Researchers exploring the notion that certain nutrients might protect against pancreatic cancer found that lean individuals who got most of these nutrients from food were protected against developing cancer. The study also suggests this protective effect does not hold true if the nutrients come from vitamin supplements.

Investigators combined data from four large studies and found that people who were at or below normal body weight decreased their risk for developing pancreatic cancer if they took in high levels of vitamin B6, vitamin B12, and folate from food. The study determined that their risk was 81 percent, 73 percent, and 59 percent lower, vitamin B6, vitamin B12, and folate respectively, compared with participants who did not eat as much of these nutrients or who weighed more.

The majority of doctors in North Carolina do not probe for signs of postpartum depression in new mothers, according to a survey conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Of the 228 physicians responding to the survey who said they had seen women for postpartum visits in the previous three months, 79 percent said they were unlikely to formally screen the patients for depression. An estimated 13 percent of new mothers are affected by postpartum depression.

Small changes in agricultural and sanitation practices may eliminate the spread of a disease that affects some 200 million people living in developing nations around the world.

Researchers working in remote farming villages in western China report that providing medicine to infected people and animals, along with modifying irrigation and waste treatment practices could reduce, or even eliminate, the long-term transmission of schistosomiasis.

Schistosomiasis is a disease that can affect the liver, the gastrointestinal tract or the bladder.

An international team of astronomers led by Ohio State University has examined dark matter in the outer reaches of our galaxy in a new way.

For the first time, they were able to employ triangulation -- a method rooted in ancient Greek geometry -- to estimate the location of dark matter and calculate its mass.

The latest find from an international planet-hunting team of amateur and professional astronomers is one of the oddest extrasolar planets ever cataloged -- a mammoth orb more than 13 times the mass of Jupiter that orbits its star in less than four days.

Researchers from the U.S.-based XO Project unveiled the planet, XO-3b, at today's American Astronomical Society meeting in Honolulu. Christopher Johns-Krull, a Rice University astronomer and presenter of the team's results, said, "This planet is really quite bizarre. It is also particularly appropriate to be announcing this find here, since the core of the XO project is two small telescopes operating here in Hawaii."

Scientists have identified the receptor in cells of the peripheral nervous system that is most responsible for the body's ability to sense cold.

The findings reveal one of the key mechanisms by which the body detects temperature sensation. But in so doing it also illuminates a mechanism that mediates how the body experiences intense stimuli – temperature, in this case – that can cause pain.