News Articles

Preliminary research led by Dr. Lawrence Cheskin, MD, Director of John Hopkins Weight Management Center, suggests increasing intake of low-energy density foods like mushrooms in place of high-energy-density foods like lean ground beef is a strategy for preventing or treating obesity. This is good news for the more than one-third of U.S. adults age 20 and older who are obese, according to the Center for Disease Control and who therefore have a greater risk factor for cardiovascular disease, certain types of cancer, and type 2 diabetes. (1)
In a Mushroom Council study led by Dr. Cheskin, study participants were randomly chosen to receive either beef or mushroom lunch entrées over four days – lasagna, napoleon, sloppy Joe and chili. Subjects then switched entrées to consume the other ingredient (mushroom or beef) the following week.

Scientists at Michigan State University have identified a new protein necessary for chloroplast development that they say could ultimately lead to plant varieties tailored specifically for biofuel production.
Chloroplasts, which are specialized compartments in plant cells, convert sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into sugars and oxygen ("fuel" for the plant) during photosynthesis. The newly discovered protein, trigalactosyldiacylglycerol 4, or TGD4, offers insight into how the process works.

When a cell begins to multiply in a dangerously abnormal way, a series of death signals trigger it to self-destruct before it turns cancerous. In research in the August 15th issue of Genes & Development, Rockefeller University scientists using mice have figured out a way to amplify the signals that tell these precancerous cells to die. The trick: Inactivating a protein that normally helps cells to avoid self-destruction.
The work, led by Hermann Steller, Strang Professor and head of the Laboratory of Apoptosis and Cancer Biology, is the first to reveal the mechanism by which a class of proteins called IAPs regulates cell death. By exposing the mechanism in a living animal, the finding also marks a breakthrough in the field and opens the door for developing a new class of drugs that could aid in cancer therapy and prevention.

Scientists at the Smithsonian Institution have discovered a new species of bird in Gabon, Africa, that was, until now, unknown to the scientific community. Their findings were published in the international science journal Zootaxa today, Aug. 15.
The newly found olive-backed forest robin (Stiphrornis pyrrholaemus) was named by the scientists for its distinctive olive back and rump. Adult birds measure 4.5 inches in length and average 18 grams in weight. Males exhibit a fiery orange throat and breast, yellow belly, olive back and black feathers on the head. Females are similar, but less vibrant. Both sexes have a distinctive white dot on their face in front of each eye.
The bird was first observed by Smithsonian scientists in 2001 during a field expedition of the National Zoo's Monitoring and Assessment of Biodiversity Program in southwest Gabon. It was initially thought, however, to be an immature individual of an already-recognized species. Brian Schmidt, a research ornithologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and a member of the MAB program's team, returned to Washington, D.C., from Gabon in 2003 with several specimens to enter into the museum's bird collection. When he compared them with other forest robins of the genus Stiphrornis in the collection, Schmidt immediately noticed differences in color and plumage, and realized the newly collected birds might be unique.

In the world of alternative fuels, there may be nothing greener than pond scum.
Algae are tiny biological factories that use photosynthesis to transform carbon dioxide and sunlight into energy so efficiently that they can double their weight several times a day, producing oil in the process — 30 times more oil per acre than soybeans, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Like soybean oil, the algae oil can be burned directly in diesel engines or further refined into biodiesel.

A new systematic analysis of the relationship between the neoplastic and developmental transcriptome provides an outline of trends in cancer gene expression. The research, published recently in Genome Biology, describes how cancers can be divided into three groups distinguished by disparate developmental signatures.
Isaac S Kohane from Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard University, US, led a team of researchers who performed a comprehensive comparison of genes expressed in early developmental stages of various human tissues and those expressed in different cancers affecting these tissues. He says, "Our study reveals potentially clinically relevant differences in the gene expression of different cancer types and represents a reference framework for interpretation of smaller-scale functional studies".

The NHS and private healthcare are not providing good enough basic care to a large portion of the population in England, especially older and frailer people, according to a study published on bmj.com today.
Overall, only 62% of the care recommended for older adults is actually received, conclude the authors.
The large-scale independent study of quality of care involved 8 688 people aged 50 and over and looked at 13 different health conditions including heart disease, diabetes, stroke, depression and osteoarthritis.

All animals, plants and bacteria run the risk of being infected by specific viruses. For humans, such viruses include the flu virus, for the tobacco plant this is the tobacco mosaic virus and for the intestinal bacterium E. coli this is the enterobacteria phage lambda.
During the course of evolution, these organisms have developed systems to render viruses harmless. Viruses respond by adapting themselves in such a way that they avoid the defence mechanism, to which the bacteria respond in turn. In short, there is a continuous arms race between bacteria and viruses.
Researchers at Wageningen University, together with colleagues from England and the United States, have unravelled a mechanism with which bacteria can defend themselves for a longer period against threatening viruses.

Boys may be more apt than girls to have childhood asthma, but, when compared to girls, they are also more likely to grow out of it in adolescence and have a decreased incidence of asthma in the post-pubertal years. This indicates that there may be a buried mechanism in asthma development, according to a prospective study that analyzed airway responsiveness (AR) in more than 1,000 children with mild to moderate asthma over a period of about nine years.
"We wanted to investigate what was behind the observed sex differences in asthma rates and AR," says lead researcher, Kelan G. Tantisira, M.D., M.P.H., of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. "This is the first study to prospectively examine the natural history of sex differences in asthma in this manner."

If you live in Spain, you may have felt like some weather occurred on a predictable cycle, even a weekly one. And if you are below a certain age, you may even have been planning your seasonal activities around it your whole life.
You aren't alone. Arturo Sanchez-Lorenzo of the University of Barcelona and colleagues from the University of Girona, the University of Valencia and the University of Augsburg have thought the same thing.
Writing in Geophysical Research Letters, they detail their study of Spain during the 1961–2004 period. To minimize the impact of local variables, they used 13 series from stations placed in different climatological and geographical areas.

Ever since Darwin, evolutionary biologists have wondered why some lineages have diversified more than others. A classical explanation is that a higher rate of diversification reflects increased ecological opportunities that led to a rapid adaptive radiation of a clade. A textbook example is Darwin finches from Galapagos, whose ancestor colonized a competitors-free archipelago and rapidly radiated in 13 species, each one adapted to use the food resources in a different way.
This and other examples have led some to think that the progenitors of the major evolutionary radiations are those that happened to be in the right place and at the right time to take advantage of ecological opportunities.

The next generation of digital audio broadcasting has arrived: ROCK ANTENNE at the Fraunhofer stand (TWF 5.3, Stand 15) at IFA in Berlin will be the world's first radio station to broadcast its program in DAB Surround and mp3 Surround Internet radio.
DAB Surround will lend new quality to digital radio thanks to developments by the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen. Researchers there have devised the necessary techniques for processing and compressing the audio data.
The special feature of DAB Surround is that it doesn't require a higher data rate than stereo DAB to achieve this noticeably better sound experience. This is because the new MPEG Surround standard, developed largely by Fraunhofer engineers, compresses the six channels of a surround music track to the extent that they require no more memory than a compressed stereo signal.