In findings illustrating the difficulty of developing an AIDS vaccine, UCLA AIDS Institute researchers report the immune systems in two HIV-positive identical twins responded to the infection in different ways. Detailed in the Dec. 5 issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Virology, the findings show that the body’s defenses against the virus are random rather than genetically determined.
A new treatment for pancreatic cancer substantially reduces the size of tumors and lowers the risk of local recurrence of the disease. Fifty percent of patients in the study responded to therapy–one of the highest response rates ever seen with pancreatic cancer. Results of the study were published in the December 2005 issue of the Annals of Surgical Oncology.
More than half of the largest galaxies in the nearby universe have collided and merged with another galaxy in the past two billion years, according to a Yale astronomer in a study using hundreds of images from two of the deepest sky surveys ever conducted.
Planting trees across the United States and Europe to absorb some of the carbon dioxide emitted by the burning of fossil fuels may just outweigh the positive effects of sequestering that CO². In theory, growing a forest may sound like a good idea to fight global warming, but in temperate regions, such as the United States, those trees also would soak up sunlight, causing the earth’s surface to warm regionally by up to 8 degrees Fahrenheit.
NASA is part of a partnership that provides educational materials based on the book and movie “Zathura” to help teachers get students excited about space and learning. Recently, NASA talked with Chris Van Allsburg, the author and illustrator of 15 books, including “Zathura,” “Jumanji” and “The Polar Express.” Van Allsburg talked about the creative process, the importance of imagination and learning and what he hopes students and teachers will take away from his work.
WWF researchers may have discovered a new, mysterious carnivore species in the dense, central forests of Borneo. The animal, a mammal slightly larger than a domestic cat with dark red fur and a long, bushy tail, was photographed twice by a camera trap at night. This could be the first time in more than a century that a new carnivore has been discovered on the island.
An editorial in the December issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings paints a picture of a world population very susceptible to an avian flu pandemic, but also offers suggestions to physicians that could help answer questions presented by patients who may be feeling anxious about the “bird flu.”
By age 2, children with the often-devastating neurological condition physicians call autism show a generalized enlargement of their brains, a new University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University medical schools study concludes. Exactly why this roughly 5 percent greater brain growth occurs and what it means are not yet clear, scientists said. Indirect evidence suggested that the increased brain growth probably began during the later months of the children’s first year of life.
Scientists studying the effects of carbon on climate warming are very likely underestimating, by a vast amount, how much soil carbon is available in the high Arctic to be released into the atmosphere, new University of Washington research shows. A three-year study of soils in northwest Greenland found that a key previous study greatly underestimated the organic carbon stored in the soil. That’s because the earlier work generally looked only at the top 10 inches of soil, said Jennifer Horwath, a UW doctoral student in Earth and space sciences.
The chemical bisphenol A (BPA), widely used in products such as food cans, milk container linings, water pipes and even dental sealants, has now been found to disrupt important effects of estrogen in the developing brain. A University of Cincinnati research team, headed by Scott Belcher, PhD, reports in two articles in the December 2005 edition of the journal Endocrinology that BPA shows negative effects in brain tissue “at surprisingly low doses.”
People who drink small amounts of alcohol regularly are less likely to be obese than people who do not drink at all. A study published today in the open access journal BMC Public Health shows that consuming no more than a drink or two a few times a week reduces the risk of being obese. Consuming four or more drinks per day, however, increases the risk of being obese by 46%.
A classic clinical dilemma faces doctors treating patients with congestive heart failure (CHF): while exercise generally protects the normal heart from cardiovascular disease, will exercise potentially “improve the prognosis of patents with CHF, or (will it place) a further excessive demand on an already over-stressed myocardium”? That’s how a new research paper poses the question, and its positive but still tentative results show: “Briefly we found that low intensity exercise training markedly delayed the onset of overt CHF without a reduction in antecedent hypertension. Additionally, we found that some, but not all, of the classic cellular and systemic physiological alterations normally associated with the development of overt CHF were attenuated with exercise training.”
Tropical areas of south and central America such as the Amazon rainforest are home to some 7500 species of butterfly compared with only around 65 species in Britain. UCL scientists have ruled out the common theory that attributed this richness of wildlife to climate change. Instead, scientists believe that biology played a far greater role in the evolution of species than external factors like prehistoric climate change. After conducting “DNA-clock” studies, which revealed that new species evolved at very variable rates, the scientists were able to conclude that external factors can only have had a limited impact on evolution.