Saturday 8 December 2012

Incredible! Water Remembers What Swims In It For Thousands Of Years

Water does not forget, says Prof. Boris Koch, a chemist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association. Irrespective of what happens in the sea: whether the sun shines, algae bloom or a school of dolphins swims through a marine area – everything and everyone leaves biomolecular tracks. With the help of a combination of new techniques, Boris Koch and colleagues can now identify and retrace some of these. In a special volume of the open access journal Biogeosciences, these scientists report on how these analyses work and which events in the sea have so far been uncovered by researchers.

Researchers working with Prof. Dr. Boris Koch, travelling on the Polarstern research ship, took water samples containing dissolved organic matter or DOM from the sea. The subsequent analysis in the mass spectrometer generates a chemical fingerprint which indicates the origin of the organic substances. Do they original from land plants or marine organisms, or did they enter the ocean via dust in the air or along springs on the sea bed? The analysis also permits conclusions to be made about the age of substances in the water – they can float in the ocean for several thousand years!

Vitamin D cuts cavities in half

by: Sherry Baker, Health Sciences Editor

(NaturalNews) With less time spent outdoors and the constant use of sunscreen by many, vitamin D levels are decreasing in many populations. Meanwhile, the number of cavities in children's teeth has gone up. Is there a connection? A new review of multiple studies of dental caries, or tooth decay, and vitamin D indicates the answer is yes. In fact, studies of kids in many countries link vitamin D intake to a whopping 50 percent reduction in cavities.

Male fertility - Yet another study suggests sperm numbers are falling in rich countries

Yet another study suggests sperm numbers are falling in rich countries
Fertilisation sperm connecting with egg
AS HEALTH scares go, the idea that sperm counts are plummeting across the industrialised world, probably as a result of chemical pollution that has an adverse hormonal effect, takes some beating. In 1992 a meta-analysis of 61 papers, published in the British Medical Journal, suggested they had fallen by half in the preceding half-century, from 113m per millilitre of semen to 66m. Since then, the decline has apparently continued. The most recent paper, just published in Human Reproduction, by JoĆ«lle le Moal, Matthieu Rolland and their colleagues at France’s Institute for Public Health Surveillance, is also one of the most comprehensive yet.

Sunday 2 December 2012

Canadian Researchers Discover New Evidence That Vitamin D Shuts Down Cancer Cells

By Mae Chan - preventdisease.com

Researchers at McGill University have discovered a molecular basis for the cancerpreventive effects of vitamin D, whereby its active form essentially shuts down cancer cells.

People with higher blood levels of vitamin D live significantly longer than people who have low blood levels of the vitamin.

The team, led by McGill professors John White and David Goltzman, of the Faculty of Medicine’s Department of Physiology, discovered that the active form of vitamin D acts by several mechanisms to inhibit both the production and function of the protein cMYC. cMYC drives cell division and is active at elevated levels in more than half of all cancers. Their results are published in the latest edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.