Cryptosporidium parvum is a tiny yet insidious waterborne parasite that wreaks havoc worldwide, causing diarrhea and malnutrition in small children in developing countries, and severe disease in AIDS and other immune compromised patients in the developed world. Cryptosporidium is resistant to water chlorination and has caused massive outbreaks in the US, making the parasite a potential...

A University of Saskatchewan team of scientists funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research has isolated a gene that has never before been identified in helping plants to resist stress.The study -- published this month in the top-ranked plant journal The Plant Cell -- could pave the way for development of agricultural and forestry crops that are more tolerant to environmental stresses...

Common human viruses are responsible for outbreaks of respiratory disease that have led to the decline of endangered chimpanzees in the wild, according to a study reported online.

Every permanent resident of Israel is entitled to basic health insurance, no matter what their nationality, but studies indicate that Arabs residing in Israel tend to have a higher prevalence of diabetes compared to the Jewish population. Why is that? What should be done about it? Recent research published by SAGE in the January/February issue of American Journal of Medical Quality examines those...

The dirt under our feet is being so changed by humans that it is now appropriate to call this the "Anthropocene (or man-made) Age," says a new worldwide overview by Duke University soil scientist Daniel Richter.

Researchers in Belgium have significantly advanced the discovery of a pancreatic progenitor cell with the capacity to generate new insulin-producing beta cells. If the finding made in mice holds for humans, the newfound progenitor cells may represent "an obvious target for therapeutic regeneration of beta cells in diabetes," the researchers report in the Jan. 25 issue of the research journal Cell,...

Cambridge scientists are advocating additional research into the little understood links between environmental pollution and type 2 diabetes.

Mounting evidence shows community hospitals are transferring more patients to trauma centers, despite their own ability to treat injured patients.

The opening of gorillas and chimpanzees reserves for tourism is often portrayed as the key to conserving these endangered great apes. There are also however serious concerns that tourism may expose wild apes to infection by virulent human diseases.

Babies conceived during a period of famine are at risk of developing addictions later in life, according to new research published in the international journal Addiction. Researchers from the Dutch mental health care organisation, Bouman GGZ, and Erasmus University Rotterdam studied men and women born in Rotterdam during the Dutch "hunger winter." Those whose mothers had suffered severe food...

Even though the lightest known metals in the universe, lithium and beryllium, do not bind to one another under normal atmospheric or ambient pressure, an interdisciplinary team of Cornell scientists predicts in the Jan. 24 issue of Nature that lithium and beryllium will bond under higher levels of pressure and form stable lithium-beryllium alloys that may be capable of superconductivity....

Geologists from the University of Leicester propose that humankind has so altered the Earth that it has brought about an end to one epoch of Earth's history and marked the start of a new epoch.

About nine percent of teenagers may have metabolic syndrome, a clustering of risk factors that put them on the path toward heart disease and diabetes in adulthood. This shocking statistic represents some of the first concentrated efforts to define and measure metabolic syndrome in children and adolescents -- a necessary starting point for combating the problem, but one that has proven even...

Researchers from Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., recently examined the use of self-expanding plastic stents in the treatment of benign esophageal disease and found that use of SEPSs resulted in frequent stent migration and few cases of long-term improvement. The study appears in the January issue of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, the monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal of the American Society...

The new Center for Vaccine Awareness and Research at Texas Children's Hospital announced that it will implement the nation's first major "cocoon strategy" vaccination program to protect newborn infants from the life-threatening infection pertussis, more commonly known as whooping cough.

The use of a drug to activate stem cells that differentiate into bone appears to cause regeneration of bone tissue and be may be a potential treatment strategy for osteoporosis.

Genes have the ability to recognize similarities in each other from a distance, without any proteins or other biological molecules aiding the process, according to new research published this week in the Journal of Physical Chemistry B. This discovery could explain how similar genes find each other and group together in order to perform key processes involved in the evolution of species.

Multipotent adult progenitor stem cells extracted from bone marrow, and known as MAPCs, have proved to be effective in the regeneration of blood vessel tissue and also in muscle tissue when treating peripheric vascular disease.

The researchers have excavated for the first time in a scientific and systematic way a site of these characteristics, where they have found the first water well of the Iberian Peninsula. From the 20th century, the "motillas" were erroneously considered to be burial mounds, a theory which was refuted by the experts of the UGR, who proved that it was a fortification surrounded by a small settlement...

Trimming damaged tissue through arthroscopic surgery does not relieve pain and swelling in arthritic knees any better than simply flushing loose debris from the joint, according to a new review of evidence.

A group of computational biologists at Virginia Tech have created a mathematical model of the process that regulates cell division in a common bacterium, confirming hypotheses, providing new insights, identifying gaps in what is understood so far, and demonstrating the role of computation in biology.

Mesenchymal stem cells are capable of giving rise to various cell types through a process known as differentiation. A new study has determined that the anti-tumor drug bortezomib targets MSCs and leads to bone cell-specific differentiation. These data led the authors to suggest that Bzb might be a novel therapy for bone loss in individuals with osteoporosis and those with cancers accompanied by...

A minuscule, single-eyed camera fits in a easily swallowed pill. The device would conduct low-cost screens to prevent esophageal cancer.

Consistent condom use can reduce the spread of HIV, but are they the answer to rising rates of other sexually transmitted infections? Researchers debate the issue in this week's BMJ.