News Articles

Overweight children and adults have low levels in their blood of a protein known as SHGB, which transports sex steroids and regulates their entry into tissues. Low levels of SHGB are a marker of the metabolic syndrome, a combination of medical disorders that increase an individual’s risk of developing type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
An explanation as to why low levels of SHGB are such a good marker of the metabolic syndrome are now provided by Geoffrey Hammond and colleagues at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

Tumor progression can now be mapped less to mathematical standards and more to individual patients according to a new study by researchers at Harvard and Johns Hopkins Universities. The study provides a new paradigm in calculating tumor development, showing that it appears to be driven by mutations in many genes.
Our understanding of the progression of cancer has long been based on streamlined models where cancer is driven by mutations in only a few genes. Niko Beerenwinkel et al. show how tumor progression can be driven by hundreds of genes. As many as 20 different mutated genes might be responsible for driving an individual tumor’s development.

The inconsistent expressions related to schizophrenia are newly structured in a recent study by researchers at the Universitas Pompeau Fabra (Barcelona), and Oxford University. Marco Loh, Edmund Rolls and Gustavo Deco have created a dynamical system framework to discuss the disorder.
People with schizophrenia are known to have difficulty in maintaining attention, unstable thoughts, and reduced emotions. Creating a unifying and statistical model to understand these symptoms has always posed a challenge to researchers and clinicians. For this study Loh et al. developed a top-down analytical approach based on the different types of symptoms and related them to instabilities in attractor neural networks in a statistical dynamical framework.

Which gender is the most talkative? (1) No matter your answer, you are partially right.
A recent Gallup poll showed that both men and women believe that women possess the gift of gab and some even believe women are biologically built for conversation but all of that is challenged in research published in the November issue of Personality and Social Psychology Review.
In a recent set of meta-analyses conducted by Campbell Leaper and Melanie Ayres, they collected all of the available evidence from decades of scientific study and systematically combined the findings into an overall picture of the differences between men and women regarding talkativeness.

Yellowstone is North America’s largest volcanic field, produced by a “hotspot” – a gigantic plume of hot and molten rock – that begins at least 400 miles beneath Earth’s surface and rises to 30 miles underground, where it widens to about 300 miles across.

Scientists using the largest cosmic ray observatory in the world, the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, have made an important discovery about the highest-energy cosmic rays that hit the Earth - and the discovery leads back to supermassive black holes.
In Science, the Pierre Auger Collaboration announces that Active Galactic Nuclei - thought to be powered by supermassive black holes that devour large amounts of matter - are the most likely candidate for the source of the highest-energy cosmic rays that hit Earth.
The scientists found that the sources of the highest-energy particles are not distributed uniformly across the sky.

Certain varieties of common fescue lawn grass come equipped with their own natural broad-spectrum herbicide that inhibits the growth of weeds and other plants around them.
Cornell researchers have identified the herbicide as an amino acid called meta-tyrosine, or m-tyrosine, that these lawn grasses exude from their roots in large amounts. This amino acid is a close relative of para-tyrosine (p-tyrosine), one of the 20 common amino acids that form proteins.

Atmospheric scientists are just about the only group that doesn't have a crime drama on television but that may change. In every crime drama there needs to be a victim, in this case the atmosphere, and we might have a part-time criminal in ozone. There's even a pretty good name for the show - 'Windprofilers.'
Ozone is a colorless, toxic gas named for the Greek word for smell because of its pungent odor.

A new study led by researchers at The Miriam Hospital’s Weight Control & Diabetes Research Center finds that dieters who have the tendency to eat in response to external factors, such as at festive celebrations, have fewer problems with their weight loss than those who eat in response to internal factors such as emotions. The study also found that emotional eating was associated with weight regain in successful losers.
The study is published in the October 2007 issue of Obesity.
“We found that the more people report eating in response to thoughts and feelings, such as, ‘when I feel lonely, I console myself by eating,’ the less weight they lost in a behavioral weight loss program.

Statement of Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases:
The new analyses revealed today from the STEP HIV vaccine clinical trial are both disappointing and puzzling. At this time, the data offer no clear explanations as to why the vaccine showed no measurable efficacy or why among individuals with background immunity to the adenovirus vector, there were more HIV infections in the vaccinees as compared to those in the placebo group.

The English Reformation spurred a fundamentalist approach to Bible reading, according to new research by a Harvard professor.
“Evangelical reading habits after 1525 were disciplinary, punishing and even demeaning,” says James Simpson, Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English in Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
In 1525, Protestant reformer William Tyndale translated the Bible into early modern English. Scholars have widely hailed that moment as a liberating step for the literate public, who could suddenly read the Bible on their own terms, without the constraints of priestly interpretation.

Is sexual orientation something people are born with - like the color of their skin and eyes - or a matter of choice?
Canadian scientists say they have uncovered new evidence which shows genetics has a role to play in determining whether an individual is homosexual or heterosexual.
The research was conducted by Dr. Sandra Witelson, a neuroscientist in the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine at McMaster University, and colleagues at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto who studied the brains of healthy, right-handed, 18- to 35-year-old homosexual and heterosexual men using structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).