(Rosemont, IL) Oct. 1 – For the past three decades, saturated fat has been considered a major culprit of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and as a result dietary advice persists in recommending reduced consumption of this macronutrient. However, new evidence shows that saturated fat intake has only a very limited impact on CVD risk -- causing many to rethink the "saturated fat is bad" paradigm.
Culture
An unparalleled heat wave in eastern Europe, coupled with intense droughts and fires around Moscow, put Earth's temperatures in the headlines this summer. Likewise, a string of exceptionally warm days in July in the eastern United States strained power grids, forced nursing home evacuations, and slowed transit systems. Both high-profile events reinvigorated questions about humanity's role in climate change.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA– Amblyopia, known as "lazy eye," is a major cause of vision problems in children and a common cause of blindness in people aged 20 to 70 in developed countries. In amblyopia the person's stronger eye is favored and his/her weaker eye gradually loses visual power as a result. When the condition is detected and treated before age 7, more than 75 percent of children achieve 20/30 vision or better, the Amblyopia Treatment Study reports. But parents and teachers can easily miss this problem–especially in very young children.
Drug companies have not only sponsored the science of a new condition known as female sexual dysfunction, they have helped to construct it, in order to build global markets for new drugs, reveals an article in this week's BMJ.
Troy, N.Y. – The National Lighting Product Information Program (NLPIP) released its latest Specifier Report, designed to provide objective performance information on existing street lighting technologies -- including light-emitting diode (LED), induction, and high pressure sodium (HPS) streetlights. This report comes at a critical time when many municipalities, some with funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, are in the process of replacing HPS streetlights with LED and induction models.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- MIT researchers and collaborators from Tufts University have now engineered E. coli bacteria to produce large quantities of a critical compound that is a precursor to the cancer drug Taxol, originally isolated from the bark of the Pacific yew tree. The tree's bacteria can produce 1,000 times more of the precursor, known as taxadiene, than any other engineered microbial strain.
As researchers and policymakers work toward an effective HIV vaccine in a constrained global economy, cost-effective prevention strategies such as Couples Voluntary Counseling and Testing (CVCT) must take a larger role in efforts to decrease the rates of HIV/AIDS in Africa, says Emory University HIV/AIDS vaccine researcher Susan Allen, MD, MPH.
Allen, who has worked to combat the AIDS epidemic in Africa for more than 25 years, highlighted the value of CVCT and other cost-effective HIV prevention strategies today at the AIDS Vaccine 2010 Conference in Atlanta.
KINGSTON, R.I.-– September 30, 2010 –Watching television and its heavy dose of medical content in news and drama can lead to more concern about personal health and reduce a person's satisfaction with life according to a new study out of the University of Rhode Island.
Defying current wisdom that everyone should be called smart and self-esteem is vital in education, new research says it is better for less academically promising students to set high educational goals and fail than settle for mediocrity from the outset.
Research ethics review committees often require that all women of childbearing age who enroll in clinical trials use contraceptives to protect against a developing fetus being exposed to untested and therefore potentially harmful drugs.
A mandatory contraceptive policy is often imposed even when there is no evidence that a trial drug could harm a fetus or when women have no chance of becoming pregnant and a report in IRB: Ethics & Human Research says that isn't necessary.
CHAPEL HILL – Using the same technology found in clothing tags used in retail store tracking systems, a study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill shows that surgical sponges with implanted radio frequency (RF) tags may be an effective adjunct to manual counting and X-ray detection in preventing sponges from being left behind in patients following a surgical procedure.
The landmark breast cancer screening study of women 40-49, published online in Cancer, has proven that annual mammography screening of women in their 40s reduces the breast cancer death rate in these women by nearly 30 percent. The results of this largest study ever conducted on women in this age group confirm that the use of the age of 50 as a threshold for breast cancer screening is scientifically unfounded. Women should begin getting annual mammograms at age 40.
Characteristics such as patient engagement, physician communication, and staff coordination may help to explain why some dialysis centers achieve higher patient survival rates than others, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN).
A new report published in the October 2010 print issue of The FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org) offers a ray of hope in the search for new cancer drugs. By examining the seemingly conflicting roles of how oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes handle cellular stress, scientists from the Institute for Advanced Studies in New Jersey argue that each of these opposing systems could be potent drug targets in the effort to stop cancer.
University of Oregon scientists have invented a method to change the color of single photons in a fiber optic cable. The laser-tweaked feat could be a quantum step forward for transferring and receiving high volumes of secured data for future generations of the Internet.