Body

Leave it to white Canadians to tell African-Americans how they feel about people with health problems.

A study by the University of Alberta, published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, says African Americans appear to perceive people with extreme health problems as less productive or valuable

The study examined the differences in preferences for the EQ-5D health states among African Americans, Hispanics, and other races living in the United States.

Two new papers demonstrate that adolescent female sheep that become pregnant before they have achieved their full growth may not be able to supply enough nourishment for their fetuses to develop without physical deficits.

These studies may also have implications for managing pregnancies of adolescent human females, who, in increasing numbers worldwide, are bearing offspring before they have finished growing.

A new study in the May issue of the Journal of Wildlife Management reports that scientists from the New York State Museum, Wildlife Conservation Society and other groups have teamed up with the New York State Department of Criminal Justice to developed a new technique that uses fingerprints to track the fisher--an elusive member of the weasel family, and the only carnivore species known to have unique fingerprints.Scientists recovered this camera trap photo of a fisher, an elusive member of the weasel family. Credit: Wildlife Conservation Society

In the tropics, even the birds know how to relax better than those in the north. Tropical birds expend less energy at rest than do birds living in more northern climates, according to a study published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Take a tip from tropical birds. Enjoy life a little.

Thymic nurse cells were given their name because of their intimate relationship with developing T cells (thymocytes) in the thymus.

Regulatory oversight of nanotechnology is urgently needed and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should act now, reports a new study released today. In EPA and Nanotechnology: Oversight for the 21st Century, former EPA assistant administrator for policy, planning and evaluation, J. Clarence (Terry) Davies, provides a roadmap for a new EPA to better handle the challenges of nanotechnology.

Nature, through the trial and error of evolution, has discovered a vast diversity of life from what can only presumed to have been a primordial pool of building blocks.

Not only does exercise make most people feel better and perform physical tasks better, it now appears that exercise – specifically, resistance training -- actually rejuvenates muscle tissue in healthy senior citizens.

A recent study, co-led by Simon Melov and Mark Tarnopolsky, involved before and after analysis of gene expression profiles in tissue samples taken from 25 healthy older men and women who underwent six months of twice weekly resistance training, compared to a similar analysis of tissue samples taken from younger healthy men and women.

Scientists have made a breakthrough in understanding how cancers spread in what could lead to new ways of beating the disease.

The University of Manchester study used embryonic stem (ES) cells to investigate how some tumours are able to migrate to other parts of the body, which makes the treatment of cancer much more difficult.

Dr Chris Ward, in the University’s Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences, studied a crucial change that makes cancer cells able to start moving and spread into other tissues.

Pancreatic cancer is among the deadliest of today's cancers due to limited tools for early diagnosis and few effective treatments. Research presented today takes a closer look at pancreatic cancer and the conditions that may lead to it, such as chronic pancreatitis, to evaluate the progress made to date, as well as the promising new applications of technology that will improve survival rates in the coming years. DDW is the largest international gathering of physicians and researchers in the fields of gastroenterology, hepatology, endoscopy and gastrointestinal surgery.

Ugandan children who received the combination therapy of artemether-lumefantrine experienced a lower rate of treatment failure compared to other combination therapies, according to a study in the May 23/30 issue of JAMA, a theme issue on malaria.

A new study presented at the American Thoracic Society 2007 International Conference finds that obese people are significantly more likely to have persistent or severe persistent asthma than their thinner counterparts.

With the growing number of smoking bans in restaurants and bars driving smokers outside, researchers in Athens, Georgia, are hoping to find out whether secondhand smoke from smokers clustered outside these establishments is posing a health hazard of its own.

They presented findings from a study in which they measured the increase of pollutants from secondhand smoke.

Scientists have identified yet another risk from a high-salt diet. High concentrations of salt in the stomach appear to induce gene activity in the ulcer-causing bacterium Helicobacter pylori, making it more virulent and increasing the likelihood of an infected person developing a severe gastric disease.

Scientists have refuted a longstanding theory of how HIV slowly depletes the body’s capacity to fight infection, in new research published today.

The researchers were looking at T helper cells, a class of white blood cells which recognise infection and co-ordinate the body’s immune defences. They are attacked by HIV, and their numbers gradually decline in HIV positive patients. It has long been a major puzzle why this process of depletion is so slow, often taking 10 years or more.