Researchers in Taiwan have demonstrated for the first time that urban air pollution simultaneously affects key indicators of cardiovascular risk in young adults: inflammation, oxidative stress, coagulation and autonomic dysfunction.

Children who are chronically exposed to higher levels of air pollution show marked deficiencies in lung growth and function, and not just short-term breathing problems, according to researchers in Mexico.

Prescribing ambulatory oxygen in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease improves exercise performance, but not the quality of their daily life unless they have resting hypoxemia, according to researchers.

Researchers are studying the impacts of natural and human-induced changes on groundwater in the central Pacific nation of Kiribati. According to their work, Pacific island nations face some of the most critical freshwater supply and sanitation problems in the world.

Researchers have found that a key gene is often "silenced" in clear cell renal cell carcinoma, the most common type of kidney cancer, and when they restored that gene in human kidney cancer cells in culture and animal experiments, tumors stopped growing and many disappeared.

New research shows that vascular activities in diabetic animals vary according to sex. This discovery may eventually have implications for the way males and females are treated medically in the future.

The interplay of two proteins that bind to messenger RNA, a molecule that mediates translation of the information encoded in genes into proteins, triggers the appearance of fragile X-associated tremor/ataxia syndrome, a late-life disorder associated with the gene that causes fragile X syndrome in children, said researchers.

Scientists have discovered how HIV/AIDS disrupts the normal replication of stem cells in the adult brain, preventing new nerve cells from forming. Researchers uncovered a novel molecular mechanism that inhibits stem cell proliferation and that could possibly be triggered in other neurodegenerative diseases. This discovery links mechanism for HIV/AIDS dementia, possibly other neurological disorders, with known cancer 'checkpoint' pathway.