Obesity in pets mirrors that of humans, as do the reasons -- decreased physical activity, age, and an increased caloric intake, even genetic predisposition. Like humans, there are also many health problems associated with being obese, such as diabetes mellitus. It's no secret that obesity is a problem in humans. Reality television makes millions of dollars chronicling the efforts of Americans attempting to shed excess weight. And every day, new medical research highlights the serious implications obesity has for heart disease, diabetes and other maladies. Now, more and more attention is being paid to the problem in our pets. The prevalence of obesity in dogs is between 22 and 40 percent.
Fragile X syndrome is the most common hereditary form of mental retardation. Many children with FXS also suffer from attention deficit and/or hyperactivity disorder, which complicates social relationships at home and at school. Although stimulant medication such as Ritalin is often successfully used to treat children with ADHD, studies have shown that while it is effective in children with mental retardation, it also causes side effects such as increased irritability, decreased verbalization and social withdrawal.
Hunted to near extinction, sea otters are making a steady comeback along the Pacific coast. Their reintroduction, however, is expected to reduce the numbers of several key species of commercially valuable shellfish dramatically, such as sea urchins and geoducks.
When we're young, a racing heart often means love is in the air. If you're a "baby boomer," it might mean you've just joined the 2.2 million Americans who have atrial fibrillation, an irregularity in the heart's rhythm that grows more common as we age and markedly increases the risk for stroke.
A NOAA scientist reported on a previously unrecognized threat to human health from a ubiquitous class of air pollutants. He reported on how one type of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon, a compound found in oil, damaged the developing hearts of Pacific herring and pink salmon embryos after the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989.
One cognitive scientist takes issue with the truism, "The more information, the better." In his experiments, innovation was stifled in groups in which information was freely shared because once a good idea was offered about a difficult problem, the human tendency to glom onto it instead of exploring further took over.
Saturn's orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes.
Two researchers suggest that a common antibiotic called minocycline may prevent children from death due to Japanese encephalitis, or commonly known as brain fever. The team found that minocycline, an US-FDA approved drug, often used to treat acne, limits the death by reducing the microglial activation, neuronal death as well as viral replication. Microglia are cells that act as the "cleanup crew" for the central nervous system.
V-Frog, the world's first virtual-reality-based frog dissection software designed for biology education -- allowing not mere observation, but physically simulated dissection -- has been developed. V-Frog, which operates on a personal computer using a standard mouse, actually simulates nearly unlimited manipulation of specimen tissue. As a result, every dissection is different, reflecting each student's individual work. The software is designed for grades 7 through 12, plus advanced placement biology students.
Giving periodic infusions of anti-CTLA-4 antibodies to patients with advanced melanoma or ovarian cancer who have been immunized with a GVAX vaccine unleashes a strong immune response to tumors, with less-harsh side effects. Besides demonstrating the potential usefulness of a vaccine-and-antibody approach, the new study suggests a way of refining treatment strategies even further, based on the biological events that antibody treatment sets in motion.
Integrated circuits, such as the silicon chips inside all modern electronics, are only as good as their wiring, but copper conduits are approaching physical performance limitations as they get thinner. Chipmakers have hoped that carbon "nanotubes" would allow them to continue using thinner wiring as they pack more devices into chips, but no one had demonstrated nanotube wires working on a conventional silicon chip. Electrical engineers are now reporting using nanotubes to wire a silicon chip operating at speeds comparable to those of commercially available processors and memory.
There are several human characteristics considered to be genetically predetermined and evolutionarily innate, such as immune system strength, physical adaptations and even sex differences. Psychologists determine significant sex differences in episodic memory, a type of long-term memory based on personal experiences, favoring women. Specific results indicated that women excelled in verbal episodic memory tasks, such as remembering words, objects, pictures or everyday events, and men outperformed women in remembering symbolic, non-linguistic information, known as visuospatial processing. For example, the results indicate a man would be more likely to remember his way out of the woods.
A new NASA study confirms that the surface temperature of Greenland's massive ice sheet has been rising, stoked by warming air temperatures, and fueling loss of the island's ice at the surface and throughout the mass beneath. Greenland's enormous ice sheet is home to enough ice to raise sea level by about 23 feet if the entire ice sheet were to melt into surrounding waters.
The HIV-1 virus cripples the human immune system by targeting white blood cells called T cells that form the body's first line of defense in fighting infections. A recent study shows that a protein found in the saliva of deer ticks prevents the HIV-1 virus from attaching to the surface of T cells, which is the critical first step in the virus' attack strategy. Since the protein suppresses the action of T cells, it may also prove to be an effective treatment for autoimmune diseases like asthma and multiple sclerosis caused by an overactive immune system that mounts an attack against the body's own cells and tissues, and it could be useful to suppress the immune system to prevent the rejection of transplanted organs.
