In a new research report published online in The FASEB Journal, researchers describe a discovery that may allow some obese people avoid common obesity-related metabolic problems until they can lose weight: make a common antioxidant, melanin, in excess.  Melanin is a common antioxidant responsible for skin and eye color.

Most promising is that some of the antioxidant drugs that can mimic the melanin effect are FDA-approved and available. This availability would greatly speed the development of new treatments, should they prove effective in clinical trials.

A team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Scripps College, Princeton University, and the University of Iowa writing in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 
say appearance counts  when it comes to perception of politicians - but mostly if the appearance is negative.   This effect diminishes the more people know about a candidate.    So, voters who know little about John McCain coming up to election 2008 might be inclined to view him negatively when compared to a younger, more charismatic Barack Obama.

The natural world behaves a lot like the stock market, with periods of relative stability interspersed with dramatic swings in population size and competition between individuals and species.

While scholars may be a long way from predicting the ins and outs of the economy, University of Calgary biologist Edward McCauley and colleagues have uncovered fundamental rules that may govern population cycles in many natural systems. Their discovery is published today in the prestigious scientific journal Nature.

Chemistry researchers at The University of Warwick and the John Innes Centre, have found a novel signalling molecule that could be a key that will open up hundreds of new antibiotics unlocking them from the DNA of the Streptomyces family of bacteria.

The amount of methane in Earth’s atmosphere shot up in 2007, bringing to an end a period of about a decade in which atmospheric levels of the potent greenhouse gas were essentially stable, according to a paper published this week in Geophysical Review Letters. 

Methane levels in the atmosphere have more than tripled since pre- industrial times, accounting for at least one-fifth of the human contribution to greenhouse gas-driven global warming. Until recently, the leveling off of methane levels had suggested that the rate of its emission from the Earth’s surface was approximately balanced by the rate of its destruction in the atmosphere.

Don't reach for that antihistamine just yet, if you have allergies.  A new article in the December issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology provides evidence that allergies are much more than just an annoying immune malfunction - they may protect against certain types of cancer.  So suppressing cancer fighting defenses may not be the best idea.