Though nearly every medical body and the United Nations would rather that epidemiologists stop talking about "pre-diabetes", concerns are still there. Governments are worried that working up the public about pre-diabetes will increase patient costs by 500 percent while advocates for it to be taken seriously believe it might head off serious issues later in life.

Pre-diabetes is a general term that refers to a vague intermediate stage between normoglycemia and diabetes mellitus. It has been broadened to include individuals with impaired glucose tolerance (IGT), impaired fasting glucose (IFG) or a combination of the two.

Results to date from prospective cohort studies investigating the link between prediabetes and risk of cancer are controversial. 

A team of researchers have evaluated mepolizumab, a new antibody-based drug for certain patients with severe asthma, and found it can replace traditional, steroid-based treatments for a specific subset of patients, resulting in improved outcomes and reduced side effects.

Patients with severe asthma often require high doses of steroid-based treatments that can significantly impair their quality of life.

These high doses can cause debilitating side effects including mood swings, diabetes, bone loss, skin bruising, cataracts and hypertension.
Previous research at the Hamilton institutions has identified specific types of patient with severe asthma have an overabundance of a particular type of white blood cell (eosinophils) present in their sputum.

A new species of titanosaurian, a member of the large-bodied sauropods that thrived during the final period of the dinosaur age, has been found in Tanzania.

Many fossils of titanosaurians have been discovered around the globe, notably in South America, but few have been recovered from the continent of Africa. 

A new study has found that the pond-dwelling, single-celled organism Oxytricha trifallax has the remarkable ability to break its own DNA into nearly a quarter-million pieces and will then rapidly reassemble those pieces when it's time to mate.

Why? No one knows, sometimes nature gets drunk and creates things that make no sense. The organism internally stores its genome as thousands of scrambled, encrypted gene pieces. Upon mating with another of its kind, the organism rummages through these jumbled genes and DNA segments to piece together more than 225,000 tiny strands of DNA. This all happens in about 60 hours.

Immunotoxins are targeted antibodies that go after deadly toxins like ricin.

In the quest to find targeted therapies for cancer - that kill cancer but spare the surrounding tissue, immunotoxins make perfect sense. But they have not succeeded in part because cancer cells share many molecules with normal cells and because it can be challenging to unlock the deadly chemical only after the antibody has homed to the diseased tissue.

Talk of a 'secret sauce' in decision-making and charges that government groups like the Environmental Protection Agency are politically motivated are not new. Every president has its opposition party contending that the administration is manipulating science to suit its agenda - in the 1990s, Democrats got it for scuttling the Superconducting Super Collider and gutting the NIH and NASA while a decade later Republicans were called anti-science for limiting federal funding for human embryonic stem cells to existing lines.

No one voted or did not vote for a candidate because of the SSC or hESCs, they were simply talking points to confirm decisions.

Feeling comfortable in our own skin when it comes to clothes is more complicated than just “being yourself”. Image: Flickr, Maria Morri

By Rosie Findlay, University of Sydney.

At first glance, water seems to be a simple molecule because a single oxygen atom is bound to two hydrogen atoms - but it is more complex when taking into account hydrogen's nuclear spin, a property reminiscent of a rotation of its nucleus about its own axis. 

The spin of a single hydrogen can assume two different orientations, symbolized as up and down. So, the spins of water's two hydrogen atoms can either add up, called ortho water, or cancel out, called para water. Ortho and para states are also said to be symmetric and antisymmetric, respectively.

In 2014, there will be an estimated 22,240 new cases of ovarian cancer in the United States and over 40,000 new cases in the European Union. Ovarian cancer is one of the most lethal gynecologic cancers. Women with recurrent or persistent ovarian cancer recur within 6-12 months of completion with a platinum-containing regimen and there remains a high unmet need for improved treatment options.