Body

NEW YORK (18 December 2013) — In November 2013 at the International Conference on Family Planning in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the Population Council convened the third meeting of international experts to discuss ways to expand contraceptive choice and accelerate progress toward the Millennium Development Goal of universal access to reproductive health services by increasing access to highly effective, long-acting, reversible contraceptives (LARCs).

PITTSBURGH, Dec.

The most complete sequence to date of the Neanderthal genome, using DNA extracted from a woman's toe bone that dates back 50,000 years, reveals a long history of interbreeding among at least four different types of early humans living in Europe and Asia at that time, according to University of California, Berkeley, scientists.

Chevy Chase, MD—A tomato-rich diet may help protect at-risk postmenopausal women from breast cancer, according to new research accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

Breast cancer risk rises in postmenopausal women as their body mass index climbs. The study found eating a diet high in tomatoes had a positive effect on the level of hormones that play a role in regulating fat and sugar metabolism.

Chevy Chase, MD—Obese children naturally produce higher levels of a key stress hormone than their normal weight peers, according to new research accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

Tobacco growers are the big winners, while the environment and people who have lost land to tobacco estates are the major losers in Malawi's expanding tobacco industry. This is according to Alois Mandondo of the Centre for Agrarian and Environmental Studies in Zimbabwe. Mandondo, as leader of a study published in Springer's journal Human Ecology, believes that concerted and coordinated efforts are needed to solve the related dilemmas faced by this African country.

WHAT:

An international team of researchers has discovered a way to identify, at a molecular level, malaria-causing Plasmodium falciparum parasites that are resistant to artemisinin, the key drug for treating this disease. The research team, which included scientists from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, published their findings today in the journal Nature.

In some mountain ranges, Earth's warming climate drives rabbit relatives known as pikas to higher elevations--or wipes them out.

But biologists discovered that pikas living in rockslides near sea level in Oregon can survive hot weather by eating moss.

"Pikas eat foods like moss to persist in warming environments," says biologist Denise Dearing of the University of Utah, co-author of a new paper reporting the results. The paper is published online today in the Journal of Mammalogy.

New recommendations for using X-rays promise to speed investigations aimed at understanding the structure and function of biologically important proteins – information critical to the development of new drugs. Scientists from two U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories, Argonne and Brookhaven, and the University of Washington, Seattle, evaluated options to remedy problems affecting data collection in their new study.

A new guideline for the management of high blood pressure, developed by an expert panel and containing nine recommendations and a treatment algorithm (flow chart) to help doctors treat patients with hypertension, was published online by JAMA.

Published in PLOS ONE and titled "Cheap and Nasty? The Potential Perils of Using Management Costs to Identify Global Conservation Priorities", the research is the first to investigate links between conservation management costs and a range of factors that determine conservation success.

Arc discharges are common in everyday conditions like welding or in lightning storms. But in altered gravity, not as much is known about the behaviour of electric discharges. For the first time, Jiří Šperka from Masaryk University, Czech Republic, and his Dutch colleagues studied the behaviour of a special type of arc discharge, so-called glide arc, in varying hypergravity conditions, up to 18 G. In a paper just published in EPJ D, they demonstrate how the plasma channel of this glide arc discharge moves due to external forces of buoyancy in varying gravity conditions.

This news release is available in German.

Swivelling patients around on a computer-controlled, rotating table could deliver high doses of radiotherapy to tumours more quickly than current methods, while sparing vulnerable organs such as the heart, brain, eyes and bowel.

Sophisticated computer modelling could be used to slowly move the table - known as a couch - and a radiation source in three dimensions to direct radiation precisely to the patient's tumour, researchers have suggested.

Implants are commonly made from metals such as titanium alloys. These materials are being made porous during processing used to prepare them for medical use. Whereas this is important to ensure good contact between the implant and the bone, this also allows dangerous bacteria to adhere and grow both on the surface as well as inside leading to increased risk of infection.