Ramadan is a Muslim religious observance in which participants do not eat or drink anything from dawn until sunset.

Researchers from the departments of Department of Nutrition and Bromatology and Department of Chemistry-Physics of the University of Granada have carried out a study in which they have revealed the need of counterbalancing the diet of the population who follow Ramadan.

According to the collected data, in this period of time macronutrient consumption levels are not appropriate if compared with the reference recommendations. The number of daily ingestions drops to 2 or 3, with regard to the 4 or 5 ingestions of the rest of the population in this period. In addition, scientists have established that, because of the diet, corporal fat increases and muscular mass falls.

Tom Learner isn’t afraid of taking a scalpel to multi-million dollar Monets or Picassos. But he also knows his way around equipment that sounds pretty high tech: Scanning Electron Microscopes, Enzyme Linked Immunosorbent Assays, and Mass Spectrometers. He knows about Neo-Dada, he digs Degas, and he’s pretty handy when it comes to High Performance Liquid Chromatography. He loves science, but he’s doing it all in the name of art. Dr. Learner is a conservation scientist; as the Senior Scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) in Los Angeles, he gets to combine his love for both art and science in an amazing way. He says he still gets a feeling of awe when he's standing nose-to-nose with an original van Gogh. The GCI's scientific department has about 25 scientists who feel the same way, with expertise in chemistry, geology, materials science, physics, and engineering. Is there a draft in here? Image of "The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden," before and after restoration.

Staying healthy is a tasteless job. Linseed is said to protect against cancer, for example, but not many people like the taste. Researchers have now isolated the valuable components of the flax seeds so when they are incorporated in bread, cakes or dressings, they support the human organism without leaving an unpleasant aftertaste.

Seriously? Cake that protects against cancer and noodles that lower cholesterol? Throw in cigars that clear our arteries and we'll join the health food bandwagon right now.

Research scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging IVV in Freising have isolated valuable components of linseed and lupin seeds and experimentally incorporated them in various foodstuffs: the linseed in cakes, bread, dressings and sauces, the lupins in bread, rolls and pasta.

Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., a physician-geneticist and leader of the Human Genome Project, has been awarded with the new Inamori Ethics Prize from the Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence at Case Western Reserve University.

Unlike the social sciences, which are overwhelmingly women, and life sciences, which are about 50-50, the hard sciences have a true gender disparity and the search is always on for reasons why.

Most parents and many teachers believe that if middle-school and high-school girls show no interest in science or math, there's little anyone can do about it but new research indicates that self-confidence instilled by parents and teachers is more important for young girls than their initial interest.

While interest is certainly a factor in getting older girls to study and pursue a career in these disciplines, more attention should be given to building confidence in their abilities early in their education, says University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee Distinguished Professor Nadya Fouad. She is one of the authors of a three-year study aimed at identifying supports and barriers that steer girls toward or away from science and math during their education.

It's a high-priority question for members of organizations like the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Research Council as they ponder how to improve the numbers of women in STEM careers – science, technology, engineering and math.

In HDTV, increased resolution and picture clarity brings with it an increased volume of data so the tiniest disruptions could mean a distortion in the picture or a loss in signal entirely.

An extension of the H.264/AVC format called SVC (scalable video coding) claims to fix that.

Protecting data packets so they are not at risk during transmission poses a serious problem for developers of video coding techniques. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut, HHI in Berlin are therefore working to improve standardized video coding techniques such as the H.264/AVC format, which is used by the YouTube video portal and Apple's QuickTime player, for example. If an Internet node is overloaded, for instance, data packets are randomly discarded during transmission. This causes a jerky picture.

If you can’t help but sing your heart out with your best friend when you hear Aladdin's A Whole New World or Johnny Cash and June Carter’s Jackson, maybe you can learn a thing or two about duets from birds. Vocal duets in the animal kingdom have long been known to occur in animals like birds, primates, and whales. But despite much research, the answer to why animals duet has been elusive and controversial. Research by Dr. Daniel Mennill, an Associate Professor at the University of Windsor in Ontario, is helping to change that with some pretty technical equipment, one duet at a time. Daniel Mennill studying duetting wrens in the humid Santa Rosa forests of Costa Rica. Photo Credit: Dale Morris.

Free drug samples provided to physicians by pharmaceutical companies could actually be costing uninsured patients more in the long run, according to a study done by researchers at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and colleagues.

The retrospective study looked at the prescribing habits of more than 70 physicians in a university-affiliated internal medicine practice in the months immediately before and after the closing of their drug sample closet. The results indicate that the availability of free samples from pharmaceutical companies greatly impacts whether an uninsured patient is given a prescription for a generic or a brand-name drug. The complete findings can be found in the September issue of Southern Medical Journal.

You may have seen projections by some scientists of global seas rising by 20 feet or more by the end of this century as a result of warming, and you may have seen others projecting less than two feet in a worst case scenario. There are a lot of projections but a new University of Colorado at Boulder study concludes that global sea rise of more than 6 feet is not only a top end of the projection, it is a near physical impossibility.

Women with hormone-receptor positive, metastatic breast cancer may take medications for years to help keep their cancer at bay, but when the tumor becomes resistant to anti-hormonal drugs, treatment with chemotherapy becomes the only option. But a study presented today at the 2008 ASCO Breast Cancer Symposiummay change this approach. Early data suggests a new treatment approach can "re-sensitize" the tumor, allowing anti-hormonal drugs to do their job once again.

The strategy being investigated involves breast cancers that are fueled by estrogen—these are called estrogen-receptor or progesterone-receptor positive cancers (ER or PR positive).