News Articles

When broadcaster and health campaigner Anne Diamond reviewed some videogames earlier this year, her damnation was so scathing that it overshadowed The Byron Review, a major government-commissioned report on the subject. Fast forward eight months and the leading health campaigner is now working with researchers to test a theory that certain casual games may actually help weight loss and she's recruiting volunteers for a clinical trial to put the theory to the test.
This study was prompted by work already undertaken in the U.S.

Globally every year, obese people waste billions on food products that 'imply' that they aid weight loss, but are totally ineffective, says a nutritional expert on British Medical Journal (www.bmj.com) today. Professor Lean from the University of Glasgow, is hopeful that a new European Union (EU) Directive on Unfair Commercial Practices, adopted this year in UK, will finally protect vulnerable consumers who are tricked into to buying useless food products or supplements in attempts to combat their disease. Unlike medicines, food products that are marketed for health reasons are not subject to the same stringent research trials and control, and consumers are often misled. 

Take out carbon credit politics and misplaced technical concerns, says the World Agroforestry Center , and existing technology that could effectively monitor carbon storage in developing country landscapes could save more carbon than closing 1,400 coal-burning power plants.

No one needs to tell Disney, who brought the likes of Herbie the Love Bug and Lightning McQueen to the big screen, that cars have personalities.   A study co-authored by a Florida State University researcher says it has confirmed through a complex statistical analysis that many people see human facial features in the front end of automobiles and ascribe various personality traits to cars -- a modern experience driven by our prehistoric psyches.Researchers, product designers and, of course, filmmakers have long toyed with the idea that cars have faces, but this study is the first to investigate the phenomenon systematically. The study will be published in the December issue of the journal Human Nature.

Media coverage of clinical trials does not contain the elements readers require to make informed decisions. A comparison of the coverage received by pharmaceutical and herbal remedy trials, reported in BMC Medicine, has revealed that it is rarely possible for the lay public to assess the credibility of the described research.

Bone growth is controlled in the gut through serotonin, the same naturally present chemical used by the brain to influence mood, appetite and sleep, according to a new discovery from researchers at Columbia University Medical Center. Until now, the skeleton was thought to control bone growth, and serotonin was primarily known as a neurotransmitter acting in the brain. This new insight could transform how osteoporosis is treated in the future by giving doctors a way to increase bone mass, not just slow its loss. Findings are reported in the Nov. 26, 2008 issue of Cell.

Enormous cave bears, Ursus spelaeus, that once inhabited a large swathe of Europe, from Spain to the Urals, died out 27,800 years ago, around 13 millennia earlier than was previously believed, scientists have reported.  Despite over 200 years of scientific study – beginning in 1794 when a young anatomist, J. Rosenmüller, first described bones from the Zoolithenhöhle in Bavaria as belonging to a new extinct species, which he called cave bear – the timing and cause of its extinction remain controversial.

Scientists have detected an organic sugar molecule that is directly linked to the origin of life, in a region of our galaxy where habitable planets could exist.  The international team of researchers, including a researcher at University College London (UCL), used the IRAM radio telescope in France to detect the molecule in a massive star forming region of space, some 26000 light years from Earth.  

The Secretariat of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has lost valuable ground by ignoring for years the contribution of long-term concurrent relationships to Africa's AIDS epidemic, claims says Helen Epstein, an independent consultant on public health in developing countries, ahead of World AIDS Day on British Medical Journal (www.bmj.com) today.

Research chemists at the University of Warwick have devised a process which covers small particles of polymer with a layer of silica-based nanoparticles and provides a versatile material that can be used to create a range of high performance materials - like self healing paints or even packaging that can be tailored to let precise levels of water, air or both pass in a particular direction.

Sandcastle worms live in intertidal surf, building sturdy tube-shaped homes from bits of sand and shell and their own natural glue. University of Utah bioengineers have made a synthetic version of this seaworthy superglue, and hope it will be used within several years to repair shattered bones in knees, other joints and the face."You would glue some of the small pieces together," says Russell Stewart, associate professor of bioengineering and senior author of the study to be published online within a week in the journal Macromolecular Biosciences.

The next time you have to make a difficult moral decision, you might think twice about mulling it over in the bath or shower.   New research in Psychological Science has found that the physical notion of cleanliness significantly reduces the severity of moral judgments showing that intuition, rather than deliberate reasoning, can influence our perception of what is right and wrong.Lead researcher, Simone Schnall, University of Plymouth, explains the relevance of the findings to everyday life; “When we exercise moral judgment, we believe we are making a conscious, rational decision, but this research shows that we are subconsciously influenced by how clean or ‘pure’ we feel.