The best thing since sliced bread may be bread crust: Researchers in Germany have discovered that the crust is a rich source of antioxidants and may provide a much stronger health benefit than the rest of the bread.

This is good news for those who like to complement their holiday meals with bread stuffing, which is rich in crust, but bad news for those who prefer to remove crusts from their bread, as they may be sacrificing healthful antioxidants. The research findings are scheduled to appe

Authors of an article in this week’s issue of THE LANCET-the first of a series of four articles assessing the role of the pharmaceutical industry in medicine-are critical of the way in which multinational pharmaceutical companies manipulate the provision of information, and say that this contributes to a distortion of medical research.

Joe Collier and Ike Iheanacho from Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin, London, UK, comment on how the pharmaceutical industry spends more time and resources o

Research scientists at INSERM, CNRS and the Institut Curie, in collaboration with physicians, have used a mouse model to demonstrate the efficacy of an innovative therapeutic approach to Ewing`s sarcoma: the combination of human interferon (alpha or beta) and a common anti-tumor agent, ifosfamide.

Their results were published in the November 2002 issue of Oncogene and point to an interesting lead in the development of a less intensive and more effective therapeutic strategy for Ewing`s sarc

Secretin is active in a brain region implicated in autism

Researchers from the Brain Imaging Center at McLean Hospital and Repligen Corporation (Nasdaq: RGEN) reported today the results of a clinical trial designed to assess the neurological activity of secretin by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The results demonstrate for the first time in humans, that secretin is active in the central nervous system and that it potentiates activity in the amygdala, a region of the bra

American college students are much more likely to worry about the way they look and to spend time obsessing over their bodies than their German counterparts, according to a new study.

“Cross-cultural differences in the value placed on appearances and resulting sociocultural pressures are the most likely explanation,” says lead author Antje Bohne of Harvard Medical School.

Despite these differences in body image, the American students were no more likely to have severe enough body d

In an effort to stabilize climate and slow down global warming, Livermore scientists along with a team of international researchers have evaluated a series of new primary energy sources that either do not emit or limit the amount of carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere.

Possible candidates for primary energy sources include terrestrial, solar and wind energy; and solar-power satellites; biomass; nuclear fission; nuclear fusion; fission-fusion hybrids and fossil fuels from which carbon h