Breaking up may actually not be hard to do, say scientists who`ve found a population of tropical butterflies that may be on its way to a split into two distinct species. The cause of this particular break-up? A shift in wing color and mate preference. In a paper published this week in the journal Science, the researchers describe the relationship between diverging color patterns in Heliconius butt...

A University of Colorado at Boulder team has developed the first atlas of bacterial diversity across the human body, charting wide variations in microbe populations that live in different regions of the human body and which aid us in physiological functions that contribute to our health. The study showed humans carry "personalized" communities of bacteria around that vary widely from our...

Most weight-control strategies emphasize energy-restricted diets and increased physical activity – and most are not effective over the long term. In a study of a "weight-acceptance" intervention, published in the November 2009 issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, researchers found that there could be long-term beneficial effects on certain eating behaviors usi...

A drug already approved for the treatment of lymphoma may also slow the growth of the most deadly bone cancer in children and teens, according to an early-stage study published online today in the International Journal of Cancer. The study drug, Bortezomib, was found to be effective against bone cancer in human cancer cell studies and in mice. While key experiments were in animals, the cancer stud...

As the climate gets warmer, arid soils lose nitrogen as gas, reports a new Cornell study. That could lead to deserts with even less plant life than they sustain today, say the researchers. "This is a way that nitrogen is lost from an ecosystem that people have never accounted for before," said Jed Sparks, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and co-author of the study,...

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to treat menopausal estrogen deficiency has been in widespread use for over 60 years. Several observational studies over the years showed that HRT use by younger postmenopausal women was associated with a significant reduction in total mortality; available evidence supported the routine use of HRT to increase longevity in postmenopausal women. However, the 2002 pu...

A team of researchers at the MUHC/McGill and their international colleagues recommend halting all clinical trials on interleukin-2. An international research team has demonstrated that treating HIV-AIDS with interleukin-2 (IL-2) is ineffective. As a result, the researchers recommend that clinical trials on this compound be stopped. Their finding was published in the New England Journal of Medicine...

An international research team that includes The University of Western Australia has released details of a breakthrough which holds promise of a new therapeutic approach for the treatment of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), an incurable muscle-wasting disease. UWA Professor Steve Wilton, head of the Molecular Genetic Therapies Group at UWA`s Centre for Neuromuscular and Neurological Disorders, w...

It was once thought that the two communities of cells within a cancerous breast tumor — fast-growing malignant cells and the normal cells that surround them — existed independently, without interaction. Then evidence emerged indicating that the normal-looking cells encouraged cells within the tumor to become malignant, but how the one community influenced the other wasn`t known. A new ...

Although we assume we can see everything in our field of vision, the brain actually picks and chooses the stimuli that come into our consciousness. A new study in the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology`s Journal of Vision reveals that our brains can be trained to consciously see stimuli that would normally be invisible. Lead researcher Caspar Schwiedrzik from the Max Planck Insti...