News Articles

"Hope is being given to patients with malignant and ultimately fatal spinal tumors where hope was never before available," said Dr. Isabelle Germano, Professor of Neurosurgery and Co-Director of The Radiosurgery Program at The Mount Sinai Medical Center. "All it takes is one thirty-minute out-patient treatment of pinpointed radiation and the tumor shrinks along with the pain from the cancer. Now cancer spreading to the spine doesn't mean a lifetime of pain or a wheelchair for a patient anymore."

Implanting dopamine generators (dopaminergics) in brain cells has produced improvement in the symptoms in Parkinson's, according to the results of tests carried out with monkeys by the Navarra University Hospital, led by Dr María Rosario Luquin Piudo, neurologist at the Hospital and at the other Navarra University-based medical centre, CIMA (the Research Centre for Applied Medicine).
The results have been published in the latest issue of the British scientific journal specialising in Neurology, Brain, and have corroborated the conclusions of a previous study, published in 1999 by the same research team in the specialist journal, Neuron.

A challenging goal in biology is to understand how the principal cellular functions are integrated so that cells achieve viability and optimal fitness under a wide range of nutritional conditions. Scientists from the French research centers INRA and CNRS showed by genetic approaches that, in the model bacterium Bacillus subtilis, central carbon metabolism (which generates energy from nutrients) and replication (which synthesizes DNA), two key functions in the fields of nutrition and heredity, are tightly linked.
The discovered link involves the activity of a small region of the central carbon metabolism (the terminal reactions of a process called glycolysis that burns sugars) and several enzymes of the replication machinery that synthesizes DNA.

Despite hundreds of families being told their children have peanut allergies every year, many of the children may be able to eat peanuts safely, a study by researchers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and Sydney Children's Hospital has found.
Peanut allergies occur in one in 200 infants, according to the Australasian Society of Clinical Immunology and Allergy.

Clinical research conducted in the Department of Communication Disorders at the University of Haifa revealed that some children who are born deaf "recover" from their deafness and do not require surgical intervention.
To date, most babies who are born deaf are referred for a cochlear implant. "Many parents will say to me: 'My child hears; if I call him, he responds'. Nobody listens to them because diagnostic medical equipment did not register any hearing. It seems that these parents are smarter than our equipment," said Prof. Joseph Attias, a neurophysiologist and audiologist in the Department of Communication Disorders at the University of Haifa, who made the discovery.

Scientists from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the National Agricultural Research Organization in Uganda teamed up with local, eastern Ugandan farmers to evaluate the effectiveness of low-cost alternatives for soil treatment. By implementing alternative soil fertility management and a reduction in crop tillage, scientists hope to help small-scale farmers to increase crop outputs.

Automobile crashes remain the leading cause of death for adolescents and young adults, compounded by the effects of alcohol and failure to use seatbelts. Although males have tended to be associated with alcohol-related crashes, a study to be presented at the 2007 Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) Annual Meeting shows that young females are beginning to show an alarming increase in fatal automobile crashes related to alcohol use and a failure to use seatbelts.

Mayo Clinic researchers and a group of international collaborators have discovered a correlation between an extreme form of sleep disorder and eventual onset of parkinsonism or dementia.
Clinical observations and pathology studies, as well as research in animal models, led to the findings that patients with the violent rapid eye movement sleep (REM) behavior disorder (RBD) have a high probability of later developing Lewy body dementia, Parkinson’s disease or multiple system atrophy (a Parkinson’s-like disorder), because all of these conditions appear to stem from a similar neurodegenerative origin.

Scientists have found hundreds of new marine creatures in the vast, dark deep-sea surrounding Antarctica. Carnivorous sponges, free-swimming worms, crustaceans, and molluscs living in the Weddell Sea provide new insights into the evolution of ocean life.
They describe how creatures in the deeper parts of the Southern Ocean - the source for much of the deep water in the world ocean – are likely to be related to animals living in both the adjacent shallower waters and in other parts of the deep ocean.

Cracks in the icy surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus open and close daily under the pull of Saturn's gravity, according to new calculations by NASA-sponsored researchers.
"Tides generated by Saturn's gravity could control the timing of eruptions from cracks in the southern hemisphere of Enceladus," said Dr. Terry Hurford of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Hurford is lead author of a paper on this research appearing in Nature May 17.

Chemical "relaxers" used to straighten hair are not associated with an increased risk of developing breast cancer among African-American women, say researchers who followed 48,167 Black Women's Health Study participants.
In the May issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, researchers from Boston University and Howard University Cancer Center found no increase in breast cancer risk due to the type of hair relaxer used or the frequency and duration of use. Women who used relaxers seven or more times a year over a 20 year span or longer had the same risk as women who used the chemicals for less than a year, researchers say.

Multidrug-resistant strains of the Acinetobacter calcoaceticus-baumannii complex have been infecting injured soldiers treated in US military hospitals in Iraq. US soldiers in Iraq do not carry the bacteria responsible for these difficult-to-treat wound infections.
Investigator Matthew E. Griffith, MD, (Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, San Antonio, Texas) and colleagues found that drug-resistant strains of Acinetobacter calcoaceticus-baumannii complex are not present on the skin of uninjured soldiers in Iraq, as had been expected.