A new study by Jeremy Graff and colleagues from Eli Lilly and Company has demonstrated the anti-cancer effect of a new therapeutic in a mouse model of human tumors and has spawned clinical trials to test the ability of this therapeutic to treat human cancers. As highlighted in the accompanying commentary by Celeste Simon and colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, if the therapeutic is as effective in clinical trials as it was in mice it will be useful for the treatment of a broad range of cancers.

ADHD is characterized by hyperactivity, impulsive behavior and an inability to pay attention to tasks; the condition affects social behaviors and achievement at school and work.

A new study says an estimated 8.7 percent of U.S. children age 8 to 15 meet the diagnostic criteria for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Less than half of that are being treated for it.

Is ADHD really on the rise or are the criteria too broad? It depends on who you ask because it doesn't follow any particular medical pattern. Boys have it more than girls and hispanics less than whites. The poorest one-fifth of children were more likely than the wealthiest one-fifth of children to have it.

The largest-ever study of treatments for diabetes has shown that a fixed combination of perindopril and indapamide also reduces the risks of heart and kidney disease.

One of the study leaders, Professor Stephen MacMahon from The George Institute for International Health in Australia, said, "these results represent an important step forward in health care for the millions of people with diabetes worldwide. This treatment reduced the likelihood of dying from the complications of diabetes by almost one-fifth, with virtually no side-effects.”

Globally, there are approximately 250 million people with diabetes, most of whom will eventually be killed or disabled by the complications of their condition. The most common cause of death in people with diabetes is heart disease.

During the last Ice Age, the ice dammed enormous lakes in Russia. The drainage system was reversed several times and the rivers flowed southwards. A group of geologists is now investigating what took place when the ice melted and the lakes released huge volumes of fresh water into the Arctic Ocean.

”The ice-dammed lakes in Russia were larger than the largest lakes we know today,” Eiliv Larsen, a geologist at the Geological Survey of Norway (NGU), tells me. He is in charge of the important SciencePub International Polar Year project that is studying natural climate changes in the Arctic and the ways in which man has adapted to them.

Moving glaciers

”The entire drainage system in Russia has been reversed several times during the past 130 000 years.

With prices of gourmet coffee approaching sticker-shock levels, scientists in Illinois are reporting development of a method to "fingerprint" coffee to detect when corn has been mixed in to short-change customers.

Gulab Jham and colleagues point out that such adulteration of Brazilian coffee is among the most serious problems affecting coffee quality -- with cereal grains, coffee twigs, and brown sugar sometimes mixed into the genuine article. Their research focuses on detecting corn, probably the most widely used adulterant.

British astronomers from the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed a new camera that gives much more detailed pictures of stars and nebula than even the Hubble Space Telescope, and it does all this from the ground. Images from ground-based telescopes are usually blurred out by the atmosphere.

Astronomers have tried to develop techniques to correct the blurring called adaptive optics but so far they only work successfully in the infrared where the smearing is greatly reduced. However a new noise-free, high-speed camera has been developed at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge which makes very high resolution imaging in the visible possible.