Body

The lifestyle a person shares with their partner has a greater influence on their chances of becoming obese than their upbringing, research suggests.

By middle age, choices made by couples - including those linked to diet and exercise - have a much greater impact than the lifestyle each shared with siblings and parents growing up.

Although by middle age siblings have a shared risk of being obese, this is mostly attributable to their shared genetic inheritance rather than any habits instilled during their shared upbringing.

(Boston)--For the first time, researchers at Boston University have shown that T-cell leukemia cells use a particular cycle, called the TCA or Kreb cycle, to support their growth and survival.

The findings from Dr. Hui Feng and her postdoctoral trainees (Dr. Nicole M. Anderson, Dr. Dun Li, and Dr. Fabrice Laroche), which appear online in the journal Leukemia, may lead to the development of therapeutics to effectively kill these types of tumor cells by targeting a critical enzyme called DLST that exists in the TCA cycle.

A research has proven, for the first time, that maternal supplementation with docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), an omega-3 essential polyunsaturated fatty acid, enhances fetal iron metabolism thanks to a greater expression of key genes regulating its transfer through the placenta. This research has been carried out by scientists from the University of Granada (UGR) and King's College London, in collaboration with the infant and maternity hospitals from Granada and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria along with the dairy company Lactalis Puleva.

NEW ORLEANS -- Although historically seen as solitary animals, new research being presented here shows sharks may have a more complex social structure than previously thought. Using tracking devices to trace the movements of individual animals in the open ocean, researchers found that Sand Tiger sharks form complex social networks that are typically seen in mammals but rarely observed in fish.

FRANKFURT/ZURICH. Over 17,000 eight-year-old children in 16 countries on four continents were asked about their experiences and their views on their lives. No survey of this age group has ever before been undertaken. The second report on the "Children's World" study, which was published recently, reveals important results which can be used to improve children's lives throughout the whole world. The Jacobs Foundation in Zurich financed the research work on which this report is based and has announced that it will also support the next stage.

New York, Feb. 22, 2016 - Multinational companies are facing tough issues like climate change, poverty and human rights. A new study published in the Journal of World Business suggests that they are increasingly seen to have a responsibility to support sustainable development.

The study, authored by Professor Ans Kolk from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, has been selected by an independent advisory board to be given the Atlas award, recognizing the impact it has on people's lives around the world.

General practitioner numbers appear to have a small but important influence on premature mortality rates in England, according to research by the University of Leicester.

The study, published in the journal BMJ Open, records lower levels of premature mortality in less deprived practices -- which could support the case for strengthening general practice throughout England.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- In matters of the fundamental molecular biology of aging, we mammals are not so different from tiny C. elegans worms. Some of the biggest differences only serve to make them convenient research models. But one distinction - their ability to asexually reproduce exact copies of themselves - may have led to many research discrepancies.

Nagoya, Japan - In the production of pharmaceuticals, it is extremely important to produce molecules that have the right kind of symmetry. Even products that have the same composition, but are mirror images of each other, can have different effects in the body. Considerable interest has been generated by a recent advance made by scientists at Nagoya University, which was reported online in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

A study carried out by researchers from the Hospital Inmaculada ONCOSUR-Granada hospital and the UGR department of Personality, Assessment and Psychological Treatment shows the sleep disturbances suffered by patients with cancer before receiving a radiotherapy treatment.

A University of Queensland (UQ)-led study has discovered a new genus and two new species of extinct kangaroos which couldn't hop, but may have been ancestral to all kangaroos and wallabies living today.

Lead author Kaylene Butler of UQ's School of Earth Sciences said the new kangaroo species were discovered in ancient fossil deposits at the Riversleigh World Heritage Area in north-western Queensland, Australia.

"They lived around 15-23 million years ago and were the size of very small wallabies or pademelons," she said.

Using several genetic analytical methods, an international research team has identified an interbreeding event between Neanderthals and modern humans that occurred about 100,000 years ago -- tens of thousands of years earlier than previous scientific estimates. Dr. FU Qiaomei, a researcher at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is part of the team that made this ground-breaking discovery, which was published February 17 in the journal Nature.

Researchers at Hiroshima University have opened the door to finding a new class of cancer-causing genetic variations.

Using a combination of pre-existing electronic databases and their own experiments with cancerous and healthy cells, researchers linked stomach (gastric) and prostate cancer to a specific type of DNA called transcribed-ultraconserved regions (T-UCRs). This approach will likely reveal more links between T-UCRs and other cancers in the future.

Sharks have a reputation for having voracious appetites, but a new study shows that most coral reef sharks eat prey that are smaller than a cheeseburger.

Researchers from James Cook University's ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies examined stomach contents of reef sharks and conducted chemical analyses of shark body tissue to find out what they had been eating.

Lead author, Dr Ashley Frisch said that after pumping a shark's stomach to identify the contents of its last meal, the most common thing to find was in fact, nothing.

SINGAPORE - An international team of scientists, led by researchers from A*STAR's Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) and the Bioinformatics Institute (BII), have developed SIFT 4G (SIFT for Genomes) - a software that can lead to faster genome analysis. This development was published in the scientific journal Nature Protocols.