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MultiDetector Computed Tomography (MDCT) can aid forensics teams in determining if a person has drowned, according to a study published in the June issue of Radiology.

MDCT is comparable to conventional autopsy in demonstrating airway froth and sediment that are indicative of drowning.Skull using MDCT. Credit: American Journal of Roentgenology

Scientists in New Zealand have discovered that some cows have genes that give them the ability to produce skimmed milk naturally. They say they can use this information to breed herds of milkers producing only skimmed milk.

Even better, they said they can breed herds producing milk with the unique characteristics required to make a butter that is spreadable straight from the fridge.

Women who consume higher amounts of calcium and vitamin D may have a lower risk of developing premenopausal breast cancer.

Data from animal studies have linked calcium and vitamin D to breast cancer prevention, according to background information in the article. However, epidemiologic studies on humans have been less conclusive.

An international team of scientists, including researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, report using antibodies derived from immune cells from recent human survivors of H5N1 avian influenza to successfully treat H5N1-infected mice as well as protect them from an otherwise lethal dose of the virus.

HIV treatment can be delivered even in settings of armed conflict, and humanitarian health agencies should not wait until a conflict is over before launching HIV care programs, say a team from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in this week’s PLoS Medicine.

Heather Culbert and colleagues report their results of three years’ experience of providing HIV care, including antiretroviral therapy (ART), to a conflict-affected population in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The reported treatment outcomes were similar to those in HIV projects in non-conflict settings.

If you're inactive as a child, you are basically 'storing up' illnesses for when you are an adult, University of Leicester study says.

Researchers at Ohio University have found that after primates evolved the ability to see red, they began to develop red and orange skin and hair.

No matter where we are on the political spectrum, we all have the same underlying goals and behaviors: The pursuit of happiness, the American dream etc. This is, at the very least, the way psychologists had viewed political ideology for quite some time. However, new research may have identified the characteristics that lead us to lean ideologically to the left or right and it may be genetic.

New York University psychologist John Jost will present his research at the Association for Psychological Science’s 19th annual convention in Washington, DC, May 24-27th.

People whose blood shows signs of inflammation are more likely to later develop Alzheimer's disease than people with no signs of inflammation, according to a new study.

The study, which is part of the larger Framingham Heart Study, involved 691 healthy people with an average age of 79. Blood tests determined whether the participants had signs of inflammation. Then the participants were followed for an average of seven years. During that time, 44 of the participants developed Alzheimer's disease.

Substituting soy nuts for other protein sources in a healthy diet appears to lower blood pressure in postmenopausal women, and also may reduce cholesterol levels in women with high blood pressure.

The American Heart Association estimates that high blood pressure (hypertension) affects approximately 50 million Americans and 1 billion individuals worldwide. The most common-and deadly-result is coronary heart disease, according to background information in the article. Women with high blood pressure have four times the risk of heart disease as women with normal blood pressure.

Rains are back, and we hardly remember how dry it was a couple of weeks ago. Usually, we do not associate moist tropical forests with drought, but during the ‘verano' it gets astonishingly dry in most Panamanian lowland forests, just as in many tropical forests worldwide: Plants suffer from drought, they grow slower, wilt and even die.credit: STRI

Childhood obesity is widely recognised as a major contributor towards cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, sleep disorders, and psychological and social problems. The China National Nutrition and Health survey in 2002 revealed that the prevalence of overweight individuals has increased overall by 39% in the past ten years.

Why are there no Unicorns?

Perhaps horses develop in a way that cannot be easily modified to produce a Unicorn, so such creatures have never arisen. Or maybe Unicorn-like animals have been born in the past but because there is no advantage for a horse to have a horn, such creatures did not thrive and were weeded out by natural selection.

In a fundamental discovery that someday may help cure type 1 diabetes by allowing people to grow their own insulin-producing cells for a damaged or defective pancreas, medical researchers here have reported that they have engineered adult stem cells derived from human umbilical cord blood to produce insulin.

Their paper cites six years of research and calls it "the first demonstration that human umbilical cord blood-derived stem cells can be engineered" to synthesize insulin.

The vast majority of chemotherapy errors identified in children reach patients, according to one of the first epidemiological studies of cancer drug errors in children. Published in the July 1, 2007 issue of CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the study concluded that the antimetabolite class of chemotherapeutic agents are most likely associated with errors, and that errors in drug administration and errors in drug dosing and frequency were the most common mistakes made and consequently, the most potentially harmful.