Body

Philadelphia, PA, January 9, 2013 – According to the Nielsen consumer research group, teens receive an average of 3,417 text messages per month (that's 114 texts per day!). Couple this with CDC's report that high school students' consumption of fruit and vegetables is, on average, 1.2 times per day (much lower than the recommended 5 a day) and it makes sense to start using text messages to inform teens about health.

The key to giving whole wheat bread a more appetizing aroma and taste may lie in controlling the amounts of a single chemical compound that appears in the bread, which nutritionists regard as more healthful than its refined white counterpart. That's the finding of a new study in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, which opens the door to making whole wheat bakery products more appealing to millions of people.

Scientists are reporting development of chemical modules that can reproduce, on an "unprecedented" molecular level, changes and interactions that occur in natural populations of plants and animals, including those of hunting and being hunted for food, conducting mutually beneficial relationships and competing for resources. The report on these new "predator-prey biochemical oscillators," which could become building blocks for molecular machines and computers, appears in ACS Nano.

To plant food, insect repellant and other homespun uses for spent coffee grounds, scientists are adding an application that could make the gunk left over from brewing coffee a valuable resource for production of dietary supplements. Their new report in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry concludes that used coffee grounds are a rich source of healthful antioxidant substances.

The new study analyses data from school aged children in Tanzania infected with the most common forms of worms. It was found that infection by one parasitic species actually changes the risk of catching another, over and above other risk factors.

The study is the first to look at the significance of infection with one disease as a risk for further infections (i.e. co-infection). The findings could help us better understand the importance of co-infection as a risk, and could help inform disease control strategies.

In mammals such as rodents that raise their young as a group, infants will nurse from their mother as well as other females, a dynamic known as allosuckling. Ecologists have long hypothesized that allosuckling lets newborns stockpile antibodies to various diseases, but the experimental proof has been lacking until now.

An in-press report in the journal Mammalian Biology found that infant Mongolian gerbils that suckled from females given separate vaccines for two different diseases wound up with antibodies for both illnesses.

NEW YORK (January 9, 2013) – Exposure to a chemical once used widely in plastic bottles and still found in aluminum cans appears to be associated with a biomarker for higher risk of heart and kidney disease in children and adolescents, according to an analysis of national survey data by NYU School of Medicine researchers published in the January 9, 2013, online issue of Kidney International, a Nature publication.

Passive smoking, also known as 'second-hand' smoke or environmental tobacco smoke (ETS), is known to cause serious cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, including coronary heart disease and lung cancer. However, until now it has been uncertain whether ETS increases the risk of dementia, mainly due to lack of research. Previous studies have shown an association between ETS and cognitive impairment, but this is the first to find a significant link with dementia syndromes.

After uncovering a mechanism that promotes chronic intestinal inflammation and the development of colorectal cancer, scientists from Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center have found that fingolimod, a drug currently approved for the treatment of multiple sclerosis, could potentially eliminate or reduce the progression of colitis-associated cancer (CAC).

SANTA CRUZ, CA--The remarkable diversity of California's plant life is largely the result of low extinction rates over the past 45 million years, according to a new study published in the journal Evolution. Although many new species have evolved in California, the rate at which plant lineages gave rise to new species has not been notably higher in California than elsewhere, researchers found.

Scientists at the University of Granada and Alcalá de Henares University have found out that not all isolated stem cells are equally valid in regenerative medicine and tissue engineering. In a paper recently published in the prestigious journal Tissue Engineering the researchers report that, contrary to what was thought, only a specific group of cord blood stem cells (CB-SC) maintained in culture are useful for therapeutic purposes.

Marine biologists are beginning to understand the varied diving and foraging strategies of filter-feeding whales by analyzing data from multisensor tags attached to the animals with suction cups. Such tags, in combination with other techniques such as echolocation, are providing a wealth of fine detail about how the world's largest creatures find and trap their prey.

New York (January 9, 2013) -- A new study by NYU School of Medicine researchers reveals that an especially virulent strain of the gut bacterium Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) isn't implicated in the overall death rate of the U.S. population, and may even protect against stroke and some cancers. The findings, based a nationwide health survey of nearly 10,000 individuals over a period of some 12 years, are published online, January 9, in the journal Gut.

Patients with non-small-cell lung cancer survive longer if they are taking beta-blockers while receiving radiotherapy, according to a study of 722 patients published in the cancer journal Annals of Oncology [1] today (Wednesday).

Cold Spring Harbor, NY – "Although mortality from many cancers has been steadily falling, particularly those of the blood [i.e., leukemias], the more important statistic may be that so many epithelial cancers (carcinomas) and effectively all mesenchymal cancers (sarcomas) remain largely incurable."