Research led by Dartmouth scientists found that animals fed nutritious, high-quality food end up with much lower concentrations of toxic methylmercury in their tissues. The result suggests ways in which methylmercury—a neurotoxin that can accumulate to hazardous levels—can be slowed in its passage up the food chain to fish.

"This research provides evidence that by eating high-quality food, organisms may reduce their bodily concentration of a contaminant," said lead author Roxanne Karimi, a graduate student in the Dartmouth Department of Biological Sciences. "These findings allow us to predict the conditions under which freshwater fish are likely to carry relatively high mercury levels."

When motor neurons damaged by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease, inappropriately send the wrong signal, immune cells react by killing the messenger. Their surprising finding provides new direction for therapies to treat ALS.

The study was conducted in the laboratory of Don Cleveland, Ph.D., UCSD Professor of Medicine, Neurosciences and Cellular and Molecular Medicine and member of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and will be published online April 27 in advance of publication in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Large swaths of garbled human DNA once dismissed as junk appear to contain some valuable sections, according to a new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the University of California-Santa Cruz. The scientists propose that this redeemed DNA plays a role in controlling when genes turn on and off.

Scientists have determined that a specific class of PCB causes significant developmental abnormalities in rat pups whose mothers were exposed to the toxicant in their food during pregnancy and during the early weeks when the pups were nursing.

Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), used mostly as coolants and lubricants beginning in the 1930s, were banned in 1977. Early toxicology studies focused mostly on a subset of PCBs known as coplanar PCBs, which were shown in cell culture and animal models to pose a serious health risk. Recent studies, however, have shown that non-coplanar PCBs are particularly stable, are less susceptible to degradation by organisms in the environment, and predominate in environmental and human tissue samples over their counterparts.

A rigorous, long-term study of quality of life in patients who underwent one of the three most common treatments for prostate cancer found that each affected men's lives in different ways. The findings provide invaluable information for men with prostate cancer who are facing vital treatment decisions.

Researchers studied quality of life in men who either underwent radical prostatectomy, implantation of radioactive seeds in their prostate gland or had external beam radiation therapy. The three treatment options rank about equally in survival outcomes for most men, so specific impacts on quality of life become paramount in making treatment decisions, said Dr. Mark Litwin, the study's lead author and a researcher at UCLA's Jonsson Cancer Center.

New research on companies that sprint to rapidly gain market share is revealing the danger of pursuing sudden massive growth, according to the Management Insights feature in the April issue of Management Science.