COLLEGE STATION – Lightning may not often strike twice in the same place, but it sure can hang out repeatedly in the same neighborhood. In Texas, that neighborhood is Houston, which Texas A&M University atmospheric scientists call the “lightning capital of the state.” Results of their lightning research, indicating that the high-energy stuff likes the city life, was originally published in Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres, and an overview of that study is featured in the online

Popeye was right — eat your spinach. In fact, add some fresh-cut apples to that spinach salad.

Two new animal studies by researchers at the University of South Florida Center for Aging and Brain Repair and James A. Haley Veterans Hospital bolster a growing body of evidence that certain fruits and vegetables may protect the brain against the ravages of age. The complementary research papers appear in today’s issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

“If these pre-clinical fin

An enzyme whose activity is affected by alcohol may prove useful in identifying recent alcohol or marijuna use even though it does not seem to be a good marker for genetic predisposition to alcoholism, a new international study finds. The researchers also found that the activity level of the enzyme, adenylyl cyclase, steadily dropped in people who had abstained from drinking for days to weeks and was generally lower in people with a history of major depression, according to the study published in th

One or two drinks a day can raise the risk of developing hypertension in some men, according to two Japanese studies. The studies, published in the July issue of Alcohol: Clinical Experience and Research, found that men who had as few as one or two glasses of alcohol on a regular basis had a much higher incidence of hypertension than those who did not drink at all. Several U.S. studies have found that moderate drinking habits can actually decrease the risk of heart disease. A

A team of Johns Hopkins researchers has identified and successfully tested in animals a potential new treatment for liver cancer, a disease for which there are few effective treatments. Writing in the July 15 issue of Cancer Research, the scientists report that only cancer cells were killed when the compound, 3-bromopyruvate, was given to rabbits with experimental liver tumors. “It’s very exciting because we expected the compound to be pretty toxic, but somehow normal c

Over the past few years, covalent modifications of histone tails have emerged as an important mechanism of gene regulation in eukaryotes. Now, scientists have identified a major euchromatic histone methyltransferase in mammalian cells that is crucial for normal embryonic development, and possibly the prevention of cancer. In a report published in Genes & Development, Dr. Yoichi Shinkai and colleagues have identified a protein called G9a as an enzyme that adds a methyl group to the lysine 9 amino acid