Use of growth hormone to boost athletic performance can lead to diabetes, reports a study published ahead of print in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

A diet rich in black soya beans could help control weight, lower fat and cholesterol levels, and aid in the prevention of diabetes, reports Lisa Richards in Chemistry & Industry, the magazine of the SCI.

A once-a-day, short-term treatment with a drug compound substantially improved learning and memory in mice with Down syndrome symptoms, say researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. What’s more, the gains lasted for months after the treatment was discontinued. The researchers are now considering a clinical trial to test whether the compound has a similar effect in humans with Down syndrome.

Instead of using the usual cancer-fighting modalities, surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation, researchers from a drug development company called Advaxis, have embarked on a novel approach to fighting cancer: Engaging the immune system to attack cancer in the same the way it would a flu vaccine, by creating new life forms.

Yale engineers who study both flow hydrodynamics and how bacteria propel themselves report that one reason for the high incidence of infections associated with catheters in hospital patients may be that some pathogenic bacteria swim "to the left," in a study published in Physical Review Letters.

In 1918, 50 million people died during a worldwide influenza pandemic caused by mutation of a bird-specific strain of the influenza virus. Recently H5N1, another highly infectious avian strain has caused outbreaks of bird flu around the world. There is great concern that this virus might also mutate to allow human-to-human transmission and cause another catastrophic pandemic. Specific mutations in a viral protein, the polymerase, contribute to the ability of the bird virus to jump the species barrier to humans. Researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Grenoble and Heidelberg, the Institut de Biologie Structurale (IBS) and the Unit of Virus Host Cell Interactions (UVHCI)*, both in Grenoble, have now produced the first 3-dimensional image of part of this key protein. The study, which is published in the current issue of Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, investigates the structure and function of the protein and sheds light on how polymerase mutations contribute to transmission of avian flu to humans.

What influence does the variation in estrogen level have on the activation of the female brain? Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Jean-Claude Dreher, a researcher at the Cognitive Neuroscience Center (CNRS/Université Lyon 1), in collaboration with an American team from the National Institute of Mental Health (Bethesda, Maryland) directed by Karen Berman, has identified, for the first time, the neural networks involved in processing reward-related functions modulated by female gonadal steroid hormones. This result, which was published online on January 29, 2007 on the PNAS website, is an important step in better comprehension of certain psychiatric and neurological pathologies.

New research at Ohio State University answers an infectious question about eating at restaurants: How clean are manually washed dishes?

Marine turtles almost always return to the same beach to lay their eggs. The egg-laying sites are often far from the feeding areas and the females cross several hundred kilometers of ocean with no visual landmarks. How do they manage to return to the same spot? A study by Simon Benhamou of the Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology at Montpellier, France, together with other groups (CNRS, IRD, IFREMER, CEDTM2, University of Pisa), shows that the marine turtles use a relatively simple navigation system involving the earth’s magnetic field, and this allows them to return to the same egg-laying site without having the ability to correct for the deflection of ocean currents. This work, published in Current Biology and Marine Ecology Progress Series, should allow better conservation strategies for this endangered species.

Our immune system finds it difficult to eliminate tumours effectively. Deciphering the strategies it implements may increase the immune system's effect on tumour cells and thus improve the clinical perspectives for anticancer immune therapy. At the Institut Curie, INSERM and CNRS researchers have used two-photon microscopy to demonstrate, for the first time in vivo and real-time, how T lymphocytes infiltrate a solid tumour in order to fight it.