New research shows air pollution can reduce children's lung function
...se who moved away from a polluted environment will show some improvement in lung function. This research is part of the larger Children's Health Study, an ongoing study that was started in 1993. The study is the longest ever undertaken on the association between air pollution and children's health....Wrapping a memory with an experience, capacity for recollection detected in non-human species
...ecently experienced. In addition, the researchers show that rodents' capacity for recollection-like memor...lude details of previous encounters. ROC analyses show that familiarity manifests itself as a continuous function reflecting the strength of a perceptual i...Adaptive changes in the genome may provide insight into the genetics of complex disease
...onal genes thathave been affected by selection and show a connection to diseases such ashigh blood pressure, kidney disease, susceptibility to infection, asthma,and Alzheimer's disease. He and colleagues used data from the Seattle SNPs project, led by Dr.Deborah Nickerson, a professor in the Department of...Reducing allergens in the home helps inner-city children with asthma
... "These study results are exciting because they show that changes made in the home environment can produce a reduction in symptoms comparable to that achieved with asthma inhalers," said Dr. Kenneth Olden, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Children who partic...New research suggests link between maternal diet and childhood leukemia risk
...eley and lead author of the paper. "These findings show how vital it is that women hoping to get pregnant,...se with multiple risk factors. What these findings show is that the nutritional environment in utero could be one of those factors." ...UCLA molecular biologists uproot the tree of life
...imals and plants. "Through the use of genomics, we show that the fusion of two prokaryotes -- a life form that does not have a cellular nucleus -- created the first eukaryote," Lake said. "There have been theories, but we have never known where eukaryotes came from before. Eukaryotes inherited two sets of...Final Alert: 16th EORTC NCI AACR Symposium
...veness of new targeted treatment Laboratory tests show gossypol abandoned as a contraceptive can sensitise prostate cancer to radiotherapy patient trials now planned Please note: information above on news briefing & press release topics is for information only and is embargoed until the time of the...Screen siblings, parents of infants with severe heart abnormalities
...present an increase because data do not exist that show how common they are in the general population. "For many of those individuals, the problems are medically significant and need to be followed up by a cardiologist," he said. "Before, we would have completely ignored these people. Now we ...New evidence of radiation risk in childhood leukaemia
...hose of directly exposed males. He then went on to show that the elevated mutation rates persisted into the second generation of offspring, through both the male and female germ-lines. Dubrova and his colleagues developed a novel, effective method for monitoring radiation-induced mutation in humans and s...Fossils reveal direct link between global warming and genetic diversity in wildlife
...fferent response to medieval warming. "They didn't show any reduction in genetic diversity, even though they did show a reduction in population size," Hadly said. That's because voles routinely look for mates from othe...For imitative parrots, wagging tongues may be key to vocalization
...lson, and Roderick Suthers from Indiana University show that tongue movements in Monk parakeets, Myiopsitta monachus, cause changes in their vocal-tract formant frequencies and amplitudes; formants are narrow ranges of sound frequency that form the basis for vowel sounds and are the same types of sound ch...Mitochondrial genes cause nuclear mischief
... But in this issue, Miria Ricchetti and colleagues show that the over 200 mitochondrial genetic fragments also integrated into the nuclear genome may not be quite so benign. They have continued to invade the human genome, even into the present day, and a large proportion of them take up residence within n...Optimizing protein's 'death domain' halts leukemia in laboratory study
... normal cells. If that proved successful, it would show that the BH3 alpha helix and alpha helices from many other proteins could be used like keys to turn off protein activity involved in disease processes. These alpha helices then could serve as the foundation for building novel drugs. But one hurdle...Battle between bubbles might have started evolution
...hesizing ribozymes or structural RNAs, our results show that all you would need is to have the RNA replicating," said Szostak. "The cells that had RNA that replicated better -- and ended up with more RNA inside -- would grow faster. So, there is a direct coupling between how well the RNA replicates and ho...Computer models expose humans as main cause of caribou decline
...th no changes from current conditions. The models show that human activities stood out overwhelmingly as the variable most responsible for the woodland caribou's decline in northern Alberta. The models also showed that woodland caribou could coexist with uncontrolled wolf populations in northern Alberta,...Essential smell gene may provide key to new insect repellents
...es, however, showed no response. All these results show that Or83b is essential for fruit flies to smell. "Not every gene that is broadly expressed has an important function," says Vosshall. "But for a fly to smell anything the Or83b receptor has to be present." "We still haven't figured out how or why it...Men from early middle ages were nearly as tall as modern people
...studies for the late 18th and early 19th centuries show that large cities were particularly hazardous for health," Steckel said. "Urban centers were reservoirs for the spread of communicable diseases." Inequality in Europe grew considerably during the 16th century and stayed high until the 20th century t...Chernobyl study: Risk of thyroid cancer rises with radiation dose
...sed in regions near the blast. Since then, reports show several hundred cases of thyroid cancer in young children in the three countries contaminated by Chernobyl, a trend that appears to be continuing. Despite the lack of resources available to initiate these studies, Davis said that scientists and citiz...Convulsions in worms mimic epileptic seizures
...t's quite possible that other gene mutations might show susceptibility to convulsions in worms," said Caldwell's undergraduate co-author Locke, who, with support from HHMI and a National Science Foundation Career award, has developed a computer database of candidate epilepsy genes to test in the worm mode...New imaging technology at Joslin shown to detect early signs of type 1 diabetes
...f Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that a powerful new imaging technology gives scientists a glimpse into the earliest stages of the inflammatory process leading to type 1 diabetes in laboratory animals. The new findings one day may be useful for predicting whether and when diabetes w...