News Articles

 Although smoking is a well-known risk factor for type 2 diabetes, new research published in the January 5 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine suggests that quitting the habit may actually raise diabetes risk in the short term. Researchers found that people who quit smoking have a 70 percent increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes in the first six years without cigarettes as compared to people who never smoked. The risks were highest in the first three years after quitting and returned to normal after 10 years. Among those who continued smoking over that period, the risk was lower, but the chance of developing diabetes was still 30 percent higher compared with those who never smoked.

Although running can confer many health benefits, the shoes runners wear while exercising may actually be doing them harm. In a study published in the December 2009 issue of PM&R: The journal of injury, function and rehabilitation, researchers compared the effects on knee, hip and ankle joint motions of running barefoot versus running in modern running shoes. They concluded that running shoes exerted more stress on these joints compared to running barefoot or walking in high-heeled shoes.

The authors of a new study featured in Annals of Internal Medicine say that kitchen spoons should be avoided when taking medicine, because it's easy to under or overdose when using them to measure. During the study, former cold and flu sufferers were asked to pour one teaspoon of nighttime flu medicine into kitchen spoons of differing sizes.  Depending upon the size of the spoon, the 195 former patients poured an average of eight percent too little or 12 percent too much medicine."When pouring into a medium-size tablespoon, participants under-dosed.  But when using a larger spoon, they poured too much medicine," said Dr. Brian Wansink, Director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, who led the study.

A team of researchers at Binghamton University who were able identify specific types of chronic wound bacteria and test their ability to produce cell-cell signaling molecules say listening in on bacterial conversations could be one way of improving chronic wound care. Their findings have been published in the Journal of Applied Microbiology."Bacteria, often viewed as simplistic creatures, are in fact very sociable units of life," said Alex Rickard, assistant professor of biological sciences. "They can physically and chemically interact with one another and are quite selective about who they hang out with. How bacteria might communicate in chronic wounds, however, was somewhat of a mystery."

Bacon and Eggs are delicious. And most people probably wouldn't mind having more of both in their diets for that reason alone. Pregnant women, however, may have a real reason to eat bacon and eggs: research published in the January 2010 print issue of the FASEB Journal shows that choline, found in pork as well as chicken eggs, plays a critical role in helping fetal brains develop regions associated with memory. 

Researchers from the University of Texas and Shriners Hospitals for Children say a compound from licorice root (glycyrrhizin from Glycyrrhiza glabra) might be an effective treatment for antibiotic-resistant infections resulting from severe burns. Their new study featured in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology suggests that glycyrrhizin may improve the ability of damaged skin to create antimicrobial peptides, proteins that serve as the first line of defense against infection.To make the discovery, the researchers used three groups of mice. The first group was normal, the second group was burned and untreated, and the third group was burned and treated with

New evidence uncovered by a team from Imperial College London and the University College London (UCL) suggests that during the Hesperian Epoch, approximately 3 billion years ago, Mars sustained lakes of melted ice, each around 20 km wide, along parts of its equator. The discovery challenges scientists' previous understanding of Mars during the Hesperian Epoch, a period which was previously thought to be too cold and arid to sustain water on the planet's surface. The findings appear in the journal Geology. 

Women's minds and bodies respond differently to sexual arousal, whereas men's bodies and minds tend to be more in tune with each other, according to research conducted by an international team of scientists. The team's meta-analysis of the extent of agreement between subjective ratings and physiological measures of sexual arousal in men and women is published online this week in Archives of Sexual Behavior.

 Researchers from UC San Diego, Santa Barbara and MIT have developed a "cocktail" of different nanometer-sized particles that work in concert within the bloodstream to locate, adhere to and kill cancerous tumors. The team says their work, appearing in an upcoming issue of PNAS, represents the first successful effort to employ a cooperative nanosystem to fight cancer.In their study, the researchers developed a system containing two different nanomaterials the size of only a few nanometers, or a thousand times smaller than the diameter of a human hair, that can be injected into the bloodstream. One nanomaterial was designed to find and adhere to tumors in mice, while the second nanomaterial was fabricated to kill those tumors.

 Volcanic rocks buried along the coasts of New York, New Jersey and New England, and as far south as South Carolina and Georgia, might be ideal reservoirs to lock away carbon dioxide emitted by power plants and other industrial sources. A new study featured this week in PNAS outlines formations on land as well as offshore where scientists say the best potential sites may lie.

The Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver, or SPIRE instrument, riding aboard Herschel Space Observatory, launched in May by the European Space Agency, has provided one of the most detailed views yet of space up to 12 billion years back in time.The December images have revealed thousands of newly discovered galaxies in their early stages of formation, said CU-Boulder Associate Professor Jason Glenn, a co-investigator on the project. The new images are being analyzed as part of the Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey, or HerMES, which involves more than 100 astronomers from six countries.

The authors of a new study published in Current Biology say they've gained new insight into the sex lives of malaria spreading mosquitoes. In finding a partner of the right species type, male and female mosquitoes depend on their ability to "sing" in perfect harmony, and those tones are produced and varied based on the frequency of their wing beats in flight.