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Children who eat less salt drink fewer sugar-sweetened soft drinks and may significantly lower their risks for obesity, elevated blood pressure and later-in-life heart attack and stroke, researchers report.

Patients who have an in-hospital cardiac arrest at night or on the weekend have a substantially lower rate of survival to discharge than hospitalized patients who experience a cardiac arrest during day/evening times on weekdays, according to a new study.

Scientists have linked a mutation in a gene known as TDP-43 to an inherited form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the neurodegenerative condition often called Lou Gehrig's disease.

The same chemical reaction that causes iron to rust plays a similarly corrosive role in our bodies. Oxidative stress chips away at healthy cells and is a process, scientists know, that contributes to a host of diseases and conditions in humans ranging from Alzheimer's, heart disease and stroke to cancer and the inexorable process of aging. Scientists report the discovery of a gene expression pathway that exerts a sweeping influence over the process of oxidative stress.

All the crucial proteins in our bodies must fold into complex shapes to do their jobs. These snarled molecules grip other molecules to move them around, to speed up important chemical reactions or to grab onto our genes, turning them "on" and "off" to affect which proteins our cells make. Since the discovery of RNA clumps called "riboswitches," in 2002, scientists have been striving to understand how they work and how they form. Now, researchers are looking closer than ever at how the three-dimensional twists and turns in a riboswitch come together by grabbing it and tugging it straight.

Understanding the structure of proteins involved in inhibiting HIV-1 infection could help in the battle against AIDS, and researchers have taken a crucial step in that direction. Scientists have determined the structure of a protein that inhibits the AIDS virus, HIV.

The consequence of maternal exposure to a variety of potentially toxic agents during pregnancy remains the prime focus of concern in scientific endeavors and in society at large. However, there is now mounting evidence that paternal exposure can also adversely affect fetal and postnatal development of offspring and that this imprint can be expressed in subsequent generations. The reported impact on offspring outcome includes low birth weight; increase in childhood cancers; developmental, behavioral, endocrine abnormalities and cross-generational effects.

Prostate cancers that are resistant to androgen deprivation therapy are more invasive and more likely to spread to other organs than androgen dependent prostate cancers, cancer researchers have found.

Scientists have won a major battle in the fight against age-related macular degeneration, or AMD, a blinding eye disease that affects millions of people. The researchers explain how a deficiency of the CD36 receptor prevents the evacuation of oxidized lipids in the eye. Those oxidized lipids in turn accumulate and attack the layers beneath and over the retina -- thereby causing vision loss.

Scientists have produced the largest and most detailed worldwide study of human genetic variation. Like astronomers who build ever-larger telescopes to peer deeper into space, population geneticists are using the latest genetic tools to probe DNA molecules in unprecedented detail, uncovering new clues to humanity's origins. The latest study characterizes more than 500,000 DNA markers in the human genome and examines variations across 29 populations on five continents.