A new study shows that, from 1500 until 2000, about a third of floods in southwestern Netherlands were deliberately caused by humans during wartimes. Some of these inundations resulted in significant changes to the landscape, being as damaging as floods caused by heavy rainfall or storm surges. 

This month marks the 10-year anniversary of the first successful total marrow irradiation (TMI) using the TomoTherapy System, first performed at City of Hope in Duarte, California. Since then, numerous centers around the world have adopted the approach, once considered to be impossible because of limitations inherent to conventional radiation therapy systems.

TMI is an advanced form of total body irradiation, which has traditionally been an important part of bone marrow transplants (BMT). People with certain types of cancers or other diseases including leukemias, lymphomas and multiple myeloma may undergo a BMT as part of their treatment. Before the transplant, chemotherapy and/or radiation may be given to neutralize any cancer in the marrow.

Nutritionists take a lot of criticism - conferences that revolve around Yogic flying instructors and actresses who think their breast milk has "otherworldly power" will do that to your field, but there is at least one way to know if someone knows what they are talking about - multidisciplinary health care professionals who hold the Certified Nutrition Support Credential (CNSC) scored significantly higher on a survey about their approaches to nutrition support practice than those who do not hold the credential according to new study. Multidisciplinary may be more important than the CSNC, if it means actual knowledge of biology and medicine.

Europe's most homophobic countries may be paving the way for a rise in HIV cases among gay and bisexual men, according to new research published in the journal AIDS.

An international team of researchers from Europe and the US looked at HIV-related service use, need and behaviours among 175,000 gay or bisexual men living in 38 European countries with differing levels of national homophobia.

They found that men in homophobic countries had fewer sexual partners and were less likely to be diagnosed with HIV. However, they also found those men knew less about HIV, were less likely to use condoms and are at greater potential risk of getting HIV when they do have sex.

New research shows that surface waters of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas could reach levels of acidity that threaten the ability of animals to build and maintain their shells by 2030, with the Bering Sea reaching this level of acidity by 2044. 

"Our research shows that within 15 years, the chemistry of these waters may no longer be saturated with enough calcium carbonate for a number of animals from tiny sea snails to Alaska King crabs to construct and maintain their shells at certain times of the year," said Jeremy Mathis, an oceanographer at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and lead author. "This change due to ocean acidification would not only affect shell-building animals but could ripple through the marine ecosystem."

Metabolism experts are increasingly convinced that obesity and many of the pathogenic changes it entails, such as Metabolic Syndrome and type 2 diabetes, are a result of chronic inflammatory processes in fatty (adipose) tissue. The adipose tissue of obese people exhibits higher-than-normal quantities of almost all types of immune and inflammatory cells.