Lowers

Medical whistleblowers speak out

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was "the single greatest obstacle to doing anything effective" about Vioxx, said FDA drug safety officer David Graham at an unprecedented roundtable of medical whistleblowers sponsored by the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and the Government Accountability Project. In comments that echoed his now infamous testimony to the US Senate Finance Commi...

Bumblebees copy one another when contending with unfamiliar flowers

Researchers have reported findings that offer a surprising new twist to our understanding of how bumblebees, a vital floral pollinator, select the flowers from which they collect nectar. When faced with unfamiliar plants, foraging bees do not choose flowers entirely alone but instead copy the choices of other bees. The new findings suggest that bees adjust their behavior when dealing with flowers...

FDA: 'Highly Unlikely' Green Tea Lowers Cancer Risk

The new surgical assistant at the University of North Carolina Hospitals arrived in February sporting three arms, a computerized brain and a glowing track record in helping to repair heart valves, remove cancerous prostates, bypass blocked coronary arteries and perform gastric bypass operations for morbid obesity. The new arrival is a robotic machine, the da Vinci Surgical System, manufact...

Reducing antibiotic use lowers rates of drug-resistant bacteria

Fewer antibiotic prescriptions leads to fewer "superbugs." That's the take-home message behind a new study in the Oct. 15 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, now available online. The study found that reducing antibiotic use for pediatric respiratory tract infections resulted in lower rates of carriage of drug-resistant bacteria. Drug-resistant bacteria, commonly called "superbugs," ar...

Recreating 'Flowers for Algernon' with a happy ending

In a surprise twist that recalls the film classic "Flowers for Algernon," but adds a happy ending, UCLA scientists used statins, a popular class of cholesterol drugs, to reverse the attention deficits linked to the leading genetic cause of learning disabilities. The Nov. 8 issue of Current Biology reports the findings, which were studied in mice bred to develop the disease, called neurofibromato...

AIDS drug from sunflowers

Sunflowers can produce a substance which prevents the AIDS pathogen HIV from reproducing, at least in cell cultures. This is the result of research carried out by scientists at the University of Bonn in cooperation with the caesar research centre. For several years now the hopes for a completely new group of AIDS drugs have been pinned to what is known as 'DCQA'. However, the substance is only av...

How nice, brown rice: Study shows rice bran lowers blood pressure in rats

Thousands of years ago, humans began scrubbing off and discarding the outer layer of long-grain rice, preferring the polished white kernel beneath. Now, for the first time, scientists in Japan have shown that this waste product of rice processing, called rice bran, significantly lowers blood pressure in rats whose hypertension resembles that of humans. The team reports their findings in th...

Wild bees and the flowers they pollinate are disappearing together

The diversity of bees and of the flowers they pollinate, has declined significantly in Britain and the Netherlands over the last 25 years according to research led by the University of Leeds and published in Science this Friday (21 July 2006). The paper is the first evidence of a widespread decline in bee diversity. Concerns have been raised for years about the loss of pollination service...

Genetic snooze button governs timing of spring flowers

In the long, dark days of winter, gardeners are known to count the days until spring. Now, scientists have learned, some plants do exactly the same thing. Addressing scientists here today (Aug. 9) at a meeting of the American Society of Plant Biologists, University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Richard Amasino described studies that have begun to peel back some of the mystery of how pla...

Hair-growth drug artificially lowers PSA levels in prostate cancer screening, study finds

The popular hair-growth drug finasteride, taken by millions of balding men, artificially lowers the results of the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test, the standard screening test for prostate cancer, a multicenter study has found. The study, involving 308 men ranging in age from 40 to 60 years old, is available online in the British medical journal The Lancet and is scheduled to be publ...

How did bilaterally symmetric flowers evolve from radially symmetric ones?

How did bilaterally symmetric flowers evolve from radially symmetric ones? To address this important question, geneticists Francisco Perfectti and Juan Pedro M. Camacho, and ecologist José M. Gómez (Universidad de Granada, Spain) explored how different flower shapes affected plant fitness in natural populations of Erysimum mediohispanicum, a Mediterranean herb. Their findings will be published in...

Columbine flowers develop long nectar spurs in response to pollinators

The researchers were Justen Whittall of the University of California at Davis and Scott Hodges of the University of California at Santa Barbara....