News Articles

Though nearly every medical body and the United Nations would rather that epidemiologists stop talking about "pre-diabetes", concerns are still there. Governments are worried that working up the public about pre-diabetes will increase patient costs by 500 percent while advocates for it to be taken seriously believe it might head off serious issues later in life.
Pre-diabetes is a general term that refers to a vague intermediate stage between normoglycemia and diabetes mellitus. It has been broadened to include individuals with impaired glucose tolerance (IGT), impaired fasting glucose (IFG) or a combination of the two.
Results to date from prospective cohort studies investigating the link between prediabetes and risk of cancer are controversial. 

A team of researchers have evaluated mepolizumab, a new antibody-based drug for certain patients with severe asthma, and found it can replace traditional, steroid-based treatments for a specific subset of patients, resulting in improved outcomes and reduced side effects.
Patients with severe asthma often require high doses of steroid-based treatments that can significantly impair their quality of life.
These high doses can cause debilitating side effects including mood swings, diabetes, bone loss, skin bruising, cataracts and hypertension.
Previous research at the Hamilton institutions has identified specific types of patient with severe asthma have an overabundance of a particular type of white blood cell (eosinophils) present in their sputum.

Though the American government now wants to control intake, another study has affirmed that claims of a link between table salt and hypertension were always on shaky ground.
A new paper in the American Journal of Hypertension instead finds that increased Body Mass Index, age, and non-sodium dietary factors are bigger factors in systolic blood pressure than sodium intake. 
The researchers measured the effects of sodium intake, Body Mass Index, physical activity, alcohol consumption, and non-sodium dietary factors on the blood pressure of 8,670 French adults and concluded that Body Mass Index, age, and alcohol intake were all strongly linked to blood pressure increases.

A new species of titanosaurian, a member of the large-bodied sauropods that thrived during the final period of the dinosaur age, has been found in Tanzania.
Many fossils of titanosaurians have been discovered around the globe, notably in South America, but few have been recovered from the continent of Africa. 

A new study has found that the pond-dwelling, single-celled organism Oxytricha trifallax has the remarkable ability to break its own DNA into nearly a quarter-million pieces and will then rapidly reassemble those pieces when it's time to mate.
Why? No one knows, sometimes nature gets drunk and creates things that make no sense. The organism internally stores its genome as thousands of scrambled, encrypted gene pieces. Upon mating with another of its kind, the organism rummages through these jumbled genes and DNA segments to piece together more than 225,000 tiny strands of DNA. This all happens in about 60 hours.

Immunotoxins are targeted antibodies that go after deadly toxins like ricin.
In the quest to find targeted therapies for cancer - that kill cancer but spare the surrounding tissue, immunotoxins make perfect sense. But they have not succeeded in part because cancer cells share many molecules with normal cells and because it can be challenging to unlock the deadly chemical only after the antibody has homed to the diseased tissue.

At first glance, water seems to be a simple molecule because a single oxygen atom is bound to two hydrogen atoms - but it is more complex when taking into account hydrogen's nuclear spin, a property reminiscent of a rotation of its nucleus about its own axis. 
The spin of a single hydrogen can assume two different orientations, symbolized as up and down. So, the spins of water's two hydrogen atoms can either add up, called ortho water, or cancel out, called para water. Ortho and para states are also said to be symmetric and antisymmetric, respectively.

In 2014, there will be an estimated 22,240 new cases of ovarian cancer in the United States and over 40,000 new cases in the European Union. Ovarian cancer is one of the most lethal gynecologic cancers. Women with recurrent or persistent ovarian cancer recur within 6-12 months of completion with a platinum-containing regimen and there remains a high unmet need for improved treatment options.

Using a neutron beam, researchers at The Ohio State University have able to track the flow of lithium atoms into and out of an electrode in real time as a battery charged and discharged, providing a kind of window into the inner workings of a lithium-ion battery for the first time.
They believe that neutron depth profiling (NDP) could one day help explain why rechargeable batteries lose capacity over time, or sometimes even catch fire.

Wasps in the genus Spasskia (family: Braconidae) have been found for the first time in China, including a species in that genus which is totally new to science.   
The new species, Spasskia brevicarinata, is very small — male and female adults are less than one centimeter long. It is similar to a previously described species called Spasskia indica, but the ridges on some of its body segments are different.
The species epithet brevicarinata reflects a short ridge on its first tergite, as "brevi" is Latin for short and "carinata" is Latin for ridge.

New whale research has turned a long-accepted evolutionary assumption on its...hips. Instead of  being just vestigial, whale pelvic bones play a key role in reproduction, according to a new study.Both whales and dolphins have pelvic (hip) bones, evolutionary remnants from when their ancestors walked on land more than 40 million years ago. Common wisdom has long held that those bones are simply vestigial, slowly withering away like tailbones have in humans. But a new paper by USC and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County finds that not only do those pelvic bones serve a purpose – but their size and possibly shape are influenced by the forces of sexual selection.

South of Copenhagen, Danish archaeologists have done something that has not happened in over 60 years - they have found a previously undiscovered Viking fortress.It will be a surprise to most that Vikings built fortresses at all - they were the people that caused everyone else to build fortresses, who was dangerous enough to raid them? Their fellow berserkers and pirates, of course.Using new, precise laser measurements of the landscape out curator Nanna Holm of
Nanna Holm of The Danish Castle Centre
on the trail of the fortress. An almost invisible rise in the field was proved by new measurements to have a clear circular outline.