Researchers conducting a clinical trial state that the drug topiramate may be effective in curbing alcohol dependence.

“Topiramate has emerged as a promising treatment for people with alcohol dependence,” says the lead author, Professor Bankole Johnson, D.Sc., M.D., Ph.D., M.Phil., FRCPsych., who is chairman of the University of Virginia Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences. “Our finding in this national study was that topiramate is a safe and highly efficacious medicine that can be paired with a 15-minute brief intervention by health practitioners who are not addiction specialists.

A new study reveals that even married men who are considered aloof spouses and provide minimal parenting have much lower testosterone levels than single, unmarried men.

In the October issue of Current Anthropology, Peter B. Gray (University of Nevada, Las Vegas), Peter T. Ellison (Harvard University), and Benjamin C. Campbell (Boston University) investigated the links between male testosterone levels and marital status among modern-day pastoralists in northern Kenya – of whom less than 1.5 percent consider their wives a source of emotional support.

The Ariaal males serve as herd boys until they reach puberty, at which point they are initiated, become warriors, and accumulate livestock.

A group of scientists, led by mathematicians, has taken on the challenge of building a common model of immune responses. Their work will radically improve our understanding of the human immune system by allowing all the scientific disciplines working on it to have a common reference point and language.

The mathematicians will investigate how the different cellular components of the immune system work together and devise a theoretical and computational model that can be used by immunologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists and engineers.

The model promises to help a multi-disciplinary research community work together to bring about medical advances for patients.

A diet low in fat could reduce the risk of ovarian cancer in healthy postmenopausal women, according to new results from the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) Dietary Modification Trial.

Researchers found that after four years, women who decreased the amount of dietary fat they consumed were 40 percent less likely to develop ovarian cancer than women who followed normal dietary patterns. As expected, no effect was found during the first four years because preventive benefits on cancer often take many years to develop. Ovarian cancer affects about 1 in 60 U.S.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2007 jointly to Albert Fert, Unité Mixte de Physique CNRS/THALES, Université Paris-Sud, Orsay, France, and Peter Grünberg, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany, "for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance".

Nanotechnology gives sensitive read-out heads for compact hard disks

This year's physics prize is awarded for the technology that is used to read data on hard disks. It is thanks to this technology that it has been possible to miniaturize hard disks so radically in recent years. Sensitive read-out heads are needed to be able to read data from the compact hard disks used in laptops and some music players, for instance.

Tilapia, a fish that originates from southern regions, has been introduced in over 100 countries. It is the second most commonly produced fish in aquaculture in the world after carp. 99% is produced and consumed in China.

Raising tilapia is easy and inexpensive. It adapts well to fresh or salt water and fattens fast. Unlike most salmoniforms in aquaculture (salmon, trout, perch, bream), for which fishmeal and fish oil constitute an essential part of their diet, tilapia is lower down in the trophic or food chain and feeds on algae, plankton or small animals. In extensive and semi-extensive production systems, tilapia is largely fed on vegetable waste (rice, cotton, etc.).