Women may worry more about their weight, but it’s men who are more likely to become hooked on exercise, a University of Florida study shows.

College-age men were twice as likely as their female counterparts to exercise to excess, and were more prone to becoming irritable and tense if they missed a scheduled workout time, according to a study published in the June issue of the journal Psychology of Addictive Behaviors.

“We think of exercise as a positive behavior, and for th

Drugs to protect the brains of Alzeimer’s patients could result from new finding.

Duke University Medical Center researchers have discovered that a seemingly mild “insult” to the brain could sensitize neurons to attack by immune system proteins that are otherwise protective.

The finding could explain why sufferers of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases significantly worsen following such insults. According to the scientists, such minimal “excitotoxic insult

Biomedical scientist Shuming Nie is testing the use of nanoparticles called quantum dots to dramatically improve clinical diagnostic tests for the early detection of cancer. The tiny particles glow and act as markers on cells and genes, giving scientists the ability to rapidly analyze biopsy tissue from cancer patients so that doctors can provide the most effective therapy available.

Nie, a chemist by training, is an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Eng

Soy protein enriched with isoflavones appears to have no effect on bone mineral content and bone mineral density in young women, according to a new study. Researchers say the finding will disappoint nutritionists hoping to document benefits from diets containing the nutrients, not to mention the soy industry.

A report on the study, conducted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, appears in the current (October) issue of the Journal of the American College of Nutrition. Isofla

The next radically different means of information processing will be quantum computing, which researchers say will use the principles of quantum mechanics to perform complex calculations in a fraction of the time needed by the world’s fastest supercomputers.

A paper published recently in Physical Review Letters (Nov. 4 issue) has proposed an experimentally realizable circuit and an efficient scheme to implement scalable quantum computing. The ability to scale up the technology from the one

Sometimes getting too much of a good thing may create more problems than not getting enough – especially when it comes to the weather. Just ask Texas A&M University atmospheric scientist Fuqing Zhang, whose ensemble weather forecasting research is burdened with trillions of bytes of real-time data.

Zhang’s quest, funded by a National Science Foundation grant of $295,500, is to find the best way to assimilate the most recent weather observation data for input into the latest computer fo