Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have shown that fat collection in different body locations, such as around the heart and the aorta and within the liver, are associated with certain decreased heart functions. The study, which appears online in Obesity, also found that measuring a person`s body mass index (BMI) does not reliably predict the amount of undesired fat in and...

A new study carried out at the University of Haifa has found that the hormone oxytocin, the "love hormone," which affects behaviors such as trust, empathy and generosity, also affects opposite behaviors, such as jealousy and gloating. "Subsequent to these findings, we assume that the hormone is an overall trigger for social sentiments: when the person`s association is positive, oxyt...

Insoluble dietary fibre, or roughage, not only keeps you regular, say Australian scientists, it also plays a vital role in the immune system, keeping certain diseases at bay. The indigestible part of all plant-based foods pushes its way through most of the digestive tract unchanged, acting as a kind of internal broom. When it arrives in the colon, bacteria convert it to energy and compounds known ...

A new study in China has found that people with higher levels of pesticide exposure are more likely to have suicidal thoughts. The study was carried out by Dr Robert Stewart from the Institute of Psychiatry at King`s College London together with scientists from Tongde Hospital Zhejiang Province. The agricultural pesticides commonly used in China are organophosphates which are in wide use in many l...

Too much light at night can lead to symptoms of depression, according to a new study in mice. Researchers found that mice housed in a lighted room 24 hours a day exhibited more depressive symptoms than did similar mice that had a normal light-dark cycle. However, mice that lived in constant light, but could escape into a dark, opaque tube when they wanted showed less evidence of depressive symptom...

Mathematicians at Michigan Technological University have developed powerful new tools for winnowing out the genes behind some of humanity’s most intractable diseases. With one, they can cast back through generations to pinpoint the genes behind inherited illness. With another, they have isolated 11 variations within genes—called single nucleotide polymorphisms, SNPs or "snips"...

Exposure to lead in early childhood significantly contributes to lower performances on end-of-grade (EOG) reading tests among minority and low-income children, according to researchers at Duke University and North Carolina Central University. "We found a clear dose-response pattern between lead exposure and test performance, with the effects becoming more pronounced as you move from children ...

A gene has been associated with human kidney aging, according to researchers from Stanford University, the National Institute on Aging, the MedStar Research Institute, and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. In work published on October 16 in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics, the investigators claim that their approach, which combines sequential transcriptional profiling and eQTL map...

A high-speed chase across the Panama Canal in a Boston Whaler may sound like the beginning of another James Bond film—but the protagonist of this story brandishes a butterfly net and studies the effects of climate change on insect migrations at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. "Our long-term study shows that El Niño, a global climate pattern, drives Sulfur butterfly m...

Which comes first, depression or inflammation? To help solve this long standing chicken and egg conundrum, researchers led by Jesse Stewart, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis asked two critical questions. Does depression lead to elevated inflammatory proteins in the human body? Or does an increase in these proteins lead to depression? The...