News Articles

The Spanish Aging Research Network (Red Nacional de Investigación del Envejecimiento), funded by Carlos III Health Institute and headed by professor Darío Acuña Castroviejo, from the University of Granada (Universidad de Granada [http://www.ugr.es]), is very near to achieving one of today's Science greatest goals: allowing humans to age in the best possible health conditions.

Europe is facing a “major health and social burden” as the obesity epidemic reaches crisis point, experts warned today.
Governments, whose health ministers have already signed the ‘European Charter’ pledging to halt the rise in obesity by 2015, must now back more intensive research programmes, and gear up to cope with the scale of the epidemic, which is damaging quality of life and reducing life expectancy.

The culture of a school can dampen – or exacerbate – the violent or disruptive tendencies of aggressive young teens, new research indicates. A large-scale study from the University of Illinois found that while personal traits and peer interactions have the most direct effect on the aggressive behavior of middle school students, the school environment also influences student aggression.
The study assessed individual, family and school predictors of aggression in 111,662 middle school students. The findings appear in the March 2007 issue of the journal, Youth & Society.

NASA's Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) satellites have provided the first three-dimensional images of the sun. For the first time, scientists will be able to see structures in the sun's atmosphere in three dimensions. The new view will greatly aid scientists' ability to understand solar physics and there by improve space weather forecasting. This web page contains 3-D anaglyph video and images. This 3-D video can be seen with red and cyan + 3-D paper glasses.

CLICK ABOVE FOR FULL SIZE.

New research helps bridge an important gap in understanding schizophrenia, providing the best evidence to date that defects in the brain's white matter are a key contributor to the disease, which affects about 1 percent of people worldwide. The findings, to be published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences during the week of April 23, also demonstrate how two of the dozen or more genes previously linked with schizophrenia may contribute to the disease.

When NRG1-erbB signaling was blocked, oligodendrocytes from the brain's frontal cortex had a less complex structure than normal, forming fewer branches.

Just as an editorial note, we try to stay as politically agnostic as possible. No site can be objective but we at least try to be balanced - left, right, we don't much care. We just want it to be science.
This is a news release and it's from a group that, we are told, has a left wing agenda. News releases aren't endorsements of the content and we often change the titles to look less inflammatory, just as we did here. It's a science study so anyone who writes to write more on the GNEP program can contribute as well.

A newly-identified virus may be responsible for the deaths of three Victorians who received organs from the same donor in December.
Victoria's Acting Chief Health Officer Dr John Carnie said there was no evidence the virus represented a public health risk and its presence in these Victorian recipients is thought to be a world-first occurrence.

A naturally occurring compound found in many fruits and vegetables as well as red wine, selectively kills leukemia cells in culture while showing no discernible toxicity against healthy cells, according to a study by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. These findings, which were published online March 20 in the Journal of Biological Chemistry and will be in press on May 4, offer hope for a more selective, less toxic therapy for leukemia.

The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis is a hormonal system that defends against stress, starvation and illnesses. New findings of alterations in adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) and cortisol secretion in alcoholic patients, which reflect changes in the HPA axis, prompt recommendations that alcoholics avoid excessive stress – both physical and psychological – during early abstinence.

A wide variety of public policies affect alcohol purchases, consumption, and traffic fatalities, The two alcohol-control policies that have been most-clearly demonstrated to reduce youth consumption and traffic deaths are raising the minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) and raising beer taxes. Researchers have evaluated the independent effectiveness of these and many other policies. A new study finds that the effectiveness of any particular policy depends on what other policies are also in place.

Researchers and clinicians already know that alcohol abuse and/or dependence can lead to severe and potentially irreversible brain damage. It is also known that women, when compared to men, seem to become more "damaged" by chronic alcohol abuse within a shorter period of drinking and with less overall consumption. A new study shows that female alcoholics may also sustain greater cognitive damage than male alcoholics.

For nearly a century, anthropologists have been debating the relationship of Neanderthals to modern humans. Central to the debate is whether Neanderthals contributed directly or indirectly to the ancestry of the early modern humans that succeeded them.
As this discussion has intensified in the past decades, it has become the central research focus of Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. Trinkaus has examined the earliest modern humans in Europe, including specimens in Romania, Czech Republic and France. Those specimens, in Trinkaus' opinion, have shown obvious Neanderthal ancestry.