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Integrating bio-chemical sensors into textiles for continuous monitoring of a person's health is the goal of the EU-funded BIOTEX ('Bio-sensing textile for health management') project.
As the first of its kind, the project is developing optimal electric, electrochemical and optical sensors which will be embedded into a textile substrate to create 'sensing patches' able to monitor the biochemical parameters of a user.

Scientists subjected mice to a diet that was 40 percent fat and lots of high fructose corn syrup - the human equivalent of a McDonald's meal and 8 cans of soda per day - and it took only four weeks for liver enzymes to increase and for glucose intolerance, the beginning of type II diabetes, to begin.

Heart researchers at the Center for Translational Medicine at Jefferson Medical College have used gene therapy to reverse heart failure in animals. In addition, they found that this gene therapy strategy had "unique and additive effects" to currently used, standard heart failure drugs called beta-blockers.

Researchers have found that bricks made from fly ash--fine ash particles captured as waste by coal-fired power plants--may be even safer than predicted. Instead of leaching minute amounts of mercury as some researchers had predicted, the bricks apparently do the reverse, pulling minute amounts of the toxic metal out of ambient air.

Score one for body language: It seems that body shape and the way people walk hold major cues to their attractiveness to others, according to collaborative research findings published by Texas A&M University professor Louis G.

The legislative push for "abstinence only" sex education has suggested that nonmarital sex negatively affects a teen's mental health but a new study says that the negative mental side effects of a teen's loss of virginity are confined to a small proportion of those who have sex -- specifically, young girls, but including both boys and girls who have sex earlier than their peers and whose relationships are uncommitted and ultimately fall apart.

In the tropics, even the birds know how to relax better than those in the north. Tropical birds expend less energy at rest than do birds living in more northern climates, according to a study published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Take a tip from tropical birds. Enjoy life a little.

A new study in the May issue of the Journal of Wildlife Management reports that scientists from the New York State Museum, Wildlife Conservation Society and other groups have teamed up with the New York State Department of Criminal Justice to developed a new technique that uses fingerprints to track the fisher--an elusive member of the weasel family, and the only carnivore species known to have unique fingerprints.

Scientists recovered this camera trap photo of a fisher, an elusive member of the weasel family. Credit: Wildlife Conservation Society

The University of Delaware is helping to build a huge "IceCube" at the South Pole, and it has nothing to do with cooling beverages.
"IceCube" is a gigantic scientific instrument--a telescope for detecting illusive particles called neutrinos that can travel millions of miles through space, passing right through planets.

The IceCube telescope's optical detectors are deployed in mile-and-a-half deep holes in the Antarctic ice. Credit: James Roth, University of Delaware

Excessive levels of fecal bacteria were to blame for almost 60 percent of Nebraska streams deemed impaired by federal and state environmental laws in 2004. In order to develop effective pollution-control strategies, it is important for researchers to identify the source of the contamination.
By using multiple methods, or a “toolbox” approach, to determine the origin of fecal pollution in streams, researchers were able to identify the source of fecal bacteria with greater certainty than if testing with a single method.

Plum Creek watershed, south-central Nebraska. Credit: Jason R. Vogel, USGS

Two new papers demonstrate that adolescent female sheep that become pregnant before they have achieved their full growth may not be able to supply enough nourishment for their fetuses to develop without physical deficits.
These studies may also have implications for managing pregnancies of adolescent human females, who, in increasing numbers worldwide, are bearing offspring before they have finished growing.

Clean manure may sound like an oxymoron, but Dr. Brent Auvermann is working with feedyard owners to help them get the most "spark" from it as a fuel source.
"We're doing something that has never been done before," said Arles "Bugs" Graham, Panda Energy International's general manager for the Hereford plant. Graham spoke at the meeting. "We're using your manure as an energy source," he said. "It's a very complex process."