SALT LAKE CITY – University of Utah scientists successfully created a sensitive prototype device that could test for dozens or even hundreds of diseases simultaneously by acting like a credit card-swipe machine to scan a card loaded with microscopic blood, saliva or urine samples.
The prototype works on the same principle – giant magnetoresistance or GMR – that is used to read data on computer hard drives or listen to tunes on portable digital music players.
Olive stones can be turned into bioethanol, a renewable fuel that can be produced from plant matter and used as an alternative to petrol or diesel. This gives the olive processing industry an opportunity to make valuable use of 4 million tonnes of waste in olive stones it generates every year and sets a precedent for the recycling of waste products as fuels.
Potentially hazardous levels of metal ions are present in many commercially available wines. An analysis of reported levels of metals in wines from sixteen different countries, published in the open access Chemistry Central Journal, found that only those from Argentina, Brazil and Italy did not pose a potential health risk owing to metals.
Boston, MA -- The quality of hospitals across the U.S. is inconsistent. To address this issue, the federal government and private organizations have begun to publicly report data, such as how well hospitals treat certain conditions. But until now, there has been no data on how patients themselves feel about the care they received.
African American kidney disease patients in both Canada and the United States are less likely than Caucasian Americans to have access to kidney transplants, but only African-Americans in the United States have worse health outcomes than Caucasians after a transplant is performed, according to a study appearing in the January 2009 issue of the Journal of the American Society Nephrology (JASN). The results could further open the debate about what has driven the disparities seen only in the United States.
ST. PAUL, Minn. – People with pre-existing medical conditions, such as obesity, and vascular problems such as diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol, may experience a delay in being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), or experience an increase in severity of the disease at diagnosis, according to a study published in the October 29, 2008, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
DANVILLE, PA - The use of an antimalarial medication may prevent the onset of diabetes in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, new Geisinger research shows.
Researchers examined the records of 2,093 Geisinger patients who received treatment for rheumatoid arthritis from 2000 to 2008. The study looked at, among other things, use of the medication hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and the development of new cases of diabetes in these patients.
HCQ was developed to treat malaria but it has also been used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases.
Offering another reason why eating red meat could be bad for you, an international research team, including University of California, San Diego School of Medicine professor Ajit Varki, M.D., has uncovered the first example of a bacterium that causes food poisoning in humans when it targets a non-human molecule absorbed into the body through red meats such as lamb, pork and beef.
The natural world behaves a lot like the stock market, with periods of relative stability interspersed with dramatic swings in population size and competition between individuals and species.
While scholars may be a long way from predicting the ins and outs of the economy, University of Calgary biologist Edward McCauley and colleagues have uncovered fundamental rules that may govern population cycles in many natural systems. Their discovery is published today in the prestigious scientific journal Nature.
UC San Diego bioengineers have created the first stable, fast and programmable genetic clock that reliably keeps time by the blinking of fluorescent proteins inside E. coli cells. The clock's blink rate changes when the temperature, energy source or other environmental conditions change, a fact that could lead to new kinds of sensors that convey information about the environment through the blinking rate.
The researchers published their synthetic biology advance in the journal Nature on 29 October, 2008.
UNFAITHFUL women beware. Chances are your male partner is on your case. In fact, he is likely to suspect infidelities even when you have kept to the straight and narrow. The flip side is that to counter this constant vigilance, women may be better than men at concealing illicit liaisons.
COLUMBIA, Mo. – It's easy to go to the gym on a regular basis right after a person buys the gym membership. It's also easy to skip the gym one day, then the next day and the day after that. A new University of Missouri study indicates that the negative effects of skipping exercise can occur in a short period. The researchers found that a sudden transition to a sedentary lifestyle can quickly lead to symptoms of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (hepatic steatosis), which affects at least 75 percent of obese people.
COLUMBIA, Mo. – An estimated 2 million women in the United States are at risk of developing lymphedema, a condition that involves the chronic and abnormal swelling of the arm, chest, neck and/or back, as a complication of breast cancer treatment. While physicians will recommend proven techniques to manage the swelling, a University of Missouri researcher has found that patients often won't follow the recommendations, or they will use alternative treatments and not discuss them with their doctors.
What behaviour do website visitors exhibit? Do they buy a specific product mainly on Mondays? Do they always return at a certain time of day? Being able to recognise and make use of such patterns is lucrative business for companies. Edgar de Graaf discovered that interesting patterns often contain a time aspect. Jeroen De Knijf developed methods to detect relevant patterns quicker.
Environmental changes implemented at 12 Dow Chemical Company worksites helped employees' there achieve modest improvements in health risks, including weight management, decreasing tobacco use and blood pressure, says Emory University public health researcher Ron Goetzel, PhD.
Goetzel and his team will present the findings from their study Oct. 29, 2008, at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association in San Diego.