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Shaking out Sugars

A diabetes researcher’s take on dietary sugar

With all the talk these days about fructose, glucose, sucrose, high-fructose corn syrup, and sugar in general, it can be hard for a health-conscious person to sort out the truth.

“A lot of people are putting out their ideas as established fact,” says diabetes researcher and endocrinologist John Bantle, M.D., a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota. “It’s hard to find the actual facts and then to interpret them.”

Bottom line: Too much sugar is bad, if only for the excess calories. But the story isn’t quite so simple. (more…)

Teenagers Urged to Exercise to Ward off Bone Disease

Playing football or running for at least three hours a week could help teenagers counteract the potential damage to their bone health caused by prolonged spells of sitting.

An international team, including an expert from the University of Exeter, has found evidence that adolescents who spend long periods engaged in certain sedentary activities are more likely to have low bone mineral content in parts of the body where it can be an indicator of the risk of developing osteoporosis.

The team found that studying put girls at particular risk, while for boys leisure internet use posed the greatest threat. Scientists found that participating in at least three hours of certain sports could significantly reduce the threat in girls. The study found evidence of the benefits of high-intensity sports where the participant is on their feet, such as football, basketball, netball or running. (more…)

Making Farm Fresh Affordable

New Food Bank program makes local produce accessible to low-income community

“We want to make sure you have access to the best produce,” says University of Delaware anthropology senior Dan Reyes. “To locally-, naturally- and organically-grown fruits and vegetables. Pesticide-free. Herbicide-free. The kinds of food normally too expensive to buy in grocery stores.” (more…)

Mutations in Genes that Modify DNA Packaging Result in form of Muscular Dystrophy

A recent finding by medical geneticists sheds new light on how facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy develops and how it might be treated. More commonly known as FSHD, the devastating disease affects both men and women. (more…)

New Noninvasive Tool Helps Target Parkinson’s Disease

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Health professionals may soon have a new method of diagnosing Parkinson’s disease, one that is noninvasive and inexpensive, and, in early testing, has proved to be effective more than 90 percent of the time.

In addition, this new method has the potential to track the progression of Parkinson’s, as well as measure the effectiveness of treatments for the disorder, said Rahul Shrivastav, professor and chairperson of Michigan State University’s Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders and a member of the team developing the new method.

It involves monitoring a patient’s speech patterns – specifically, movement patterns of the tongue and jaw. (more…)

For Ancient Birds, Wing Feathers Were a Serious Drag

A new study of ancient feathers adds weight to the theory that primitive birds — close relatives of feathered dinosaurs — were far less versatile fliers than their modern descendants. (more…)

Say Hi to a Magpie via New App

A new app which encourages people to say “good morning Mr Magpie” via their mobile phone will help scientists evaluate the benefits which birds bring to the quality of human life.

Whether you view them with sorrow or joy, using your smart device to help build up a national database of sightings of the distinctive black-and-white birds will feed into wider research by the University of Exeter to assess how much value people place on having birds in their gardens.

Dr Richard Inger, at the Environment and Sustainability Institute on the University’s Cornwall Campus, said: “We chose to study magpies because they’re one of the most common garden birds in the UK and are easily recognisable. Many people already acknowledge them for luck, and we’re asking them to go one small step further and log sightings on their mobile phones. Magpies are not everyone’s favourite birds, but by getting involved you can help us to gather crucial data which will help us establish how much time the birds spend in different habitats. (more…)

BOSS Quasars Unveil a New Era in the Expansion History of the Universe

Berkeley Lab scientists and their Sloan Digital Sky Survey colleagues use quasars to probe dark energy over 10 billion years in the past

BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, is mapping a huge volume of space to measure the role of dark energy in the evolution of the universe. BOSS is the largest program of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) and has just announced the first major result of a new mapping technique, based on the spectra of over 48,000 quasars with redshifts up to 3.5, meaning that light left these active galaxies up to 11.5 billion years in the past.

“No technique for dark energy research has been able to probe this ancient era before, a time when matter was still dense enough for gravity to slow the expansion of the universe, and the influence of dark energy hadn’t yet been felt,” says BOSS principal investigator David Schlegel, an astrophysicist in the Physics Division of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). “In our own time, expansion is accelerating because the universe is dominated by dark energy. How dark energy effected the transition from deceleration to acceleration is one of the most challenging questions in cosmology.” (more…)