Researchers at UCSF Children's Hospital in San Francisco have launched a groundbreaking study to determine whether a new procedure using magnets can correct sunken chest, the most common congenital chest deformity, in the same way that orthodontic braces gradually realign teeth.

When they fly, insects use their vision for piloting, just like human pilots. The electric signals from their facetted eyes travel through specialized neurons to stimulate the wing muscles, which let the insects correct their flight and avoid crashes. Could these same neurons be used in a sort of "automatic pilot"? This is what Nicolas Franceschini, Franck Ruffier and Julien Serres have just shown. These biorobotics specialists from the Movement and Perception Laboratory (CNRS/Université de la Méditerranée) in Marseille, France have revealed an automatic mechanism called the "optic flow regulator" that controls the lift force. The researchers obtained these results by modeling the overland flight navigation of insects using experiments carried out on OCTAVE, a captive flying robot microhelicopter that can reproduce much of the mysterious natural insect behavior. Their work is published online in Current Biology, February 8, 2007.

A new type of protein discovered by Queen’s University researchers may be useful in developing treatments for antibiotic-resistant bacteria, such as those that cause food poisoning and typhoid.

The new findings, which are being published the week of February 12 in an online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offer significant insights into normal folding mechanisms as well as those that lead to abnormal amyloid fibril conversion. The new insights may lead to the discovery of novel therapeutic targets for neurodegenerative diseases.

The genome of patients with type 2 diabetes (DT2) has been elucidated, for the first time, thanks to the use of new DNA chip technologies allowing 400,000 DNA mutations to be studied simultaneously. New genes conferring a predisposition to DT2 have been identified. They include the zinc transporter of pancreatic insulin-secreting cells (ZnT8), which is a potential target for treatment. This study of the French population was carried out as a French-British-Canadian collaboration between the teams directed by Philippe Froguel (CNRS, University of Lille 2, Pasteur Institute, Imperial College London) and Rob Sladek (McGill University, Montreal, Canada). About 70% of the genetic risk of DT2 is accounted for by these new discoveries, published online in Nature on February 11 2007. This work opens up entirely new avenues of prevention and treatment for this disease.

Long-term exposure to marijuana smoke is linked to many of the same health problems as tobacco smoke, such as increased respiratory symptoms like cough, phlegm and wheeze, according to a new study by researchers at Yale School of Medicine.

Labor migration played a critical role in the spread of HIV in South Africa, according to new research published in the journal AIDS.

Physicians have an effective new option for treating atrial fibrillation, a common irregular heart rhythm that can cause stroke. Heart surgeons at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have developed and tested a device that radically shortens and simplifies a complex surgical procedure that has had the best long-term cure rate for persistent atrial fibrillation.

Roger K. Long, MD, an endocrinology research fellow at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco, was one of only three scientists named in January 2007 as 2006-2008 Postdoctoral Fellows by the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI).

We all know that iron deficiencies are dangerous, but also too much iron is bad for our health. Our body stores excess iron in various tissues, where it can lead to organ failure and even death if not treated before irreversible damage has occurred. Researchers from the Innsbruck Medical University, the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) now made a surprising discovery that may lead to new therapeutic approaches to treating such disorders. In this week's online issue of the journal Nature Medicine they report that a compound that was frequently used to treat high blood pressure can reverse iron overload in mouse models and has the potential to treat similar conditions in humans.

A new statistical method of determining genetic traits that influence social interactions among animals may provide for more productive livestock.

A complex molecule and snake venom may provide researchers with a more reliable method of diagnosing human diseases and developing new drugs.

A stable social structure may help control the spread of bovine tuberculosis (TB) among badgers, ecologists have found. The findings – published online in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Animal Ecology – have important implications for the role of badger culling as part of the strategy to control bovine TB in the UK.