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A dear friend has been battling cancer for a decade or more. Through a grinding mix of chemotherapy, radiation and all the other necessary indignities of oncology, he has lived on, despite dire prognoses to the contrary. My friend was the sort of college professor students remember fondly: not just inspiring in class but taking a genuine interest in them — in their studies, their progress through life, their fears and hopes. A wide circle of former students count themselves among his lifelong friends; he and his wife have always welcomed a steady stream of visitors to their home. Though...

For more than 150 years, photographers have wrestled with the problem of exposure. Attempting to take a picture containing a wide range of light intensity meant sacrificing part of the image--either washing it out or plunging it into deep shadow--and thus losing detail. The problem is particularly acute in security applications, where the inability to differentiate human faces hidden in shadows can be disastrous. Now researchers think they may have found a way to overcome this challenge and perhaps create a new generation of video cameras that can see clearly no matter what the light conditions. The team took its...

Close window Published online: 21 July 2006; | doi:10.1038/news060717-18 You're only as old as your genesGenetic fingerprint could pinpoint fittest organ donors.Helen Pearson Close up: ageing can be seen in our cells, chromosomes and genes.Credit: DR GOPAL MURTI / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY A fingerprint of gene activity could reveal the true 'youthfulness' of our kidneys, hearts and muscle, regardless of our biological age. The technique might one day be used to find healthy organs for transplants or to warn us of impending disease. It's hard to tell, particularly on a cellular level, whether a young and healthy body conceals...

When high fat food can be good for you By Roger Highfield, Science Editor(Filed: 10/10/2005)"Take two cheeseburgers and call me in the morning" may sound like far-fetched medical advice but it could soon be heard at doctors' surgeries. A new study shows that high-fat foods can, at least in the gut, reduce inflammation. The work - to be published today in The Journal of Experimental Medicine - also suggests that people who have fasted could be at risk of developing a potentially lethal inflammatory response after surgery or an injury.Eating - particularly eating fat-rich foods - causes cells in...

"for their discovery of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease" More to follow... another breaking news at FR

Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded to Axel and Buck for research into the sense of smell | By Stephen Pincock Richard Axel, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Columbia University, NY, and Linda B. Buck from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Wash., have been awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet said the two researchers were being recognized for their discovery of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system. Their seminal paper, in which they described the large family of roughly 1000 genes for odorant receptors,...

Cruel Joke or Medical Anomaly? Proponents of same-sex "marriage" owe us an answer by Tim Wilkins (part of this article may be unsuitable for young readers) The Physiology of Mankind "Love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage. This I tell ya, brother, you can't have one without the other." Neither can you have a marrriage without a man and a woman, unless you’re the Massacheutts Supreme Court–to whom I ask the following question. Why is one hundred percent of the homosexual population physiologically heterosexual? When I asked that question before a group of university...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Motherhood not only makes females smarter, it makes them calmer under pressure and more courageous, a U.S. researcher said on Tuesday. Neuroscientist Craig Kinsley of the University of Richmond does his work with rats, but he said his findings probably apply to other animals and humans as well. Kinsley found that female rats that have had one or more litters are much less stressed out when provoked than rats without pups. When he examined their brains, he found much less activity in the fear centers of the brains of mother rats. Writing in the journal Physiology and...