The link between environmental tobacco smoke and coronary heart disease and lung cancer may be considerably weaker than generally believed, conclude James Enstrom of the University of California, Los Angeles and Geoffrey Kabat of New Rochelle, New York, in this week’s BMJ.

This study will add to the already controversial debate on the health impact of passive smoking.

Their analysis involved 118,094 California adults enrolled in the American Cancer Society cancer prevention study in

Dust from China’s Takla-Makan desert traveled more than 20,000 kilometers [12,000 miles] in about two weeks, crossing the Pacific Ocean, North America, and the Atlantic Ocean, before settling atop the French Alps. Chinese dust plumes had been known to reach North America and even Greenland, but had never before been reported in Europe.

An international team of scientists, using atmospheric computer models, studied dust that traveled the globe from February 25 to March 7, 1990. Their findin

The apparent increase in marine biodiversity over the past 50 million to 100 million years is real and not just a false reading produced by the inconsistencies of the fossil record, says a team of paleontologists led by the University of Chicago’s David Jablonski. This finding, published in the May 16 issue of the journal Science, may help scientists place the future of global biodiversity in its proper context. “If you want to understand what’s going to come in the future you need

Painless bone substitute could offer new era for surgeons

In an operating room in Carle Hospital in Urbana, Ill., on May 7, as scientists from the University of Illinois (UI) and Sandia National Laboratories watched, surgeon Michael Goldwasser fitted a highly unusual ceramic prosthetic device into the mouth of an elderly woman who had lost most of her teeth and along with it, much of the bone of her lower jaw.

The fitting operation was to determine whether the implant – crea

Work published in Journal of Medical Genetics indicates break may lead to an understanding of an important piece of the puzzle

Researchers at the University of Alberta have discovered a genetic flaw in a family suffering with schizophrenia that may help to explain an important biochemical process implicated in the onset of the disease.
Studying a British mother and daughter, the researchers discovered that both were found to have a “break” in a large gene on human chromosome 14,

Those seeking yet another reason to eat their veggies, take note. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that a chemical produced when digesting such greens as broccoli and kale can stifle the growth of human prostate cancer cells.

The findings show that 3,3’-diindolylmethane (DIM), which is obtained by eating cruciferous vegetables in the Brassica genus, acts as a powerful anti-androgen that inhibits the proliferation of human prostate cancer cells in cultur