Body

Two genes in which variation affects intake of caffeine, the most widely consumed stimulant in the world, have been discovered. A team of investigators from the National Cancer Institute, Harvard School of Public Health, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill examined genetic variation across the entire genome of more than 47,000 individuals from the U.S., as described in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics.

Orlando, Fla. − Smoke from cigarettes can affect nearly every organ in the body by promoting cell damage and causing inflammation, but no one has understood which smoker is or is not susceptible to disease development.

At the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) 102nd Annual Meeting 2011, however, researchers from Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, a part of Georgetown University Medical Center, demonstrate how cigarette smoke produces different "metabolites" or active biological compounds, in individual smokers, compared to non-smokers.

ORLANDO, Fla. — Freeze-dried strawberries may be an alternative to drugs for the prevention of esophageal cancer, according to research presented at the AACR 102nd Annual Meeting 2011, held here April 2-6.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Eating strawberries may be a way to help people at risk of esophageal cancer protect themselves from the disease, according to a new study by researchers at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC – James) and researchers in China.

Experts from The Cancer Institute at NYU Langone Medical Center presented new research findings at the American Association for Cancer Research 102nd Annual Meeting 2011 held April 2-6, 2011 in Orlando, Florida. NYU Cancer Institute researchers discussed various breakthroughs such as a novel test for early-stage asbestos-related pulmonary cancer, a promising treatment strategy for glioblastomas, genome-wide mapping of nickel-related cancer and greater understanding of melanoma and bladder cancer.

Orlando, Fla. – How do certain multiple myeloma treatment drugs cause complications? How does the immune system become dysfunctional due to cancer? How safe is a vaccine that could prevent development of precancerous colon polyps? Those are among the many questions that will be answered by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute (UPCI) and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine during the American Association for Cancer Research 102nd Annual Meeting 2011, April 2 to 6, in Orlando, Fla.

Sex or nice weather. That's the agonizing choice some birds face, according to a new University of Guelph study.

A team led by Guelph researchers discovered that for some male birds traveling to areas with lighter rainfall comes at the cost of attracting a female when they return home.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A new study louses up a popular theory of animal evolution and opens up the possibility that dinosaurs were early – perhaps even the first – animal hosts of lice.

The study, in Biology Letters, uses fossils and molecular data to track the evolution of lice and their hosts. It offers strong evidence, the researchers said, that the ancestors of lice that today feed on birds and mammals began to diversify before a mass extinction event killed off the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago.

The "colour" of our environment is becoming "bluer", a change that could have important implications for animals' risk of becoming extinct, ecologists have found. In a major study involving thousands of data points and published this week in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Animal Ecology, researchers examined how quickly or slowly animal populations and their environment change over time, something ecologists describe using "spectral colour".

New Haven, Conn. – Male monkeys looking for a good time might benefit from spending a bit longer getting to know a potential mate, according to a new study published online in the scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The time males spend around a prospective mate might be the key to detecting subtle sexual signals that show which females are fertile and which are not, according to the study, co-authored by an international team of biologists and psychologists.

Women who are obese during early pregnancy have a significantly increased risk of their baby dying before, during or up to one year after birth, according to research published in Europe's leading reproductive medicine journal Human Reproduction today [1]. A second paper [2] also published in the journal today shows that obesity increases the risk of complications, such as bleeding and infections, during and after a hysterectomy operation.

General Medical Council (GMC) decisions about doctors who qualified outside the UK are more likely to have far reaching consequences (high impact decisions), finds research published on bmj.com today.

The authors, led by Professor Charlotte Humphrey from King's College London, say there is no clear reason why overseas doctors do worse in GMC fitness to practise processes than their UK-trained peers.

Modifying a protein from a plant much favored by science, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and colleagues have created a new type of genetic tag visible under an electron microscope, illuminating life in never-before-seen detail.

Despite Federal Drug Administration regulation of the approval and use of pharmaceutical products, "off-label" marketing of drugs (for purposes other than those for which the drug was approved) has occurred in all aspects of the US health care system. In a study published in this week's PLoS Medicine, Aaron S. Kesselheim from Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, USA and colleagues report that the most common alleged off-label marketing practices also appear to be the most difficult to control through external regulatory approaches.

In a large collaborative analysis publishing tomorrow in the online, open access journal PLoS Biology, 55 scientists from 49 nations document that the capability of reef fish systems to produce biomass and deliver goods and services to humanity, is functionally linked to the number of species; functioning increases as biodiversity increases. However, mounting pressures from growing human populations is tampering with this functioning of the reef fish communities, especially in the most diverse reefs.