Limiting and labeling trans fats in food is not enough, according to Walter Willett, an epidemiologist and nutrition professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, who argues to food manufacturers that they should be banned altogether.

Willett was among dozens of speakers on the opening day of the Institute of Food Technologists Annual Meeting & Food Expo here, the world’s largest annual food science forum and exposition.

While some trans fats occur naturally in foods, most are the result of cooking or baking with hydrogenated oils. Those oils provide creamy textures that are enjoyable to eat and affect positively the shelf life and stability of many foods like baked goods.

In order for the best baseball team to win, the National League would have to extend its season to 256 games say a pair of physicists at the Los Alamos national Laboratory in New Mexico.

Because of randomness, there's always a chance a bad team can win so mathematically a certain outcome for the best team requires a number of games equal to roughly the cube of the number of teams. In the National League, with its 16 teams, that means 4096 regular season games or 256 per season, almost 100 more than the 162 games they play now.

Insulin-dependent, or Type 1, diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which the body’s immune system attacks and destroys insulin and insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas. Insulin is a hormone that is needed to convert sugar, starches and other food into energy.

Insulin typically is given through shots and not pills so the hormone can go straight into the bloodstream but a new method by Professor Henry Daniell’s research team may change that.

Their work involved genetically engineering tobacco plants with the insulin gene. They administered the freeze-dried plant cells to five-week-old diabetic mice in powder form for eight weeks. By the end of the study, the diabetic mice had normal blood and urine sugar levels, and their cells were producing normal levels of insulin.

Decades ago a gene was discovered that was linked to the susceptibility of multiple scleroris (MS). Since then, the search has been on to uncover the puzzling mix of genes, environment and immunity that could aid in the treatment of the 350,000 people just in America who have the disease.

A pair of large-scale genetic studies supported by the National Institutes of Health has revealed two genes that influence the risk of getting MS.

"These studies describe the first genes conclusively linked to MS in more than 20 years," said Ursula Utz, Ph.D., a program director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), a part of NIH.

Autopsies usually point to a cause of death but now a study of brain tissue collected from people who committed suicide may explain an underlying cause of major depression and suicide.

The international research group, led by Dr. Michael O. Poulter of Robarts Research Institute at The University of Western Ontario and Dr. Hymie Anisman of the Neuroscience Research Institute at Carleton University, says that proteins that modify DNA directly are more highly expressed in the brains of people who commit suicide, they write in Biological Psychiatry.

These proteins are involved in chemically modifying DNA in a process called epigenomic regulation.

Twenty-one years after they first described a fatal genetic disorder in Missouri and Arkansas families, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have linked the condition to mutations in a gene known as TREX1.

The identification will accelerate efforts to understand and treat retinal vasculopathy with cerebral leukodystrophy (RVCL), a rare condition that usually goes unrecognized or is misdiagnosed. In Asian and Caucasian patients with the disease, a complex and ultimately fatal barrage of primarily central nervous system symptoms begins around age 45 that includes vision loss, mini-strokes and dementia. The symptoms can also mimic a brain tumor or multiple sclerosis. After onset, RVCL is fatal in 10 years or less.

A new report from researchers at the University of Colorado and Stanford University speculates how unique, lineage-specific gene copy number expansions and contractions in humans may underlie traits such as endurance running, higher cognitive function, and susceptibility genetic disease.

The study provides an overview of genes and gene families that have undergone major copy number expansions and contractions in different primate lineages spanning approximately 60 million years of evolutionary time.

Plant scientists have known for some time that genes from the maternal plant control seed development, but they have not known quite how.

Scientists at the University of Oxford have paved the way for bigger and better quality maize crops by identifying the genetic processes that determine seed development.

Working in collaboration with researchers in Germany and France, Professor Hugh Dickinson's team found that only the maternal copy of a key gene responsible for delivering nutrients is active. The copy derived from the paternal plant is switched off.

Drinking malt liquor may put young adults at increased risk for alcohol problems and use of illicit drugs, particularly marijuana, according to a new study of malt liquor drinkers and marijuana use by scientists at the University at Buffalo’s Research Institute on Addictions (RIA).

“In our study of young adults who regularly drink malt liquor,” reports lead researcher R. Lorraine Collins, senior research scientist at RIA, “we found that malt liquor use is significantly related to reports of alcohol problems, problems specific to the use of malt liquor and to marijuana use above and beyond typical alcohol use.”