'Flag waving' is often considered a metaphor for stirring up the public towards adopting a more nationalistic, generally hard-line stance.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, close to one-third of the population in the United States is obese and another third is overweight.

Excessive weight gain is elicited by alterations in energy balance, the finely modulated equilibrium between caloric intake and expenditure. But what are the factors that determine how much food is consumed?

Part of the mystery is unfolding in the laboratory of Maribel Rios, PhD, at the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston. Through their work, Rios and colleagues have demonstrated for the first time that a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is critical in mediating satiety in adult mice.

University of California, San Diego researchers have proven in animal studies that fibrosis in the liver can be not only stopped, but reversed. Their discovery, published in PLoS Online, opens the door to treating and curing conditions that lead to excessive tissue scarring such as viral hepatitis, fatty liver disease, cirrhosis, pulmonary fibrosis, scleroderma and burns.

Six years ago, the UC San Diego School of Medicine research team discovered the cause of the excess fibrous tissue growth that leads to liver fibrosis and cirrhosis, and developed a way to block excess scar tissue in mice.

People with high triglycerides and another type of cholesterol tested but not usually evaluated as part of a person’s risk assessment have an increased risk of a certain type of stroke, according to research published in the December 26 issue of Neurology®.

“LDL or ‘bad’ cholesterol has been the primary target for reducing the risk of stroke, but these results show that other types of cholesterol may be more strongly linked with stroke risk,” said study author Bruce Ovbiagele, MD, of UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, CA, and member of the American Academy of Neurology.

President Bush has signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. This is the first time the U.S. government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency.

The provision directs the NIH to change its existing Public Access Policy, implemented as a voluntary measure in 2005, so that participation is required for agency-funded investigators.

In mammals, male or female development depends on the presence of the Y chromosome, which is only found in males because it includes masculinizing genes. But other animal groups have evolved different systems.

James Erickson and Jerome Quintero at Texas A&M University studied the mechanism of sex determination in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster.

Previous studies in the fly suggested that it was the ratio of X chromosomes (the “female” chromosome, of which there are two copies in a female fly, and just one in a male) to the non-sex chromosomes (the autosomes) that determined the sex of a fly embryo.

However, this new paper indicates that rather than being dependent on the ratio, it is the number of X chromosomes that is important.