Body

Creating surrogate human organs, coupled with insights from highly sensitive mass spectrometry technologies, a new project is on the brink of revolutionizing the way we screen new drugs and toxic agents.

ATHENA, the Advanced Tissue-engineered Human Ectypal Network Analyzer project team, is developing four human organ constructs – liver, heart, lung and kidney – that are based on a significantly miniaturized platform. Each organ component will be about the size of a smartphone screen, and the whole ATHENA "body" of interconnected organs would fit neatly on a desk.

Washington, DC—Although people live longer today than they did 50 years ago, people who were overweight and obese as teenagers aren't experiencing the same gains as other segments of the population, according to a new study published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM).

New research shows sugary drinks are the worst offenders in the fight against youth obesity and recommends that B.C. schools fully implement healthy eating guidelines to reduce their consumption.

Data from the 2008 Adolescent Health survey among 11,000 grade seven to 12 students in British Columbia schools indicates sugary drinks like soda increased the odds of obesity more than other foods such as pizza, french fries, chips and candies.

A new international study has revealed how genetics could explain why different environmental exposures can trigger the onset of different forms of rheumatoid arthritis.

A team at the Arthritis Research UK Centre for Genetics and Genomics at The University of Manchester, part of a large international consortium involving scientists from across 15 academic institutions, believe their findings could have important implication for the way that rheumatoid arthritis is diagnosed and treated.

PULLMAN, Wash. - A Washington State University food scientist and colleagues at Texas A&M have found that compounds in peaches can inhibit the growth of breast cancer cells and their ability to spread.

Writing in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, the researchers say the compounds could be a novel addition to therapies that reduce the risk of metastasis, the primary killer in breast and many other cancers. The compounds could be given as an extract or, judging from the doses given mice in the study, two to three peaches a day.

Geneva, Switzerland, 26 March 2014 -- A new era of lung cancer therapy is close to dawning, using drugs that can prevent tumour cells from evading the immune system, experts have said at the 4th European Lung Cancer Congress.

For decades, scientists and doctors thought immunotherapy –treatments that harness the immune system to fight a disease-- was of marginal benefit in lung cancer, says Jean-Charles Soria, Institute Gustave Roussy in Paris, France.

KNOXVILLE – In many group-living species, high-rank individuals bully their group-mates to get what they want, but their contribution is key to success in conflict with other groups, according to a study that sheds new light on the evolutionary roots of cooperation and group conflict.

In the Western world, bladder cancer is the fourth most common cancer in men and the eighth most common in women, with many patients experiencing recurrence after treatment. A new study published in BJU International indicates that inheriting certain DNA sequences can affect a patient's prognosis. The findings may help physicians identify sub-groups of bladder cancer patients who should receive intensive treatment and monitoring.

Male bears are seemingly always on the prowl, roaming much greater distances than females, particularly for mating. For bear evolution, studying the paternally inherited Y chromosome is therefore a rich source to trace both the geographic dispersal and genetic differences between bear species.

Influential economic ideas first advanced in 1911 — stressing innovation and entrepreneurialism as the fundamental generators of growth and wealth — were deemed inappropriate for developing countries, stunting progress in many parts of the world throughout the 20th century, says a distinguished Harvard academic.

The Joint British Societies' consensus recommendations for the prevention of cardiovascular disease (JBS3), which have been drawn up by *11 UK professional societies and charitable organisations, are based on the latest available scientific evidence.

They emphasise the importance of putting patients in the driving seat and starting preventive action early on, using a new method of risk assessment - the JBS3 risk calculator.

Doctors routinely record blood pressure levels that are significantly higher than levels recorded by nurses, the first thorough analysis of scientific data has revealed.

A systematic review led by the University of Exeter Medical School, and supported by the National Institute for Health Research Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care in the South West Peninsula (NIHR PenCLAHRC), has discovered that recordings taken by doctors are significantly higher (by 7/4mmHg) than when the same patients are tested by nurses.

Millions of children in the UK are potentially receiving penicillin prescriptions below the recommended dose for common infections, according to new research led jointly by researchers at King's College London, St George's, University of London and Imperial College London. The authors are calling for an urgent review of penicillin dosing guidelines for children - which at the time of study had not changed in over 50 years - after discovering wide variation in current prescribing practice.

Improving cooking fuels and kitchen ventilation is associated with better lung function and reduced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), according to research published in this week's PLOS Medicine. The study, led by Pixin Ran from the Guanzhou Medical University, China, followed 996 villagers from southern China for 9 years to examine the effects of cleaner fuels and better kitchen ventilation on lung function and disease.

Scientists have used a particle accelerator to obtain high-speed 3D X-ray visualizations of the flight muscles of flies. The team from Oxford University, Imperial College, and the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) developed a groundbreaking new CT scanning technique at the PSI's Swiss Light Source to allow them to film inside live flying insects. Their article, including 3D movies of the blowfly flight motorpublished March 25 in the open access journal PLOS Biology.