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University of Illinois microbiology professor William Metcalf and his collaborators have developed a way to mass-produce an antimalarial compound, potentially making the treatment of malaria less expensive.

The Stowers Institute's Conaway Lab has demonstrated that an enzyme called Uch37 is kept in check when it is part of a human chromatin remodeling complex, INO80. The results were published in today's issue of Molecular Cell.

The Hyperspectral Imager for the Coastal Ocean (HICO) and the Remote Atmospheric and Ionospheric Detection System (RAIDS), both developed at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), are ready for payload integration following a fast-paced program of development and test. HICO, built by NRL's Remote Sensing Division, will be the first spaceborne hyperspectral imager optimized for characterization of the coastal environment.

OAK BROOK, Ill. – September 26, 2008 – A new study from researchers in Italy reports that endoscopy may not be necessary in children who show no symptoms after a caustic ingestion. The results demonstrated that the incidence of severe abnormalities of the esophagus in children without any early symptoms is very low and an endoscopy could be avoided. The study appears in the September issue of GIE: Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, the monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal of the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE).

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Policing is dangerous work, and the danger lurks not on the streets alone.

The pressures of law enforcement put officers at risk for high blood pressure, insomnia, increased levels of destructive stress hormones, heart problems, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and suicide, University at Buffalo researchers have found through a decade of studies of police officers.

Going green may be heart healthy if the green you choose is pistachio nuts, according to researchers at Penn State who conducted the first study to investigate the way pistachios lower cholesterol.

"We investigated mechanisms of action to explain the cholesterol-lowering effects of the pistachio diets," says Sarah K. Gebauer, recent Penn State Ph.D. recipient, currently a post-doctoral research associate, USDA Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center.

For some, a full night's rest can be anything but restful. That's because they have sleep apnea, which causes them to struggle for breath in bouts throughout the night. Six percent of the population is affected by the condition—but many don't even know they have it.

Alternating organic-rich and organic-poor beds have been deposited on the floor of the Eastern Mediterranean. These deposits coincide with the alternation of wet and dry climatic periods. Researchers believe that the organic-rich beds, called sapropels, can originate in two ways: 1. More organisms live in the surface water because, for example, rivers introduce more nutrients. As a result, more organisms sink to the bottom when they die. 2. The organic material is better preserved. If dead organisms sink to an oxygen-free bottom, the organic material breaks down less well.

Tourism in Antarctica has grown dramatically. In 1985, just a few thousand people visited the area but in the season 2007/2008 more than 40,000 did the same. A number of parties are concerned about the effects of this rapid growth with respect to safety, the environment, the scale of tourism and the lack of financial resources for monitoring and enforcement purposes. They also have doubts about how this growth can be reconciled with the basic principles of the Antarctic Treaty System ATS.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — University of Michigan scientists have provided the most detailed picture yet of a key HIV accessory protein that foils the body's normal immune response. Based on the findings, which appear online in the journal PLoS Pathogens, the team is searching for new drugs that may someday allow infected people to be cured and no longer need today's AIDS drugs for a lifetime.

Women have been more successful on average in passing their genes on to the nextgeneration. "This is because a few males have fathered children with multiple females, which occurs at the expense of other less successful males", says Dr. Michael Hammer, ARL Division of Biotechnology at the University of Arizona.

A study by researchers from Lancashire, England, and Chicago, IL, found that 97 percent of campylobacteriosis cases sampled in Lancashire were caused by bacteria typically found in chicken and livestock. The work, which appears September 26 in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics, is based on DNA-sequence comparison of thousands of bacteria collected from human patients and animal carriers.

Continuous glucose monitoring as part of antenatal care for women with diabetes improves maternal blood glucose control and lowers birth weight and risk of macrosomia* (excessive birth weight in babies), according to a study published on bmj.com today.

The English healthcare system is failing to encourage breast feeding and a national strategy to promote breast feeding is urgently needed, say experts on bmj.com today.

In the UK, the women most likely to use formula milk are young, white and from low socioeconomic backgrounds, and this has created a major public health and inequalities challenge, write Professor Mary Renfrew from the University of York and Professor David Hall from the University of Sheffield.

Cervical and lung cancer are more common in poor people while rates of breast cancer and melanoma are higher in the wealthy. A detailed analysis of the incidence of these four different kinds of cancer, carried out on more than 300,000 English cancer patients and published today in the open access journal BMC Cancer, describes the effects of socioeconomic group, region and age.