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Romantic fiction bad for marriages and love life!

According to a warning in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) seemingly innocent and harmless romantic fiction may also be a cause of marital breakdown, adulterous affairs and unwanted pregnancies. This comes from an article in the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care, which said women struggle to distinguish between romantic fiction and real life.

10 Jul 2011

Unvented cooking indoors causes small-particle air pollution and raises blood pressure in women

An estimated two billion people in the developing world heat and cook with a biomass fuel such as wood, but the practice exposes people - especially women - to large doses of small-particle air pollution, which can cause premature death and lung disease.

8 Jul 2011

Research roundup: Rural hospitals have poorer quality; Cost-effective migraine relief; Doctors still take Medicare

Quality Of Care And Patient Outcomes In Critical Access Rural Hospitals -- This study looks at the quality of care provided by patterns of care at "critical access hospitals," a federal designation for hospitals that serve rural populations and thus have been granted special incentives under Medicare.

8 Jul 2011

German investigators test new approach for chronic depression

In a recent issue of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics a group of German investigators headed by Eva Brakemeier has performed a pilot study to test a new approach for chronic depression.

8 Jul 2011

Brigham and Women's Hospital receives NIH Program of Excellence in Glycosciences award

The laboratory of Robert Sackstein, MD, PhD, of the Dermatology Department at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), has been granted a prestigious Program of Excellence Award from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to support investigations in glycobiology: the discipline which studies how sugars direct biologic processes.

8 Jul 2011

AJMS summarizes developments related to idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a common and severe lung disease of unknown cause and with no proven therapies. But researchers are pushing forward in investigating new clues to the development and effective treatment of IPF, according to a special symposium presented in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences (AJMS), official journal of the Southern Society for Clinical Investigation (SSCI).

8 Jul 2011

Cloud computing technology shortens development time for new antibiotics

IBM today announced researchers from science and technology university ETH Zurich and CloudBroker, a high-performance cloud computing company, have partnered with IBM to use cloud computing technology to conduct cutting-edge research focused on developing new antibiotics to fight disease.

8 Jul 2011

EU countries should pool funding to create 'prize' for bringing new antibiotics to market, report says

"European policy makers were urged Wednesday to find viable financial incentives to get drug companies to discover new antibiotics, because the lack of fresh supplies poses acute dangers to health care and efforts against infectious diseases," according to a report by the Office of Health Economics and funded by GlaxoSmithKline, Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal reports.

8 Jul 2011

Extensive genomic, transcriptional diversity identified through massively parallel DNA and RNA sequencing

In a paper published in the online edition of Nature Genetics on July 3, 2011, sequencing specialists at Axeq Technologies, and scientists from Macrogen Inc., Genomic Medicine Institute at Seoul National University, Psoma Therapeutics Inc., Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School reported the discovery of a wide range of novel genetic variants based on the deep sequencing of 18 genomes and 17 transcriptomes of unrelated Korean individuals.

8 Jul 2011

Portable system for highly sensitive multi-dimensional chemical analysis

By pairing an award-winning remote-detection version of NMR/MRI technology with a unique version of chromatography specifically designed for microfluidic chips, researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have opened the door to a portable system for highly sensitive multi-dimensional chemical analysis that would be impractical if not impossible with conventional technologies.

8 Jul 2011

Researchers to evaluate long-term health effects of oil spills

An NIH-funded network of researchers will evaluate potential harmful effects of the Deepwater Horizon disaster on reproduction and birth outcomes, the cardiorespiratory system, and behavior and mental health.

8 Jul 2011

Merck Serono announces recipients of second Grant for Fertility Innovation

Merck Serono, a division of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, today announces the recipients of its second Grant for Fertility Innovation.

8 Jul 2011

UTMB scientists to look at possible impact of Gulf oil spill on seafood safety

In an effort to determine the vulnerability of affected Gulf Coast communities following last year's BP oil spill,the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences has awarded a five-year $7.85 million grant to a consortium of university researchers and Gulf Coast community groups led by the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston to examine the safety of Gulf seafood and the long-term health of those who consume it.

8 Jul 2011

NUS, NTU students win WFF's Ph.D. Prizes for environmental research

Antibiotics, which are among the world's most widely prescribed medicines, can easily find their way into rivers and lakes because they tend not to be removed through the normal sewage process.

8 Jul 2011

New advances in Alzheimer's disease research

Advancing age is a major risk factor for Alzheimer's disease and is associated with build- up of the peptide amyloid β in the brain. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Fluids and Barriers of the CNS shows that removal of amyloid β from the brain depends on vitamin D and also on an age-related alteration in the production of transporter proteins which move amyloid β in and out of the brain.

8 Jul 2011

AHAF awards 22 new grants to scientists worldwide for innovative vision research

The American Health Assistance Foundation (AHAF), a nonprofit organization with a history of funding cutting-edge research on age-related diseases, announced today that it has awarded 22 new grants totaling nearly $2.2 million to scientists worldwide who are studying glaucoma and macular degeneration. The two conditions are the leading causes of irreversible vision loss and blindness in the U.S.

8 Jul 2011

PDF announces $1M for 11 novel Parkinson's research projects

The Parkinson's Disease Foundation (PDF) is pleased to announce awards totaling more than $1 million for 11 novel investigator-initiated research projects designed to understand the causes of and find a cure for Parkinson's disease.

8 Jul 2011

Roche, CPRIT partner to advance cancer research projects in Texas

The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) today announced a strategic partnership agreement with the Swiss-based healthcare company Roche to accelerate the development of promising oncology-related cancer research projects in Texas.

8 Jul 2011

Salt intake study causes confusion

A new review of studies refutes earlier knowledge and says salt may not be as bad for the heart as commonly believed. Researchers from the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth in Exeter, U.K. reviewed data for the Cochrane Library from seven studies with nearly 6,500 participants who reduced their salt intake and found that while eating less salt did lower blood pressure, it did not reduce the risk of dying or of having heart disease.

7 Jul 2011

Fused indolines made by asymmetrical carbon–carbon coupling

Many drugs are based on natural substances. Because it is usually difficult, if not impossible, to isolate these in sufficient quantities from plants or microorganisms, they must be synthesized in the laboratory. This requires linking carbon atoms – with the right spatial orientation (stereochemistry) relative to each other. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, E. Peter Kündig and a team from the University of Geneva (Switzerland) have now introduced a palladium-catalyzed synthesis that allows them to produce indoline derivatives with the correct spatial arrangement.

7 Jul 2011