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Adults have much more "brown fat" than previously thought

Keeping your baby fat turns out to be a good thing, as long as it is "brown fat" - the kind that burns calories, according to a study that found adults have much more of this type of fat than previously thought.

13 Jun 2009

Cold and brown fat raise the prospect of a new method of treating obesity

Sven Enerbäck, Professor at the Institute of Biomedicine at the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, is one of the scientists who published their results in The New England Journal of Medicine this week.

16 Apr 2009

'Good' brown baby fat can ward off obesity and type 2 diabetes

Scientists in the United States say people who hang on to their baby fat may be protected from developing type 2 diabetes and becoming obese - obesity is a major risk factor for type 2 diabetes.

13 Apr 2009

Research finds active brown fat in adult humans

Researchers at the Joslin Diabetes Center have demonstrated that adult humans still have a type of "good" fat previously believed to be present only in babies and children.

9 Apr 2009

New research may lead to new pharmacologic approaches to treating obesity

Scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine have discovered a gene that when mutated causes obesity by dampening the body's ability to burn energy while leaving appetite unaffected.

5 Feb 2009

Control of blood vessels a possible weapon against obesity

Mice exposed to low temperatures develop more blood vessels in their adipose tissue and metabolise body fat more quickly, according to a new study from Karolinska Institutet. Scientists now hope to learn how to control blood vessel development in humans in order to combat obesity and diabetes.

7 Jan 2009

Cellular reprogramming, the 'Breakthrough of the Year' according to AAAS

In its annual list of the year's top ten scientific breakthroughs, the journal Science has given top honors to research that produced "made-to-order" cell lines by reprogramming cells from ill patients.

18 Dec 2008

Discovery of novel prion infectivity in white and brown fat tissues of mice

Prion diseases, also known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, are infectious progressive fatal neurodegenerative diseases which affect humans as well as wild and domestic animals.

5 Dec 2008

Brown fat points to new ways to fight obesity

A surprise discovery -- that calorie-burning brown fat can be produced experimentally from muscle precursor cells in mice -- raises the prospect of new ways to fight obesity and overweight, say scientists from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

20 Aug 2008

Research sheds light on the molecular basis of SIDS

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) is a condition that unexpectedly and unexplainably takes the lives of seemingly healthy babies aged between a month and a year.

3 Jul 2008

Master switch for the production of brown fat discovered

Researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have identified a long-sought "master switch" in mice for the production of brown fat, a type of adipose tissue that generates heat and counters obesity caused by overeating.

11 Jul 2007

Discovery about fatty tissue that burns fat

In an article now being published in the leading American journal PNAS, a research team led by Barbara Cannon and Jan Nedergaard at the Wenner-Gren Institute, Stockholm University in Sweden, together with British and American scientists, have managed to show for the first time that the cells that become the so-called brown or white fat tissue already know from the very beginning what sort of fat tissue they will be.

7 Mar 2007