16 APS exercise research highlights, from reduced flu mortality to proteomics & obesity
BETHESDA, Md. (Sept. 28, 2004) Bengt Saltin, keynote speaker at the 2004 APS Intersociety exercise meeting in Austin, Texas Oct. 6-9, weaves together a lifetime of learning and research experience that bridges the 1920 Nobel Prize for Physiology, the 1935 High Altitude Expedition to Chile, and the latest in international exercise physiology. ...... Dr. Saltin, director of the Copenhagen Muscle R...Blue marlin in gulf have high mercury levels, A&M study shows
GALVESTON, Sept. 10, 2004 As sport fishes go, the blue marlin is a king of sorts highly prized for its beautiful shape and its ferocious fighting ability when hooked. ......That's the good news. The bad news is that many blue marlin caught in the Gulf of Mexico contain 20 to 30 times the acceptable levels of mercury. ......Texas A&M University at Galveston researchers Jay Rooker and Gary Gill...Integrative biology of exercise APS Intersociety meeting October 6-9, 2004 in Austin
BETHESDA, MD (August 26) The American Physiological Society, Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology and American College of Sports Medicine announced the headline speaker as well as the complete schedule for their Intersociety Meeting on the "Integrative Biology of Exercise" to be held October 6-9, 2004 in Austin, Texas.... ...The three-day meeting features six pair of concurrent symposia, rep...Critically endangered monkey species plummets more than 50 percent since 1994
August 26, 2004 (Torino, Italy) The Delacour's langur (Trachypithecus delacouri), a charismatic monkey found only in a tiny area of northern Vietnam, is close to extinction, scientists at the International Primatological Society's 20th Congress reported today. New research suggests that as many as 200 of the remaining 300 individuals, one of the most threatened primates in the world, are likely...UV light, coatings reduce bacterial adhesion up to 50 percent
The combination of ultraviolet (UV) light and certain coatings can lower -- by 15 to 50 percent -- the ability of some types of bacteria to stick to a glass surface and cause contamination or biofouling, Penn State environmental engineers have found. ...Dr. Baikun Li, assistant professor of environmental engineering, Penn State Harrisburg, says "Ultraviolet light has been used for many years a...'New and better drugs for tuberculosis' goal of UH professor
HOUSTON, Aug. 13, 2004 In Kurt Krause's laboratory, what starts off as a mere molecule may soon become a potential drug to treat tuberculosis. ...... Krause, an associate professor of biology and biochemistry at the University of Houston, has been invited to discuss this research at The Protein Society's 18th Annual Symposium "Protein Structure, Function and Disease" Aug. 14-18, in San Diego,... The nation's top environmental mercury scientists and land and resource managers... ... 2004 Mercury Workshop... ... Science of mercury and resource management... ... ... 12201 Sunrise Valley Dr. ... Reston, VA ... ... ... August 17-18, 2004... ... The large geographic scope and consequences of mercury contamination and the enormous complexity of its interaction with the...Common call for action on European Research Council (ERC)
August 6, 2004 'Science magazine' today published a letter co-signed by over 50 European scientific organisations calling for urgent action on the establishment of a European Research Council (ERC) a pan-European funding organisation for basic research at a European level. A mass petition of this kind on science policy is almost unheard of in Europe and indicates the importance these organisati...Commercialization deal boosts hope for new sickle-cell drug
A novel once-a-day treatment for sickle-cell disease, based on technology developed at Children's Hospital Boston (CHB) and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), has taken an important step toward the clinic. McNeil Consumer & Specialty Pharmaceuticals and Icagen, Inc., a private biotechnology company, have agreed to jointly develop and commercialize the drug, known as ICA-17043. The ag...Researchers find that color perception is not innate, but acquired after birth
Rearing experimental animals under special illumination, researchers have found new evidence that early visual experience is indispensable for the development of normal color perception....... The wavelength composition of the light reflected from an object changes considerably in different conditions of illumination. Nevertheless, the color of the object remains the same. This property, so-calle...Joslin Diabetes Center releases new low impact exercise video
BOSTON - Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, the world leader in diabetes research and care, announced today that it has released Keep Moving!...Keep Healthy with Diabetes, the first video designed by Joslin Diabetes Center specifically for people with diabetes or pre-diabetes. Created by the Exercise Physiology Department at Joslin, the video offers low-impact exercises designed for people who h...Heat and exercise alone may not determine how much we sweat
(July 20, 2004) - Bethesda, MD - For most of us, hot weather leads to elevated internal and skin temperatures, which increase sweat rates and skin blood flow. How much we sweat can also depend on nonthermal factors such as exercise, baroreceptor loading status, and body fluid status. During exercise, heart rate and mean arterial pressure (MAP) are elevated via a combination of central command an...Scientists find 75 percent of red snapper sold in stores is really some other species
(Embargoed) CHAPEL HILL -- While learning in a course how to extract, amplify and sequence the genetic material known as DNA, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduate students got a big surprise. So did their marine science professors....... In violation of federal law, more than 75 percent of fish tested and sold as tasty red snapper in stores in eight states were other species. How...'Rolling Store' provides model for overcoming barriers to healthy foods and better health outcomes
The Rolling Store, a unique approach to overcoming economic and transportation barriers in order to provide poor women in the Lower Mississippi Delta access to healthy foods, not only prevented continuing weight gain - the study's objective - but resulted in weight loss and improved self esteem.... ...Dr. Betty Kennedy, Pennington Biomedical Research Center, described the Rolling Store proje...PNNL supercomputer fastest open system in U.S.
RICHLAND, Wash. -- The Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is now home to the United States' fastest operational unclassified supercomputer. The laboratory's 11.8 teraflops industry-standard HP Integrity system came to full operating power this week, marking the next advance in high-performance computing designed to enable new insights in the environmental and molecular...Gene that controls susceptibility to tuberculosis discovered
Montreal, May 13, 2003 Investigators at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) have identified a gene that regulates the susceptibility to tuberculosis. This finding is published in this week's edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....... Tuberculosis, an infectious disease caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium tuberculosis, affects approxima...Small, slow growing urchin variety could affect commercial harvest
ORONO, Maine -- The discovery of a type of slow growing sea urchin that never attains legal size for harvesting in Maines coastal waters has been reported by a team of scientists led by Robert Vadas, marine biologist at the University of Maine. If the finding is supported by further research, it suggests that harvesting legal size urchins could cause a shift in the urchin population toward a...Funding to commercialize technologies of UC San Diego engineers tops $1.2 million
San Diego, CA, July 14, 2004 - In its fifth round of funding since being set up in 2001, the William J. von Liebig Center for Entrepreneurism and Technology Advancement at the University of California, San Diego today awarded $300,000 to six projects. That brings total funding so far to more than $1.2 million in support of 31 projects led by faculty members of UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering....DFG announces three percent budget increase
At its meeting on 5 July 2004, the Federal-State Commission for Educational Planning and Research Promotion approved a three percent budget increase for the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation). This brings the combined federal and state contribution to a total of 1.364 billion for 2005. ...... The DFG will use this money, inter alia, to ensure that the chances of su...Key principles for the foundation of a European Research Council (ERC)
The presidents and chairpersons of Europe's research organisations, known as the European Union Research Organisations Heads Of Research Councils (EUROHORCs), under the leadership of the current president, Professor Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker, President of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), have agreed on the key principles for the foundation of a European Research...Endurance exercise found to be equally effective as diuretics in improving cardiac health
(June 28, 2004) - Bethesda, MD Only recently was a type of diuretic known as thiazides been found to be superior to angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors and calcium antagonists (calcium channel blockers) in preventing one or more major types of cardiovascular disease. The diuretics also tend to have fewer and less severe side effects, making it easier to stay on medication. In additi...European Commission approves Herceptin + Taxotere as 1st-line therapy in HER2-positive breast cancer
Roche announced today that the European Commission has approved the use of Herceptin (trastuzumab) in combination with Taxotere (docetaxel) in the European Union as a first-line therapy in HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer patients who have not yet received chemotherapy for their disease. HER2-positive breast cancer patients suffer from a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer which t...Deciphering the limits to human maximal exercise performance
It has remained unknown during centuries what is the main factor limiting maximal exercise capacity in humans. During the past century evidence has accumulated suggesting that maximal exercise capacity in humans is limited by the maximal amount of O2 that can be delivered to the active muscles. A rather important step in this direction was the finding that blood flow may reach maximal values aro...Nature's ambush: pregnancy more likely from single unprotected intercourse than believed
US research published (Thursday 10 June) in Europe's leading reproductive medicine journal Human Reproduction suggests that a single act of unprotected intercourse is more likely to lead to an unwanted pregnancy than was previously believed.... ...In a study on women who had either been sterilised or were using an intrauterine device (IUD) the frequency of intercourse increased during the six mo...LARGE protein can overcome defects in some types of muscular dystrophy
Muscular dystrophy is a group of genetic diseases characterized by progressive muscle degeneration. Working with mice with a type of the disease, researchers have found that by expressing an enzyme that attaches sugar molecules to a protein essential for proper muscle structure, they can restore normal muscle function.... ...Interestingly, the scientists found evidence of similar benefits when th...Vision: how perceptions survive in the face of ambiguity
Because we live in a visually complex world, one of the major tasks of vision is to resolve ambiguous information into a stable image of our surroundings. By presenting subjects with differing versions of visually ambiguous images, researchers have identified the factors that are important for perceptual stabilization, a process that allows the visual system to overcome conflicting information an...UCSD study shows how we perceive world depends on precise division of labor among cells in brain
University of California, San Diego neurobiologists have uncovered evidence that sheds light on the long-standing mystery of how the brain makes sense of the information contained in electrical impulses sent to it by millions of neurons from the body.... ...In a paper published this week in the early on-line version of the journal ....... Light, sound and odors, for e...U-M scientists use 21st-century technology to probe secrets of M. tuberculosis
NEW ORLEANS University of Michigan microbiologists have created a virtual model of the human immune system that runs "in silico" to study what happens inside the lungs after people inhale Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes TB....... The computer model is helping scientists learn more about this ancient pathogen, and why some people are able to fight off the infection, while o...Tigecycline - Candidate antibiotic produces 74 percent cure rate in cSSSI patients
... ...Oklahoma City, OK An antibiotic, currently being tested in clinical trials, produced a 74 percent cure rate for hospitalized patients with possibly life-threatening, complicated skin and skin structure infections (cSSSI). Tigecycline, a candidate antibiotic drug, produced these promising results in a study led by Russell G. Postier, M.D., OU Physicians Chairman of Surgery and John A....Many physicians misperceive radiation risks to developing fetuses from X-rays and CT scans
Physicians who care for pregnant women perceive the risks to developing fetuses in early pregnancy from abdominal X-rays and CT scans to be unrealistically high, says a new study from researchers at the Hospital for Sick Children and the University of Toronto in Canada.... ...For the study, the researchers analyzed the results of a survey of 273 family physicians and obstetricians in Ontario. The...The science of overcrowded life boats and other moral dilemmas
HANOVER, N.H. -- Moral philosophy is no longer just for humanists, as organizers of an upcoming conference at Dartmouth College intend to demonstrate. Scholars from philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, education and biology will come together from May 20-23 to compare notes about the insights each discipline offers in understanding the human capacity for moral reasoning.... ...Event organizer an...Andres Vazquez-Torres honored with 2004 Merck Irving S. Sigal Memorial Award
WASHINGTON, DC--APRIL 23, 2004--Andres Vazquez-Torres, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Microbiology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center (UCHSC), Denver, will receive the 2004 Merck Irving S. Sigal Memorial Award from the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). Supported by an unrestricted educational grant from Merck Research Laboratories, Inc., two Sigal Awards are presented for...American Society for Microbiology honors Timothy Yahr with 2004 Merck Irving S. Sigal Memorial Award
WASHINGTON, DC--APRIL 23, 2004--Timothy L. Yahr, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Microbiology at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, will receive the 2004 Merck Irving S. Sigal Memorial Award from the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). Supported by an unrestricted educational grant from Merck Research Laboratories, Inc., two Sigal Awards are presented for excellence in basic research in medica...Hopkins scientists overcome main obstacle to making tons of short, drug-like proteins
Two Johns Hopkins scientists have figured out a simple way to make millions upon millions of drug-like peptides quickly and efficiently, overcoming a major hurdle to creating and screening huge "libraries" of these super-short proteins for use in drug development. ......"Our work dramatically increases the complexity of peptide libraries that can be created and the speed with which they can be ma...Longer-term, moderate exercise improves immune activity
Older men and women who performed moderate resistance exercise at home 30 minutes a day, three times a week, for eleven months, showed a significant increase in natural killer cell activity, the immune system's first line of defense against viral infection, according to a study by researchers at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. The sustained exercise may be the key, say the researchers, since ea...Is a single bout of exercise helpful or harmful in getting a good night's sleep?
Washington, DC Most weight loss experts advocate a sensible diet and regular exercise to shed unwanted pounds. Americans are accepting that advice: low-fat meals are the staples of many diets and both sexes are now engaged in an exercise regimen. As evidence of the latter, marketing experts claim that membership growth in health and fitness club facilities will soon outpace capacity, with almost...Exercise reduces blood estrogens, risk for breast cancer in post menopausal women
Three hours of moderate exercise per week significantly reduced circulating estrogens in postmenopausal women, according to a new study published in the current issue of Cancer Research. The finding may explain why women who exercise regularly lower their risk for breast cancer. ...... "Exercise is an effective way for postmenopausal women to increase their chances of avoiding breast cancer," sai...Scientists question reports of massive ant supercolonies in California and Europe
A team of California scientists made headlines four years ago when it reported finding one of the largest insect colonies in the world - a 600-mile-long subterranean network of Argentine ants stretching from Northern California to the Mexican border. According to the researchers, this "supercolony" is made up of billions of closely related workers - all direct descendants of a small group of Arge...Frog skin and supercomputers lead Penn chemists to designing better bacteria killers
PHILADELPHIA A peptide called magainin, first found in the skin of the African clawed frog, holds the secret to creating bacteria-killing surfaces, according to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. The Penn scientists have taken a joint experimental-computational approach to mimicking magainin. They designed, synthesized, tested, and then improved novel antibacterial compounds, using a...Eastern lowland gorilla population plummets 70 percent since 1994
March 30, 2004 (Congo/Washington, DC) The world population of the Endangered eastern lowland gorilla (Gorilla beringei graueri), found almost exclusively in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), has plummeted by more than 70 percent in the past decade. Scientists estimate that fewer than 5,000 individuals remain, down sharply from 17,000 in 1994. ...... But a new multi-million dollar inves...