Body

No matter how sophisticated modern medicine becomes, common ailments like fungal infections can outrun the best of the world's antibiotics. In people with compromised immune systems (like premature babies, AIDS victims or those undergoing chemotherapy for cancer) the risk is very high: contracting a fungal infection can be deadly.

Now Tel Aviv University zoologists are diving deep into the sea to collect unique chemicals –– drugs of the future –– to beat unnecessary death by fungal infection. And their secret weapon is the common marine sponge.

WASHINGTON -- The federal government's climate change research program should broaden its focus to include research that would support actions needed to cope with climate change-related problems that will impact society, while building on its successful research to improve understanding of the causes and processes of climate change, says a new report from the National Research Council. As the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) looks to the future, it should establish a U.S.

Spain is the only country in the EU where the victims of traffic accidents are not correctly indemnified for lost profit (compensated for the profit not realized due to damages) in cases of death or invalidity of the victim of a traffic accident. Those are the conclusions of a doctoral thesis carried out by Javier López y García de la Serrana in the department of Commercial Law of the University of Granada and supervised by Professors Luis de Angulo Rodríguez and Javier Camacho de los Ríos.

When male police officers need to de-stress, they might trade war stories -- but likely not with their female colleagues.

But the guys don't necessarily have it easy. They are often discouraged from showing emotion when dealing with stress and are expected to uphold the overtly masculine idea of what it means to be a police officer.

By now, most people have read stories about how to "grow your own organs" using stem cells is just a breakthrough away. Despite the hype, this breakthrough has been elusive.

(PHILADELPHIA) Researchers from Thomas Jefferson University have identified a protein that appears to play a significant role in the growth and migration of prostate cancer cells, especially androgen-independent prostate cancer cells. The study was published in the American Journal of Pathology.

They also found that prostate cancer cells express more of the protein when compared to normal prostate cells, according to Andrea Morrione, Ph.D., an associate professor and director of Urology Research for the Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson.

New research has found that modern lifestyle habits may play a bigger role than food alone, when it comes to tooth decay.

A review of the scientific evidence over the past 150 years found that the effects of fluoride toothpaste, good oral hygiene and health education, may override the effects of food alone on tooth decay. The research is published online in a Supplement to the journal Obesity Reviews.

Research by kinesiology investigator Dustin Hittel, PhD, has proven that muscle in extremely obese individuals produces large amounts of a protein called myostatin, which normally inhibits muscle growth—suggesting that for Type 2 diabetics, and the very obese, the task of getting healthy may be more difficult than initially thought.

LONGYEARBYEN, NORWAY (26 February 2009)—Four tons of seeds - almost 90,000 samples of hundreds of crop species - from food crop collections maintained by Canada, Ireland, Switzerland, USA, and three international agricultural research centers in Syria, Mexico and Colombia, were delivered today to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault as it celebrated its one-year anniversary. The repository, located near the village of Longyearbyen on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, has in one year amassed a collection of more than 400,000 unique seed samples – some 200 million seeds.

Modern genotyping technologies offer new opportunities to explore how genes influence health and disease, but also present the challenge of analyzing huge amounts of genetic and clinical data. With this in mind, investigators at the Lausanne Branch of the international Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR), the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) and the University Hospital of Lausanne have developed AssociationViewer, a computational tool that displays genetic differences between individuals on a large scale. Presented in the March 1st (Vol.

Edmonton—The University of Alberta and the National Research Council's National Institute (NINT) for Nanotechnology have engineered an approach that is leading to improved performance of plastic solar cells (hybrid organic solar cells). The development of inexpensive, mass-produced plastic solar panels is a goal of intense interest for many of the world's scientists and engineers because of the high cost and shortage of the ultra-high purity silicon and other materials normally required.

The endocrinologic basis of pediatric critical illness hypergylcemia (CIH) differs depending on the disease processes. Researchers writing in BioMed Central's open access journal Critical Care describe how both peripheral insulin resistance and primary beta-cell dysfunction can cause CIH in children.

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Boston, MA -- Many popular diets emphasize either carbohydrate, protein or fat as the best way to lose weight. However, there have been few studies lasting more than a year that evaluate the effect on weight loss of diets with different compositions of those nutrients.

Heart-healthy diets that reduce calorie intake—regardless of differing proportions of fat, protein, or carbohydrate—can help overweight and obese adults achieve and maintain weight loss, according to a study funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health, and published Feb., 26, 2009, in the New England Journal of Medicine.