Body

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, excessive alcohol use is responsible for more than 80,000 deaths in the United States each year. Over time, excessive drinking can lead to several chronic conditions, such as fatty liver disease and cirrhosis. Now, a study by University of Missouri School of Medicine researchers shows that aerobic exercise may protect the liver against alcohol-related inflammation and injury.

February 15, 2016 CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - Bacteria have evolved thousands of clever tactics for invading our bodies while evading our natural defenses. Now, UNC School of Medicine scientists studying one of the world's most virulent pathogens and a separate very common bacterium have discovered a new way that some bacteria can spread rapidly throughout the body - by hitchhiking on our own immune cells.

Internal and external qualities are two different things - the same holds true in materials science. For example, in many cases a specific material would, in principle, be ideal for a technical application were it not for the fact that its surface is unsuitable.

The layman considers fossil beetles just stones. Even experts were able to describe the rough, outer shape of the millimeter-sized fossils only. Using the ANKA synchrotron radiation source of KIT, 30 million year' old beetles have now been examined in more detail. The inner anatomy was imaged in such detail that the family tree of the beetles could be analyzed. The results are published in the journal "eLIFE". Hence, latest imaging methods can provide access to the enormous store of knowledge of unused natural history collections.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- New Florida State University research appearing today in Scientific Reports, a Nature journal, challenges a 2007 study published in Science claiming that shark declines led to rising populations of cownose rays, which were responsible for the collapse of oyster and shellfish industries along the Atlantic coast.

The new research is significant since the previous study led in part to the creation of fisheries and bow-fishing tournaments for cownose rays such as the "Save the Bay, Eat a Ray" campaign that could put ray populations in jeopardy.

In a study appearing in the February 16 issue of JAMA, Philip J. Peters, M.D., of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, and colleagues evaluated the performance of an HIV antigen/antibody (Ag/Ab) combination assay to detect acute HIV infection (early infection) compared with pooled HIV RNA testing, the reference standard. The study included 86,836 participants in a high-prevalence population from 7 sexually transmitted infection clinics and 5 community-based programs in New York, California, and North Carolina.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) has concluded that the current evidence is insufficient to assess the balance of benefits and harms of screening for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in children 18 to 30 months of age for whom no concerns of ASD have been raised by their parents or a clinician. The report appears in the February 16 issue of JAMA.

Yongning Wu, Ph.D., of the China National Centre for Food Safety Risk Assessment, Beijing, China, and colleagues compared salt and sodium consumption in China in 2000 with 2009-2012. The study appears in the February 16 issue of JAMA.

Scientists studying whether wildlife can adapt to climate change should focus on characteristics such as what they eat, how fast they breed and how well they survive in different habitats rather than simply on how far they can move, a conservation biologist at the University of Exeter says.

For rent: 32 individual rooms for a combined surface area of 4cm2, heating and food included! Biologists and microfluidics specialists at EPFL have joined forces and developed a highly innovative research tool: a 2cm by 2cm 'chip' with 32 independent compartments, each of which is designed to hold a nematode - a widely used worm in the research world. The device is described in the journal Molecular Neurodegeneration.

Scientists at the University of Southampton have made a major step forward in the development of digital data storage that is capable of surviving for billions of years.

Using nanostructured glass, scientists from the University's Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have developed the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional (5D) digital data by femtosecond laser writing.

The bed bug (Cimex lectularius) has been a familiar human parasite for more than 3,000 years. After a significant decrease in its population density in the middle of the last century, we have seen a dramatic increase again around the world over the past 20 years. In Australia, for instance, there is an increase of 4,500%.

Mostly business travel and tourism are responsible for the renewed spreading of the species - as is its growing resistance to commercially available pesticides. Some bed bug populations exhibit an increase in resistance to pesticides by 10,000.

The bilharzia-causing parasite, Schistosoma mansoni, first infected humans as they fished in lakes in East Africa and was spread, first to West Africa and then to the New World by slave traders in 16th-19th Centuries, genomics reveals.

Potsdam-Rehbruecke - Like sucrose (table sugar), the natural disaccharide isomaltulose (PalatinoseTM) consists of glucose and fructose, but it is apparently more suitable for people with type 2 diabetes with regard to regulating blood glucose levels. This has now been confirmed in a new study carried out by the German Institute of Human Nutrition (DIfE), a partner in the German Center for Diabetes Research (DZD).

After a gestation period of around ten months, fawns are born in early summer - when the weather is warm and food is plentiful for the mother. Six months would actually be enough for the embryo's development, but then offspring from mating in the later portion of summer would be born in winter. Therefore, nature prolongs the gestation period by a hormone-regulated pause in the development of the early embryos. Many animal species use this process, called diapause, to adjust their reproduction to environmental conditions.