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Health experts have warned for years that men and women with excess abdominal fat run a greater risk of developing cardiovascular problems. However, individuals with abdominal or central obesity are not the only ones in danger, according to a new study. The study found that physically active men who were not overweight but whose waist-stature ratio (WSR) was close to the risk threshold were also more likely to develop heart disorders than individuals with lower WSRs. The study was conducted [...]

The mosquito Aedes aegypti is the main transmission vector of dengue, Zika, yellow fever and chikungunya in Brazil. It is highly adapted to urban environments and rarely found in forested areas. The mosquito Anopheles cruzii is the primary vector of Plasmodium, the protozoan parasite that causes malaria in humans. It mostly inhabits the countryside and is infrequent in urban areas. Mosquito population control is considered the best strategy for combating these diseases. Understanding mosquito [...]

The production of entropy, which means increasing the degree of disorder in a system, is an inexorable tendency in the macroscopic world owing to the second law of thermodynamics. This makes the processes described by classical physics irreversible and, by extension, imposes a direction on the flow of time. However, the tendency does not necessarily apply in the microscopic world, which is governed by quantum mechanics. The laws of quantum physics are reversible in time, so in the microscopic [...]

While most developed countries have reduced the construction of large dams for the production of electricity in recent decades, developing countries, including Brazil, have embarked on even more massive hydropower developments. These countries have not accounted for the environmental impacts of large dams, which include deforestation and the loss of biodiversity, or the social consequences, such as the displacement of thousands of people and the economic damages they suffer. These effects [...]

Up to 15 million hectares of tropical rainforest in the Brazilian Amazon could lose protection and be clear-cut because of an article in the country s new Forest Code. The warning comes from Brazilian researchers at the University of São Paulo s Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture (ESALQ-USP) and Swedish researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. They recently published a paper on the subject in Nature Sustainability. [...]

A jagged little protein appears to be key to how cancer stem cells differentiate and enable metastasis, according to researchers at Rice University and the Duke University School of Medicine. Rice scientists who have formed several theories on how cancer grows and spreads connected the dots for a more complete picture of tumor mechanics. At the center, they found JAG1, a ligand, or small protein, that interacts with a signaling pathway critical to regulating the fate of cells. Their new paper [...]

The compound called GA-Hecate also acts on bacteria, fungi and cancer cells and will be tested against Zika and yellow fever viruses (action mechanism proposed for GA-Hecate. Upper half of figure (low concentrations of material): (1) HCV; (2) interaction between GA-Hecate and viral envelope, destruction of virus and release of genetic material (+ssRNA); (3) interaction between GA-Hecate and host cell membrane, with permeabilization of peptide; (4) lipid droplet; (5) interaction between compound [...]

A study performed at the University of São Paulo s Biomedical Science Institute (ICB-USP) in Brazil shows that sofosbuvir, a drug used to treat chronic hepatitis C, is capable of eliminating chikungunya virus and yellow fever virus. "Human cells infected by chikungunya virus were treated with sofosbuvir, and the drug eliminated the virus without damaging any cells. The drug proved to be 11 times more effective against the virus than against cells," said Rafaela Milan Bonotto, a coauthor of [...]

Sixty years after melatonin was isolated and with more than 23,000 published studies showing the many functions of this hormone secreted by the pineal gland, guidelines should be discussed and established for its therapeutic use. This is the view expressed by José Cipolla Neto, Full Professor at the University of São Paulo s Biomedical Science Institute (ICB-USP), and Fernanda Gaspar do Amaral, a professor at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP), both in Brazil, in an article [...]