New research shows how metal surfaces that lack mirror symmetry could provide a novel approach towards manufacturing pharmaceuticals.
These 'intrinsically chiral' metal surfaces offer potential new ways to control chiral chemistry, pointing to the intriguing possibility of using heterogeneous catalysis in drug synthesis. Such surfaces could also become the basis of new biosensor technologies.
Bees, bats, and moths all follow their noses in search of food from flowers. Plants that rely on such animals for pollination often produce particular chemical scents that attract specific pollinators. However, the ability to produce certain chemicals is also determined by a plant's genetics, or phylogenetic history, which can potentially limit its ability to respond to pollinator pressures. So which is more important in the evolution of floral scents: pollinator-induced natural selection or phylogenetic constraints?
Arlington, Va. -- A new potential leukemia therapy targets only cancer cells, while leaving healthy cells alone. Many current chemotherapy treatments affect cancer cells and healthy cells, causing significant side effects, such as fatigue, hair loss, nausea, anxiety and depression. This research is being presented at the 2011 American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) Annual Meeting and Exposition in Washington, D.C., Oct. 23 – 27.
Children who have a good relationship with their teacher may be protected from expressing aggression and being the target of aggression at school. That's the key finding in a new study of Canadian first graders that appears in the journal Child Development.
The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Quebec at Montreal, Laval University, the University of Alabama, the University of Montreal, and University College Dublin.
Reading achievement at age 10 influences how much independent reading children do at age 11. However, independent reading doesn't directly improve children's achievement in reading, at least among children at the end of elementary school. In addition, individual differences in independent reading among 11-year-olds partly reflect genetic influences on reading achievement at age 10.
Children who are persistently aggressive, defiant, and explosive by the time they're in kindergarten very often have tumultuous relationships with their parents from early on. A new longitudinal study suggests that a cycle involving parenting styles and hostility between mothers and toddlers is at play.
The study was done by researchers at the University of Minnesota and appears in the journal Child Development.
Binge eating is a disorder which affects both men and women, yet men remain underrepresented in research. A new study published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders has found that the medical impact of the disorder is just as damaging to men as it is to women, yet research has shown that the number of men seeking treatment is far lower than the estimated number of sufferers.
It is known that a high proportion of dense breast tissue, as seen with a mammogram, is associated with a high risk of breast cancer. But the role of non-dense fat tissue in the breast is less clear. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Breast Cancer Research separates the breast cancer risks associated with dense, fibroglandular tissue, and fat, and shows that large areas of either are independently associated with an increased risk.
An independent review of the NHS breast cancer screening programme is under way, Professor Sir Mike Richards, National Cancer Director, told the BMJ today.
His announcement follows an open letter from Professor Susan Bewley, Consultant Obstetrician at King's College London, urging Professor Richards to initiate a review of the evidence in light of growing uncertainty over the benefits and harms of breast screening.
A new British Medical Journal study confirms previous findings that certain oral contraceptive pills are more likely to cause serious blood clots (venous thromboembolism - VTE ) than others.
The authors, led by Dr Øjvind Lidegaard from the University of Copenhagen, say that women on pills containing one of the newer types of progestogen hormone (drospirenone, desogestrel or gestodene) have double the risk of VTE than women on pills containing an older progestogen (levonorgestrel).
While smoking remains legal, the number of smokers is never going to fall significantly, argues public health doctor in a letter to this week's BMJ.
Dr Paul Jepson suggests the tabloid press publish a list of the names of the more than 250 people killed by smoking related disease each day, as part of a "fundamental re-think" on smoking. "Any other drug causing a fraction of the morbidity and mortality of tobacco would have been outlawed long ago," he says.
Just over one in five (21%) of articles published in six leading medical journals in 2008 have evidence of honorary and ghost authorship, finds a study published on http://www.bmj.com today.
These results demonstrate that inappropriate authorship remains a problem in high impact biomedical publications, say the authors.
Using Mendelian randomization, Roman Pfister of the University of Cambridge, UK and colleagues demonstrate a potentially causal link between low levels of B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP), a hormone released by damaged heart tissue, and the development of type 2 diabetes. The findings, published in this week's PLoS Medicine, suggest that BNP may be a potential target for interventions designed to prevent type 2 diabetes, particularly since the feasibility of altering BNP levels with drugs has already been proposed.
A new study has shed light on the process by which fruit flies develop with their body proportions remaining constant. The study, conducted by the research group of Professor Markus Affolter at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel and Sven Bergmann's group at the Department of Medical Genetics, University of Lausanne, has demonstrated that the morphogen Dpp and the feedback regulator Pentagone are key factors responsible for proportional tissue growth in wings of a fruit fly. This process keeps the body plan of the fruit fly Drosophila constant.
New guidelines that provide an easy-to-use checklist for the accurate and ethical reporting of epidemiological studies involving molecular markers have been proposed by a group of international researchers and are published in this week's PLoS Medicine.