Body

Attitudes, relationships, intentions and personal behavior control are all factors that could affect a child's decision in either reaching for an apple or grabbing a bag of chips, according to a new study out of the University of Cincinnati. The research by Paul Branscum, assistant professor of health and exercise science at the University of Oklahoma, and Manoj Sharma, a University of Cincinnati professor of health promotion and education, is published in the International Quarterly of Community Health Education.

Bethesda, MD—If you're counting calories to lose weight, that may be only part of the weight loss equation says a new research report published online in The FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org). In the report, French scientists show that impairments to a gene known to be responsible for our internal body clocks, called "Rev-Erb alpha," leads to excessive weight gain and related health problems.

The one year results from a study into whether two drug treatments (Lucentis and Avastin), are equally effective in treating neovascular or wet age-related macular degeneration (wet AMD), have been reported today at an international research meeting in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.* The findings will also appear online shortly in the leading journal Ophthalmology.

Wet AMD is a common cause of loss of vision in older people. In the UK, around 70 per cent of people will experience severe loss of sight within two years of being diagnosed.

BATON ROUGE – LSU's Mark Batzer, along with research associate Jerilyn Walker and assistant professor Miriam Konkel, have published research determining that modern-day orangutans are host to ancient jumping genes called Alu, which are more than 16 million years old. The study was done in collaboration with the Zoological Society of San Diego and the Institute of Systems Biology in Seattle and is featured in the new open access journal Mobile DNA.

Alexandria, VA —The American Academy of Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Surgery (AAO-HNS) has released updated Clinical Indicators for the public and physicians. Clinical indicators for otolaryngology serve as a checklist for practitioners and a quality care review tool for clinical departments. The Clinical Indicators are created by the AAO-HNS and its clinical committees.

A modeling study from the European Alps suggests that population declines to be observed during the upcoming decades will probably underestimate the long-term effects of recent climate warming on mountain plants. A European team of ecologists around Stefan Dullinger from the Department of Conservation Biology, Vegetation and Landscape Ecology of the University of Vienna presents a new modeling tool to predict migration of mountain plants which explicitly takes population dynamic processes into account. Their results are published in "Nature Climate Change".

The requirement for efficient mosquito mass-rearing technology has been one of the major obstacles preventing the large scale application of the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) against mosquitoes.

Philadelphia, PA, May 7, 2012 – While active monitoring of serum prostate specific antigen (PSA) levels in men over 50 has greatly improved early detection of prostate cancer, prediction of clinical outcomes after diagnosis remains a major challenge.

BOSTON, MA—Brown seems to be the color of choice when it comes to the types of fat cells in our bodies. Brown fat expends energy, while its counterpart, white fat stores it. The danger in white fat cells, along with the increased risk for diabetes and heart disease it poses, seems especially linked to visceral fat. Visceral fat is the build-up of fat around the organs in the belly.

So in the battle against obesity, brown fat appears to be our friend and white fat our foe.

DENVER (May 6, 2012) - Eye color may be an indicator of whether a person is high-risk for certain serious skin conditions. A study, led by the University of Colorado School of Medicine, shows people with blue eyes are less likely to have vitiligo. It then follows, according to scientists, that people with brown eyes may be less likely to have melanoma. Vitiligo is an autoimmune skin disease in which pigment loss results in irregular white patches of skin and hair. Melanoma is the most dangerous kind of skin cancer.

PHILADELPHIA –A Penn research team, led by Mitchell Lazar, MD, PhD, director of the Institute for Diabetes, Obesity, and Metabolism at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, reports in Nature Medicine that mice in which an enzyme called histone deacetylase 3 (HDAC3) was deleted had massively fatty livers, but lower blood sugar, and were thus protected from glucose intolerance and insulin resistance, the hallmark of diabetes.

[Viewpoint: Slaughter without stunning Veterinary Record May 5 2012 468-9]

The slaughter of animals for commercial meat supply without stunning them first should at the very least be curbed, if not banned, concludes a former president of the British Veterinary Association (BVA) in an opinion piece in this week's Veterinary Record.

There has been a steady rise in the number of animals killed in this way over the past decade, the available data suggest.

There must be something in the warm breeze. A study on bats by a University of Calgary researcher suggests that bats produce twice as many female babies as male ones in years when spring comes early.

The earlier in the spring the births occur, the more likely the females are to survive and then reproduce a year later, as one-year olds, compared to later-born pups, according to Dr. Robert Barclay's research in PLoS ONE.

In an effort to identify the underlying causes of neurological disorders that impair motor functions such as walking and breathing, UCLA researchers have developed a novel system to measure the communication between stem cell-derived motor neurons and muscle cells in a Petri dish.

Results of a new study demonstrate the feasibility of a novel strategy in drug discovery: screening large numbers of existing drugs — often already approved for other uses — to see which ones activate genes that boost natural immunity.

Using an automated, high-volume screening technique, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified a cancer drug that enhances an important natural response to viral infection in human cells.