Integrating bio-chemical sensors into textiles for continuous monitoring of a person's health is the goal of the EU-funded BIOTEX ('Bio-sensing textile for health management') project.

As the first of its kind, the project is developing optimal electric, electrochemical and optical sensors which will be embedded into a textile substrate to create 'sensing patches' able to monitor the biochemical parameters of a user.

Scientists subjected mice to a diet that was 40 percent fat and lots of high fructose corn syrup - the human equivalent of a McDonald's meal and 8 cans of soda per day - and it took only four weeks for liver enzymes to increase and for glucose intolerance, the beginning of type II diabetes, to begin.

Heart researchers at the Center for Translational Medicine at Jefferson Medical College have used gene therapy to reverse heart failure in animals. In addition, they found that this gene therapy strategy had "unique and additive effects" to currently used, standard heart failure drugs called beta-blockers.

Researchers have found that bricks made from fly ash--fine ash particles captured as waste by coal-fired power plants--may be even safer than predicted. Instead of leaching minute amounts of mercury as some researchers had predicted, the bricks apparently do the reverse, pulling minute amounts of the toxic metal out of ambient air.

Score one for body language: It seems that body shape and the way people walk hold major cues to their attractiveness to others, according to collaborative research findings published by Texas A&M University professor Louis G.

The legislative push for "abstinence only" sex education has suggested that nonmarital sex negatively affects a teen's mental health but a new study says that the negative mental side effects of a teen's loss of virginity are confined to a small proportion of those who have sex -- specifically, young girls, but including both boys and girls who have sex earlier than their peers and whose relationships are uncommitted and ultimately fall apart.