News Articles

It seems like common sense, right?    We don't allow cigarettes on TV because the risk to impressionable younger people is greater than it is with adults.    Adolescents who have high levels of exposure to television programs that contain sexual content are twice as likely to be involved in a pregnancy over the following three years as their peers who watch few such shows, according to a new RAND Corporation study.The study, published in the November edition of the journal Pediatrics, is the first to establish a link between teenagers' exposure to sexual content on TV and either pregnancies among girls or responsibility for pregnancies among boys. 

Researchers in Spain writing in the Journal of Proteome Research report deep new insights into how evolution changes the biochemistry of living things, helping them to adapt to new environments. Their study, based on an analysis of proteins produced by two populations of marine snails, reveals chemical differences that give one population a survival-of-the fittest edge for life in its cold, wave-exposed environment.

Researchers in China writing in Journal of the American Chemical Society are reporting development of a new DNA "tweezers" that are the first of their kind capable of grasping and releasing objects on-demand. The microscopic tweezers could have several potential uses, the researchers note. Those include microsurgery, drug and gene delivery for gene therapy, and in the manufacturing of nano-sized circuits for futuristic electronics.

By playing it safe and using a two-pronged attack, a novel designer molecule, created and tested by an international team of researchers, fights malignant melanoma.   The substance is similar to components of viruses in that they alert the immune system so the body's own defenses are also strengthened against cancer cells in the process.   But it also puts pressure on the tumor in a different way; it switches off a specific gene in the malignant cells, driving them to suicide. With mice suffering from cancer, the researchers have thus been able to fight metastases in the lung, they report in Nature Medicine's November issue.

Cast away on a desert island, surviving on what nature alone can provide, praying for rescue but fearing the sight of a boat on the horizon.   Just the imaginative creations of Daniel Defoe in his famous novel "Robinson Crusoe?"   There has long been a theory that it was based on the real-life experience of sailor Alexander Selkirk, marooned in 1704 on a small tropical island in the Pacific for more than four years, and now archaeological evidence has been found to support contemporary records of his existence on the island.

Scientists in Italy have found bacteria in the root of a tropical grass whose oils have been used in the cosmetic and perfumery industries. These bacteria seem to promote the production of essential oils, but also they change the molecular structure of the oil, giving it different flavours and properties: termicidal, insecticidal, antimicrobial and antioxidant.

A research study carried out by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) proves that administering natural antioxidants can reduce the effects of lead poisoning in animals during the gestation and lactation periods. The study suggests that it could also be effective in humans. In this study, published in the magazine Food and Chemical Toxicology, the researchers aimed to prove that since the principal toxicity mechanism of lead poisoning is that it creates free radicals that lead to cellular destruction; administrating natural antioxidants could reverse this process and re-establish the organism's lost balance. The results of the study are preliminary but they could be the beginning of a possible therapeutic treatment to cure the disease. 

A group of researchers led by Adrian Bachtold of the CIN2 laboratory in Spain has developed an ultrasensitive mass sensor, which can measure tiny amounts of mass with atomic precision, and with an unprecedented resolution to date. The CIN2 (Research Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology), is a joint centre belonging to the Spanish National Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) and the Nanotechnology Catalonian Institute (ICN). 

Consuming foods rich in polyphenols from grapes, including red wine, helps reduce the risk of heart disease, according to a review article in the November issue of Nutrition Research.The authors review the accumulating evidence that grape polyphenols work in many different ways to prevent cardiovascular and other "inflammatory-mediated" diseases. Polyphenols are natural antioxidants found in grapes and some other plant foods. Their types and actions vary, depending on where in the grape they are found. Grape seeds, grape skin, and grape juice contain several types of polyphenols, including resveratrol, phenolic acids, anthocyanins, and flavonoids.

A group of researchers have created a  biodegradable 'scaffold' and living heart cells or stem cells seeded onto such a scaffold could develop into a patch of cardiac tissue  to treat congenital heart defects, or aid the recovery of tissue damaged by a heart attack. The biodegradable scaffold would be gradually absorbed into the body, leaving behind new tissue.The accordion-like honeycomb scaffold, to be reported in the Nov. 2 online edition of Nature Materials, is the first to be explicitly designed to match the structural and mechanical properties of native heart tissue. As a result, it has several advantages over previous cardiac tissue engineering scaffolds.

A system of presumed consent for organ donation - where people have to opt out of donating their organs when they die - is the best way to tackle a growing waiting list for transplant, according to Dr John Troyer, an expert in organ donation and the illegal trade of body parts, who has recently joined the University of Bath’s Centre for Death&Society.  Yes, that is a real department and not a Halloween trick.  We checked.There are more than 7,500 patients in the UK currently on the waiting list for organ donations.

A study in the Nov. 1 issue of the journal Sleep is the first demonstration of a specific neurochemical abnormality in adults with primary insomnia, providing greater insight to the limited understanding of the condition's pathology. Results indicate that gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), the most common inhibitory transmitter in the brain, is reduced by nearly 30 percent in individuals who have been suffering from primary insomnia for more than six months. These findings suggest that primary insomnia is a manifestation of a neurobiological state of hyperarousal, which is present during both waking and sleep at physiological and cognitive levels.