Body

PHOENIX, Ariz. — Jan. 5, 2010 — Circumcision, which substantially lowers HIV risk in men, also dramatically changes the bacterial communities of the penis, according to a study led by scientists at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) and Johns Hopkins University and published Jan. 6 in the scientific journal PLoS ONE.

And these bacterial changes may also be associated with earlier observations that women whose male partners are circumcised are less likely to develop bacterial vaginosis, an imbalance between good and harmful bacteria.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Scientists who compare insect chirps with ape calls may look like they are mixing aphids and orangutans, but researchers have found common denominators in the calls of hundreds of species of insects, birds, fish, frogs, lizards and mammals that can be predicted with simple mathematical models.

Current use of prenatal ultrasounds in women with singleton pregnancies is 55% greater than in 1996, even in low-risk pregnancies. More than one-third (37%) of pregnant women now receive 3 or more ultrasound tests in the second and third trimesters of a given pregnancy, found an article http://www.cmaj.ca/embargo/cmaj090979.pdf in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) www.cmaj.ca.

Vitamin D deficiency may contribute to a higher number of heart and stroke-related deaths among black Americans compared to whites, according to a University of Rochester Medical Center study.

The journal Annals of Family Medicine is publishing the study in the January-February edition, which goes online Jan. 11, 2010.

There is no evidence to support psychological debriefing in schools after traumatic events such as violence, suicides and accidental death, which runs counter to current practice in some Canadian school jurisdictions, according to a commentary http://www.cmaj.ca/embargo/cmaj091621.pdf in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) www.cmaj.ca .

A Nobel-winning process for testing new drugs to treat diseases such as Huntington's, Parkinson's, and muscular dystrophy is getting an electrical charge.

Researchers at McMaster University have developed a way to propel and direct microscopic-sized worms (C. elegans nematodes) along a narrow channel using a mild electric field. The discovery opens up significant possibilities for developing high-throughput micro-screening devices for drug discovery and other applications.

Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. – Each cell inherits genes from its parent as well as epigenetic information – what amounts to an instruction manual that specifies which genes should be activated or "expressed," when and to what level. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) scientist Chris Vakoc, M.D., Ph.D., and his team have now discovered how some of these epigenetic instructions get stably transferred from one generation of cells to the next.

Your mother may have taught you that it's rude to point, but according to new research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, gesturing may actually help improve communication.

Setting out to determine the survival of patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), researchers at the University of Chicago Medical Center and their colleagues also discovered that an equation used for more than 20 years to predict survival is outdated. Accordingly, they developed and recently published a new survival prediction equation that will impact clinical practice and the drug development process.

A new study involving the University of Iowa, Mayo Clinic and two other institutions provides insight on weight control, suggesting that a ATP-sensitive potassium channel critical to survival and stress adaptation can contribute to fat deposition and obesity.

The investigation reveals how the ATP-sensitive potassium channel in the heart and skeletal muscles affects the balance between food intake and energy used. The study, which was done in animal models, appears in the January issue of the journal Cell Metabolism.

VERNON -- Switching from warm-season grasses to cool-season forages can give livestock a belly ache, in some cases a deadly one, according to Texas AgriLife Research scientists.

Dr. Bill Pinchak, Texas AgriLife Research animal nutritionist at Vernon, is leading a team of scientists who are using state-of-the-art technology – metagenomics – to determine how changes in diest affect microbial communities in the digestive tract of cattle and how these changes may increase risk of disease.

Many people have traded in their gas-guzzling old "clunkers" for newer and more efficient models or cut back on energy use at home by opting for Energy Star appliances and compact fluorescent light bulbs. But, when it comes to our muscles, a little less efficiency might be just what the doctor ordered, suggests a report in the January Cell Metabolism, a Cell Press publication.

Researchers have found that even a very little bit of the fat hormone leptin goes a long way when it comes to correcting diabetes. The hormone controls the activity of a gene known as IGFBP2 in the liver, which has antidiabetic effects in animals and could have similar therapeutic effect in humans, according to a report published by Cell Press in the January issue of Cell Metabolism.

The new findings confirm what some at least had already suspected: that leptin's antidiabetic effects are independent of the hormone's well-known ability to reduce body weight.

Montreal, January 5, 2010 – Professor Denis Archambault of the Department of Biological Sciences of Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), and doctoral student Andrea Corredor Gomez have made a major discovery in the field of molecular biology. They have unlocked some of the secrets of a viral protein, known as Rev, which is very different from other proteins of the same type studied to date. The results of their research were recently published in the prestigious Journal of Virology.

URBANA – In what amounted to a kind of census of sweet corn grown for processing, three years of data from 175 fields in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota shed light on what works and what doesn't. Along with identifying the most troublesome weeds, the results also revealed some of the more complicated relationships among factors influencing both weed control and sweet corn yield in the Midwest.