Researchers at the University of Copenhagen have shown that 30 minutes of daily training provide an equally effective loss of weight and body mass as 60 minutes. Their results have just been published in the American Journal of Physiology.

Forty percent of Danish men are moderately overweight. For thirteen weeks, a research team at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences followed 60 heavy -- but healthy -- Danish men in their efforts to get into better shape. Half of the men were set to exercise for an hour a day, wearing a heart-rate monitor and calorie counter, while the second group only had to sweat for 30 minutes. Research results show that 30 minutes of exercise hard enough to produce a sweat is enough to turn the tide on an unhealthy body mass index:

"On average, the men who exercised 30 minutes a day lost 3.6 kilo in three months, while those who exercised for a whole hour only lost 2.7 kg. The reduction in body mass was about 4 kg for both groups," reports Mads Rosenkilde, PhD student, Department of Biomedical Sciences.

Scientists at Georgia State University have found that the ability to hear is lessened when, as a result of injury, a region of the brain responsible for processing sounds receives both visual and auditory inputs.

Yu-Ting Mao, a former graduate student under Sarah L. Pallas, professor of neuroscience, explored how the brain's ability to change, or neuroplasticity, affected the brain's ability to process sounds when both visual and auditory information is sent to the auditory thalamus.

The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

The auditory thalamus is the region of the brain responsible for carrying sound information to the auditory cortex, where sound is processed in detail.
When a person or animal loses input from one of the senses, such as hearing, the region of the brain that processes that information does not become inactive, but instead gets rewired with input from other sensory systems.

In the case of this study, early brain injury resulted in visual inputs into the auditory thalamus, which altered how the auditory cortex processes sounds.

In the case of aggressive fibromatosis, the good news is that it is a slow-growing benign tumor. The bad news is that this abdominal tumor often recurs after surgical removal. This is particularly true among children. While headway has been made in isolating causes of this recurrence in adults, it is less clear in children.

The current issue of the journal Pediatric and Developmental Pathology includes a study of the role of the protein -catenin in pediatric aggressive fibromatosis. Researchers analyzed the expression and mutation status of -catenin in this tumor.

Although it is rare, with only two to four cases per million people, aggressive fibromatosis shows infiltrative growth. The tumor is benign, but it can harm other structures within the body and cause organ dysfunction, so it is often removed. However, pediatric aggressive fibromatosis has a recurrence rate of 75 percent, higher than that of adults.

Through immunohistochemistry, the current study analyzed biopsy samples from 32 patients, 21 of whom were experiencing recurrent cases of the tumor. All patients were between the ages of 3 and 15. The study found that abnormal expression of -catenin appears to be frequent in pediatric aggressive fibromatosis.

Farmers may have played their part in the obesity epidemic by fattening their livestock with antibiotics, a study suggests.

By altering the fine balance of gut bacteria which influence our metabolism, even small amounts of the drugs entering the food chain could have caused obesity rates to rise, researchers claim.

Although the use of antibiotics on farms is now banned in the EU due to the risk of germs becoming drug-resistant, it was commonplace in the 1950s and is still permitted in the US.

Prof Martin Blaser of New York University, who led the study, said: "The rise of obesity around the world is coincident with widespread antibiotic use, and our studies provide an experimental linkage.

"It is possible that early exposure to antibiotics primes children for obesity later in life."

In the wake of shocking reports on how the FDA, terrified of being outed for its questionable practices, spied on its own employees in the hopes of rooting them out before they could become whistleblowers, a new story has emerged on how deep the deceit goes. From marginalizing safety reports to not reading them at all―and then going ahead and approving the drugs in question―the FDA once more stands accused of being little more than a rubber-stamping agency for Big Pharma.

Explosive revelations of an intensive spy operation by the FDA on its own scientists emerged last month. Using sophisticated spy software, the agency tracked and logged every move made by the targeted individuals. The program even intercepted personal emails and copied documents on their personal thumb drives.

The targeted scientists had expressed concern over the agency's approval of dangerous medical imaging devices for mammograms and colonoscopies, which they believe expose patients to dangerous levels of radiation. Now, another whistleblower has stepped forward, and what he has to say about the agency's drug safety reviews is shocking even to the jaded...

Former FDA Reviewer Speaks Out About Systemic Suppression of Safety

Ronald Kavanagh was a drug reviewer for the FDA in the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research from 1998 to 2008. In a recent interview he reveals how the FDA bypassed or ignored safety issues on major drugs approved during his employment. In an interview for the online news magazine Truth-Out, he tells Martha Rosenberg¹:

"In the Center for Drugs [Center for Drug Evaluation and Research or CDER], as in the Center for Devices, the honest employee fears the dishonest employee.

There is also irrefutable evidence that managers at CDER have placed the nation at risk by corrupting the evaluation of drugs and by interfering with our ability to ensure the safety and efficacy of drugs. While I was at FDA, drug reviewers were clearly told not to question drug companies and that our job was to approve drugs. We were prevented, except in rare instances, from presenting findings at advisory committees.

In 2007, formal policies were instituted so that speaking in any way that could reflect poorly on the agency could result in termination. If we asked questions that could delay or prevent a drug's approval - which of course was our job as drug reviewers - management would reprimand us, reassign us, hold secret meetings about us, and worse. Obviously in such an environment, people will self-censor."

According to Kavanagh, people would be shocked if they knew just how malleable safety data is. As examples, he points out that human studies are typically too short and contain too few subjects to get a clear picture of potential risks. In such a scenario, even a single case of a serious adverse event must be taken very seriously, and data from other longer term safety studies also need to be carefully analyzed. Kavanagh claims he has seen drug reviews where the medical safety reviewer completely failed to make such evaluations prior to the drug's approval.

A pair of widely used chemicals in the form of tiny "nanoparticles" have been shown to spread throughout a crop plant or affect growth and soil fertility.

The use of nanoparticles is increasing, yet their environmental impact is poorly understood.

A report published in PNAS shows that nanoparticles present in exhaust gases and some fertilisers adversely affect soybean growth and surrounding soil.

The nanoparticles harmed bacteria that the plant relies on for growth.

A nanoparticle is defined as a particle that has at least one diameter that is less than 100 nanometres (nm). A nanometre is a length measurement that exists at the microscopic end of the size spectrum - you can fit one million nanometres into one millimetre.

Exposure to a common parasite hosted by cats could make people more likely to attempt suicide, according to new research.

Toxoplasma gondii - which can cause toxoplasmosis - is easily transmitted to humans and has already been linked to a series of personality and behavioural changes.

A recent study found that people who tested positive for exposure to toxoplasmosis were seven times more likely to have a history of suicide attempts.

State medical regulators have warned a Dubuque "alternative health care consultant" that she has been illegally practicing medicine without a license.

The Iowa Board of Medicine, which licenses physicians, sent a letter this month warning Erin Gotz that she is breaking state law. "The information reviewed by the board indicates that you use tuning forks and specialized crystals to diagnose health conditions and prescribe a high-dose vitamin regimen to your clients," regulators wrote to Gotz.

"The board has serious concerns that the use of such high-dose vitamins may be toxic and could cause serious harm to your clients."

The letter says that if Gotz fails to heed the cease-and-desist order, the state could seek a court injunction against her or refer the case to the Dubuque county attorney for possible prosecution.

Gotz, who did not respond to a request for comment, has said alternative medical techniques, including sound therapy and Chinese medicine, helped her overcome anxiety and panic attacks as a teenager.

Regardless of how much a high school student generally studies each day, if that student sacrifices sleep in order to study more than usual, he or she is more likely to have academic problems the following day. Because students tend to increasingly sacrifice sleep time for studying in the latter years of high school, this negative dynamic becomes more and more prevalent over time.

Those are the findings of a new longitudinal study that focused on daily and yearly variations of students who sacrifice sleep to study. The research was conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and appears in the journal Child Development.

"Sacrificing sleep for extra study time is counterproductive," says Andrew J. Fuligni, professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences and a senior scientist at the Jane and Terry Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, who worked on the study. "Academic success may depend on finding strategies to avoid having to give up sleep to study, such as maintaining a consistent study schedule across days, using school time as efficiently as possible, and sacrificing time spent on other, less essential activities."

For 14 days in each of the 9th, 10th, and 12th grades, 535 students from several Los Angeles-area high schools reported in diaries how long they studied, how long they slept, and whether or not they experienced two academic problems - they didn't understand something taught in class or they did poorly on a test, quiz, or homework. The students represented a mix of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds.

Earlier this month, a federal magistrate judge in New York told the Food and Drug Administration to quit dillydallying on its three-decade effort to curb indiscriminate use of antibiotics in farm animals to spur their growth. He set a timetable for the agency to follow in withdrawing two important drugs - penicillin and two forms of tetracycline - from widespread use in animals. The trouble is, that timetable will give the F.D.A. five more years to complete the process.

The feeding of antibiotics in small doses to entire herds or flocks to promote rapid weight gain poses a serious threat to human health. The constant dosing promotes the emergence of germs that are resistant to veterinary drugs and to the very similar drugs used in humans. That raises the risk that when humans are infected by the germs, the medicines they rely on will be less effective.

The F.D.A. had proposed long ago to start proceedings to remove antibiotics from use on farms (except to treat sick animals) unless manufacturers could prove that such usage would not promote drug-resistant microbes. But no hearings were ever scheduled. Then the agency decided that it could make faster progress against a broader range of drugs by gaining the voluntary cooperation of drug makers and animal producers to limit usage.