctors can only relieve the symptoms of a cocaine overdose, by lowering the patient's temperature and reducing their heart rate.

Scientists at the University of York have discovered a new role for a population of white blood cells, which may lead to improved treatments for chronic infections and cancer.

Natural Killer (or NK) cells are abundant white blood cells that were recognised over 30 years ago as being able to kill cancer cells in the test tube. Since that time, a role for NK cells in activating other white blood cells (including 'T' lymphocytes and phagocytes) and in directing how the immune system responds to a wide range of infections has also been established.

Patients discontinuing statin medication following an acute myocardial infarction (AMI) increase their risk of dying over the next year, say researchers at McGill University and the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC). Their study was published in a recent issue of the European Heart Journal.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – New research strongly suggests that a mix of preventative agents, such as those found in concentrated black raspberries, may more effectively inhibit cancer development than single agents aimed at shutting down a particular gene.

Researchers at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center examined the effect of freeze-dried black raspberries on genes altered by a chemical carcinogen in an animal model of esophageal cancer.

Boston, MA—Researchers from Boston University's Slone Epidemiology Center have found that in a given week, over 10 million Americans are taking opioids, and more than 4 million are taking them regularly (at least five days per week, for at least four weeks). These findings appear in the August 31 issue of the journal Pain.