People are mixing supplements, herbs and over-the-counter medications and prescription drugs to cure themselves of ills, unaware that they could be making themselves sicker, says George Grossberg, M.D., director of the division of geriatric psychiatry at Saint Louis University.

Dr. Grossberg is about to change all that. He is the co-author of a new book, "The Essential Herb-Drug-Vitamin Interaction Guide," which is a comprehensive listing of what various herbs and supplements do, possible side effects and how they might interact with other medications and foods.

Researchers believe they have solved a mystery that has puzzled evolutionary scientists for years ... if 'good' genes spread through the population, why are individuals so different? 

The so-called 'lek paradox', that sexually-selecting species like humans should have much less individuality than is the case, has been seized upon by creationists as an argument that Darwin's theories are fundamentally flawed.

The problem is that if females select the most attractive mates, the genes responsible for attractive features should spread quickly through a population, resulting in males becoming equally attractive, to the point where sexual selection could no longer take place. 

The good news: improved health care is reducing occurrences of intestinal parasites worldwide. The bad news: at the same time, rates of asthma are increasing worldwide. The link between these trends? Evolution – human evolution. The human immune system has evolved in the constant presence of intestinal parasites. The immune system is designed to react to these parasites – in their absence, the immune system overreacts to simple allergens, resulting in asthma. Its evolved state is mismatched to modernity. Similar mismatches produce increased risk of diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease in modern adult populations. Globalization is making understanding these types of complex evolutionary relationships more relevant in medicine as human environments change.

A new climate modeling study forecasts the complete disappearance of several existing climates in tropical highlands and regions near the poles, while large swaths of the tropics and subtropics may develop new climates unlike any seen today.

In general, the models show that existing climate zones will shift toward higher latitudes and higher elevations, squeezing out the climates at the extremes--tropical mountaintops and the poles--and leaving room for unfamiliar climes and new ecological niches around the equator.

An odd, six-sided, honeycomb-shaped feature circling the entire north pole of Saturn has captured the interest of scientists with the Cassini mission.

This atmospheric feature was already imaged by NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft over two decades ago. The fact that it has appeared in Cassini images indicates that it is a long-lived feature. A second hexagon, significantly darker than the brighter historical feature, is also visible in the Cassini pictures. The spacecraft's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS) is the first instrument to capture the entire hexagon feature in one image.

Yesterday, I gave my first talk at the March07 ACS meeting on Teaching Organic Chemistry with Blogs and Wikis. The screencast is now available.

It was part of a symposium on Using Social Networking Tools to Teach Chemistry organized by Harry Pence and Andrea Gay. Joanna Scott gave a most interesting talk about Nature's experimentation with Second Life and the great possibilities for communicating research work. Harry is also involved with Second Life.

Nanomechanical oscillators -- tiny strips of vibrating silicon only a few hundred atoms thick -- are the subject of extensive study by nanotechnology researchers. They could someday replace bulky quartz crystals in electronic circuits or be used to detect and identify bacteria and viruses.

The catch is that measuring their vibrations isn't easy. It is usually done by bouncing laser beams off them -- which won't work when the nanodevices become smaller than the wavelength of the light -- or with piezoelectric devices -- those bulky quartz crystals we're trying to get rid of.

A pioneering “biofuel cell” that produces electricity from ordinary air spiked with small amounts of hydrogen offers significant potential as an inexpensive and renewable alternative to the costly platinum-based fuel cells that have dominated discussion about the “hydrogen economy” of the future, British scientists reported here today.

The research was presented at the week-long 233rd national meeting of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society.

An international team of researchers has discovered that two types of plant proteins are at work in the transport of an important growth hormone, a finding that could have applications in creating plants with specific characteristics.

Previously thought to function independently, the two types of proteins were shown to comprise mechanisms that work both cooperatively and synergistically, depending upon their location in the plant. Together they control the movement of auxin, a hormone that, among other functions, regulates plant architecture, tissue development and flowering time.

Gene therapy - the idea of using genetic instructions rather than drugs to treat disease - has tickled scientists' imaginations for decades, but is not yet a viable therapeutic method. One sizeable hurdle is getting the right genes into the right place at the right time.

Engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are now developing a tool to tackle this problem.

David M. Lynn and his colleagues have created ultrathin, nanoscale films composed of DNA and water-soluble polymers that allow controlled release of DNA from surfaces. When used to coat implantable medical devices, the films offer a novel way to route useful genes to exactly where they could do the most good.