Body

Drinking farm milk can protect children against asthma and hayfever, according to a study of nearly 15,000 children published in the May issue of Clinical and Experimental Allergy.

But consuming farm milk that hasn’t been boiled may pose health risks and further research is needed to develop a safe product that still provides good protection against these common childhood diseases.

Researchers from Europe and the USA studied 14,893 children aged between five and 13 in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland.

A novel catheter technique for patching holes in the heart may make it possible for many patients to avoid surgery altogether and others to regain enough strength to safely undergo surgical repair at a later date.

The patch successfully closed ventricular septal defects (VSDs)—or ruptures in the wall between the right and left ventricles—in nearly all patients, allowing blood to circulate normally again and relieving fluid back-up in the lungs. After recovery, patients were able to return to active lives.

Sometimes, it pays to be rare—think of a one-of-a-kind diamond, a unique Picasso or the switch-hitter on a baseball team.

Now, new research suggests that being rare has biological benefits. Professor Marla Sokolowski, a biologist at the University of Toronto Mississauga who in the 1980s discovered that a single gene affects the foraging behaviour of fruit flies, has identified the benefit of rarity in populations of fruit flies with two different versions of the foraging gene. This gene is of particular interest because it is also found in many organisms, including humans.

Rooted in place, plants can't run from herbivores—but they can fight back. Sensing attack, plants frequently generate toxins, emit volatile chemicals to attract the pest's natural enemies, or launch other defensive tactics.

Researchers have identified a specific class of small peptide elicitors, or plant defense signals, that help plants react to insect attack.

Bridges that "dance" during earthquakes could be the safest and least expensive to build, retrofit and repair, according to earthquake engineers at the University at Buffalo and MCEER.

The researchers recently developed and successfully tested the first seismic design methodology for bridge towers that respond to ground motions by literally jumping a few inches off the ground.

Scientists examining documents dating back 3,500 years say they have found proof that the origins of modern medicine lie in ancient Egypt and not with Hippocrates and the Greeks.

The research team from the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology at The University of Manchester discovered the evidence in medical papyri written in 1,500BC – 1,000 years before Hippocrates was born.Will it become the Egyptian Oath?

The Fumanya site, in the Bergueda region of central Catalonia, is so delicate that experts cannot get physically close enough to the tracks to examine them.

In the years since the tracks were discovered they have been exposed to the elements, and as a result are severely weathered and eroding at a rapid rate.

To make things even more difficult, the tracks are imprinted into near-vertical rock faces.

Palaeontologists feared the tracks could be lost forever - but a permanent and detailed record has now been created using cutting-edge equipment.

The presence of ecologically distinct males and females greatly increases a species' niche, say researchers.

An international team, led by researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), today announced the publication of the first genome of a marsupial, belonging to a South American species of opossum. In a comparison of the marsupial genome to genomes of non-marsupials, including human, published in the May 10 issue of the journal Nature, the team found that most innovations leading to the human genome sequence lie not in protein-coding genes, but in areas that until recently were referred to as "junk" DNA.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center have conclusive evidence that human papillomavirus (HPV) causes some throat cancers in both men and women. Reporting in the May 10 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers found that oral HPV infection is the strongest risk factor for the disease, regardless of tobacco and alcohol use, and having multiple oral sex partners tops the list of sex practices that boost risk for the HPV-linked cancer.

A new vaccine aimed at preventing cervical cancer is nearly 100 percent effective against the two types of the human papillomavirus (HPV) responsible for most cases of cervical cancer. Results of a nationwide study of the vaccine will be published in the May 9 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

A new study examines the use of tissue-engineered scaffolding made of cartilage cells, which have a limited ability to heal naturally, to replace defective cartilage tissue. Cartilage cells are extracted and seeded to the scaffold which is implanted into the body, where new cartilage tissue is grown along the structure. The study appears in the journal Artificial Organs.

Sales of herbal dietary supplements have skyrocketed by 100 percent in the United States during the last 10 years, but most people don’t consider evidence-based indications before using them, according to a University of Iowa study.

Two-thirds of people who use herbs don’t do so in accordance with guidelines, according to the article. Meanwhile, sales of herbal supplements reached $18.8 billion in 2003, up 100 percent from $8.8 billion in 1994. Those sales are subject to minimal federal regulations.

A fundamental genetic mechanism that shuts down an important gene in healthy immune system cells has been discovered that could one day lead to new therapies against infections, leukemia and other cancers. Results of a University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine study on the mechanism, called a somatic stop-codon mutation, are being reported today in the online journal PLoS ONE.

In the eternal conflict between friends and parents, friends will often win because they highlight the positive aspects of sex.

Parental communication more often than not focuses on the negative aspects of sex, write Marina Epstein and L. Monique Ward from The University of Michigan.