Researchers at the University of Cambridge have launched a major study to assess the benefits of screening for Type 2 diabetes. Type 2 is the most common type of diabetes, and is on the increase, due largely to the rise in obesity and sedentary lifestyles.

The study, named ADDITION, is based at the Department of Public Health and Primary Care. Launching the study, one of the Principal Investigators Dr Simon Griffin, explained its aim.

“Undetected diabetes is common and often people

At the heart of every cell, vital information is “written” on the DNA, a long molecular ribbon almost one meter long bundled inside the nucleus of the cell. For the DNA to fit inside this small space, it is rolled up like a ball of yarn in a highly organized structure called chromatin. Beyond its purely structural role, the spatial organization of DNA is essential to the basic processes of a cell’s life because it provides information that is added to that contributed by the genetic code. This ball-

The Star Tiger team today begins a four-month pioneering research and development project at Rutherford Appleton Laboratories (RAL), which could lead to a real breakthrough for submillimetre wave imaging.

For the first time under the ESA Star Tiger initiative, eleven scientists and specialists from seven different European countries (The United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Spain) are working together in an innovative way. The idea is to get together a small

The catastrophic flooding in Jakarta in February this year could have been predicted nearly 3 weeks in advance with a new technique being developed by Dr Matt Wheeler and colleagues at the Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre in Australia.

The flooding was caused by large waves of air and clouds, so called Madden-Julian Oscillations (MJOs). Using satellite data Dr Wheeler and co-workers are able to predict the occurrence of MJOs, which take about one month to move across the Indian basin a

The use of key resources such as forests, fisheries and energy is likely to be unsustainable and threaten the ability of SE Asia to build an environmentally and economically stable future in the face of global change, say a group of international scientists meeting in Bali this week.

In the 1980s the rates of deforestation in Southeast Asia ranged between 60,000 hectare per year in Cambodia and 600,000 hectare per year in Indonesia. Twenty years later it became uncontrollable with larger ran

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory believe that magnetic field lines extending a few million light years from galaxies into space may be the result of incredibly efficient energy-producing dynamos within black holes that are somewhat analogous to an electric motor. Los Alamos researchers Philipp Kronberg, Quentin Dufton, Stirling Colgate and Hui Li today discussed this finding at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Albuquerque, N.M.

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