Genetics tests could help provide cystic fibrosis (CF) patients with targeted treatment in future, pilot study authors suggest. Results from a French clinical trial published today in BMC Medicine show how a small percentage of CF sufferers with a rare genetic stop mutation responded positively to gentamicin treatment.

Aleksander Edelman and Isabelle Sermet-Gaudelus of Faculté de Médicine Necker in Paris led collaborators from several French institutions studying how the antibiotic gentamicin affected CF patients with a stop mutation. The team used a dual reporter gene assay first in vitro and then in CF patients.

A new report published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) shows that patients treated with bronchial thermoplasty, the first non-drug treatment for asthma, demonstrated an overall improvement in asthma control.

Co-Principal Investigators, Dr. Gerard Cox, respirologist at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton’s Firestone Institute for Respiratory Health, and Professor at McMaster University, and Dr. John Miller, Division Head of Thoracic Surgery at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton and McMaster University authored the study. The study revealed improved asthma control at one year following the bronchial thermoplasty procedure.

Picture the flow of water over a rock. At very low speeds, the water looks like a smooth sheet skimming the rock's surface. As the water rushes faster, the flow turns into turbulent, roiling whitewater that can overturn your raft.

Turbulence is important in virtually all phenomena involving fluid flow, such as air and gas mixing in an engine, ocean waves breaking on a cliff and air whipping across the surface of a vehicle. However, a comprehensive description of turbulent fluid motion remains one of physics' major unsolved problems.

Tidal marshes, which nurture marine life and reduce storm damage along many coastlines, should be able to adjust to rising sea levels and avoid being inundated and lost, if their vegetation isn't damaged and their supplies of upstream sediment aren't reduced, a new Duke University study suggests.

Such marshes "offer great value as buffers of coastal storms in cities such as New Orleans, which is separated from the Gulf of Mexico by marshlands," Matthew Kirwan and A.

New calculations show that sensitivity of Earth's climate to changes in the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) has been consistent for the last 420 million years, according to an article in Nature by geologists at Yale and Wesleyan Universities.

A popular predictor of future climate sensitivity is the change in global temperature produced by each doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. This study confirms that in the Earth's past 420 million years, each doubling of atmospheric CO2 translates to an average global temperature increase of about 3° Celsius, or 5° Fahrenheit.

It is a natural history tale that every third grader knows: The dinosaurs ruled the Earth for hundreds of millions of years, until an asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula and triggered a mass extinction that allowed the ancestors of today’s mammals to thrive.

The asteroid part of the story may still hold true, but a new study challenges the notion that a mass extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago played a major role in the dominance of today’s mammals.

A new, complete 'tree of life' tracing the history of all 4,500 mammals on Earth shows that they did not diversify as a result of the death of the dinosaurs, says new research published in Nature today.

The study was undertaken in the UK by scientists at Imperial College London and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). It contradicts the previously accepted theory that the Mass Extinction Event (MEE) that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago prompted the rapid rise of the mammals we see on the earth today.

Common sense says businesses, driven by profits, will go where they can make the most by paying the least.

Three researchers, Dr Holger Görg from GEP (the Globalisation and Economic Policy Centre, University of Nottingham ) and Professor Hassan Molana and Dr Catia Montagna from the University of Dundee, disagree.

After analyzing data from 18 countries over a 14 year period, the team found that the countries which attracted the highest levels of foreign investment were the ones with higher taxes and higher public social expenditure as a proportion of GDP.

Dr Görg, Associate Professor and Reader in Economics at GEP, said:

"The results may be startling and appear to be counterintuitive.

"Most economists have always argued that globalisation leads to a ‘race-to-th

Tailor-made dietary fiber may be able to flush artery-clogging cholesterol from the body and lower the risk of heart disease, according to a new study by University of Guelph researchers.

The study found that a fiber-rich plant extract from a legume grown in India can reduce cholesterol in pigs. The results were published in the March issue of the Journal of Nutrition.

If you’re a palaeontologist you’ve heard this question a thousand times. And if you’re not a palaeontologist you might wonder why you never get the same answer twice. Well you see the annoying part of palaeontology is that the most spectacular animals are sometimes only known from a single bone or sometimes a fragment of a bone and so ‘reconstructing’ that animal can be incredibly difficult (and controversial).