Male circumcision has been performed as far back as ancient Egypt, and the practice has continued through the ensuing centuries for religious, cultural and sociopolitical reasons.

Performing circumcision for potential health benefits gained momentum in the 19th century with the advent of anesthesia and the initial epidemiological studies demonstrating lower rates of venereal diseases in circumcised men. Recent studies have shown that circumcised men are at significantly lower risk of urinary tract infections and sexually transmitted infections such as syphilis and chancroid.

Additional studies point to lower risk of invasive penile carcinoma, gonorrhea and chlamydia (in female partners).

Mayo Clinic endocrinologist James Levine, M.D., Ph.D., has laid out some environment-changing innovations with a six-month study of a real-life office that was re-engineered to increase daily physical activity, a program called NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis).

The study began in late 2007 and ended in 2008 at SALO, LLC, a Minneapolis-based financial staffing firm. Of the 45 employee volunteers involved in the scientific study, 18 were studied for weight loss and other changes.

New science indicating fluoride’s dangers to the brain and other organs will be presented by prominent fluoride research scientists during back-to-back conferences of the International Society for Fluoride Research (ISFR) and the Fluoride Action Network (FAN) in Toronto August 7-11, 2008. Fluoride, added to water supplies to prevent tooth decay, is also in virtually all non-organic foods and beverages. Fluoride's brain effects were never examined prior to water fluoridation.

Over the last decade, childhood obesity has grown into an epidemic, reflected in soaring rates of type 2 diabetes and recommendations that pediatricians check toddlers for elevated cholesterol.

What hasn't been as clear is how early to intervene.

A study presented at a pediatric research program on Friday suggested obesity prevention efforts should begin as early as age two, when children reach a "tipping point" in a progression that leads to obesity later in life.

The pinhole camera, a technique known since ancient times, has inspired a futuristic technology for lensless, three-dimensional imaging. Working at both the Advanced Light Source (ALS) at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and at FLASH, the free-electron laser in Hamburg, Germany, an international group of scientists has produced two of the brightest, sharpest x-ray holograms of microscopic objects ever made, thousands of times more efficiently than previous x-ray-holographic methods.

The x-ray hologram made at ALS beamline 9.0.1 was of Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing "Vitruvian Man," a lithographic reproduction less than two micrometers (millionths of a meter, or microns) square, etched with an electron-beam nanowriter. The hologram required a five-second exposure and had a resolution of 50 nanometers (billionths of a meter).

INTRODUCTION

The most common causes of massive bleedings from the hemorrhagic erosive gastritis and similar lesions of duodenum and thin intestine, which well react on the operational treatment, are ulcerations induced with stress, or with ingestion of aspirins and alcohols. Stress, aspirin and alcohol, disrupt the “gel-function” of gastric mucus, so-called the mucosal barrier for the backscattering H-Jons, which is it’s the most important defensive factor.

The increased backscattering of H-Jons, enable ulterior damage, liberating vessel-active substances, and leads to degranulation of mastocits of gastric mucous membrane, and liberation of heparin, and consecutive bleeding.

On August 1, a total solar eclipse was visible in parts of Canada, northern Greenland, the Arctic, central Russia, Mongolia and China. The eclipse swept across Earth in a narrow path that began in Canada’s northern territory of Nunavut and ended in northern China’s Silk Road region.

Though the eclipse was not visible in most of North America, NASA TV and the Exploratorium made streaming video of the event available online. The following images are taken from that video, shot from the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in northwestern China near the Mongolian border. The sun appears differently in some of the images because of the different filters used to capture the event. Times listed are ET and approximate.

New knowledge points to the fact that a genetically induced lack of filaggrin, a key protein of the skin barrier, plays a decisive role in the origin of allergies.

In a large study on more than 3000 school-children scientists of the Helmholtz Zentrum München and the Technische Universität München found that about 8% of the German population carry variations of the filaggrin gene, which raise the risk to develop atopic dermatitis more than threefold. In addition, these genetic variations predispose to hay fever and asthma in those with atopic dermatitis.

A leading fungi expert has accidentally stumbled upon a new species in Scotland – as he walked home from work. Dr Andy Taylor, from Aberdeen’s Macaulay Institute, noticed the Xerocomus bubalinus growing near a lime tree in the city’s Albyn Place. This very rare fungus was only described for the first time in 1991 in the Netherlands, and has not previously been recorded before in Scotland.

As well as his city centre find, Dr Taylor, a professional mycologist, also recently discovered a species (Russula vinososordida ) not found in the UK before, and another very rare species (Buchwaldoboletus lignicola) in the very grounds of the Macaulay Institute where he works.

Dr Taylor said: “I couldn’t quite believe it that I had found this species, which isn’t supposed to occur here in Scotland, and that it was living right here under our noses.”

Creatine, a popular nutritional supplement renowned for enhancing athletic performance and muscle strength, does not improve exercise outcomes in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), according to a new study. The randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind study provided the most powerful evidence to date that the effect of creatine (Cr) supplementation was negligible at best among these patients.

"We have evidence to suggest Cr uptake into muscles [in COPD patients] but are unable to explain why an increase in muscle Cr did not enhance training," wrote the study's lead author, Sarah Deacon, M.D., specialist registrar at the Institute for Lung Health at Glenfield Hospital in Leicester, England.

The results were published in the first issue for August of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine by the American Thoracic Society (ATS).