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Discovery in Nutritional Immunology

Exercise has a similar effect to antidepressants on depression. This has been shown by previous research. Now Astrid Bjørnebekk at Karolinska Institutet has explained how this can happen: exercise stimulates the production of new brain cells.

Analyses of a national sample of individuals with alcohol dependence (alcoholism) reveal five distinct subtypes of the disease, according to a new study by scientists at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Researchers studying links between an early sign of heart disease called coronary artery calcification and body fat have found that, paradoxically, more fat may have some advantages, at least for people – particularly women – who have type 1 diabetes. Cardiovascular complications, including heart disease, are a leading cause of death for people with diabetes, who tend to suffer cardiovascular disease decades earlier than non-diabetics.

Pioneering work to reduce the use of animals in scientific research — and ultimately remove them from laboratories altogether — has received a major boost at The University of Nottingham.

A complete cure from an HIV-infection is currently not available. At present, lifelong treatment regimes are required to block the outbreak of AIDS, and these treatments do not eliminate the integrated provirus from infected cells. But German scientists have developed an enzyme that specifically cuts out the viral genome and eradicates the virus from the host cell.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is warning consumers not to eat Veggie Booty snack food, marketed by Robert’s American Gourmet, due to possible contamination with Salmonella Wandsworth, bacteria that cause gastrointestinal illness.

NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity is scheduled to begin a descent down a rock-paved slope into the Red Planet’s massive Victoria Crater. This latest trek carries real risk for the long-lived robotic explorer, but NASA and the Mars Rover science team expect it to provide valuable science.

A NASA satellite has captured the first occurrence this summer of mysterious shiny polar clouds that form 50 miles above Earth’s surface. The first observations of these “night-shining” clouds by a satellite named “AIM” which means Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere, occurred above 70 degrees north latitude on May 25. People on the ground began seeing the clouds on June 6 over Northern Europe.

There is no shortage of persons of good will in the rich world. There are millions and millions of cheap and practical tips that could help people of humble means in the third world. There are millions of practical people who could implement your tips in the third world. All we have to do is [...]

“When I think of embryonic stem cells, I think of the number zero. How many clinical trials are there now involving embryonic stem cells? Zero. How many treatments use embryonic stem cells? Zero. How many people have ever been helped by ESCs? ZERO.”

Web searchers who evaluated identical search-engine results overwhelmingly favored Yahoo! and Google, providing evidence that branding matters as much on the Internet as off, according to a Penn State study.

While it’s not likely to do you any harm, there is also no compelling evidence that meditation has therapeutic value, according to a new study from Canada. “There is an enormous amount of interest in using meditation as a form of therapy to cope with a variety of modern-day health problems, especially hypertension, stress and chronic pain, but the majority of evidence that seems to support this notion is anecdotal, or it comes from poor quality studies,” say Maria Ospina and Kenneth Bond, researchers at the University of Alberta/Capital Health Evidence-based Practice Center in Edmonton, Canada.

Time to toot my horn.

Read about my new book, a history of physics in the 20th century for high school, college, and public libraries. I’m interested in sharing that history in a colloquium talk at colleges.

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Tiny plastic fibers could be the key to some diverse technologies in the future — including self-cleaning surfaces, transparent electronics, and biomedical tools that manipulate strands of DNA.

Juries across the country make decisions every day on the fate of defendants, ideally leading to prison sentences that fit the crime for the guilty and release for the innocent. Yet a new Northwestern University study shows that juries in criminal cases many times are getting it wrong.

Global Warming or Ice Age… The question is being thrown around. Are we witnessing a global warming or could we be entering an ice age. One thing is certain, our Earth is changing weather a natural cycle or not.

The body may hold a secret to normalizing skin cell growth that is over zealous in psoriasis and non-melanoma skin cancers and too slow in aging and sun-damaged skin, researchers say.

A survey of nearly 700 surgical residents in 17 U.S. medical centers finds that more than half failed to report needle-stick injuries involving patients whose blood could be a source of HIV, hepatitis and other infections.

NASA’s Tropical Composition, Cloud and Climate Coupling (TC4) field campaign will begin this summer in San Jose, Costa Rica, with an investigation into how chemical compounds in the air are transported vertically into the stratosphere and how that transport affects cloud formation and climate.