Solving a Tongue Twister

If a doctor asked you to stick out your tongue, and you unfurled a nine-foot-long specimen, you would be proportional to the tube-lipped nectar bat of the Andes. With a tongue that can reach 150 percent of its body length, the Anoura fistulata is a species that was discovered by scientists only about a year ago. After studying three species of nectar bats, Department of Biology Ph.D. student Nathan Muchhala and his research team concluded that A. fistulata is the sole pollinator of a specialized elongated bell flower, C. nigricans. The research team published the results in the journal Nature.

How Healthy are U.S. Hispanics?

The National Institutes of Health selected the University of Miami as one of four sites to conduct the largest long-term epidemiological study of health and disease in U.S. Hispanic populations. The $61 million Hispanic Community Health Study, which began in September 2006, will follow 16,000 participants over six and a half years who will undergo a series of physical examinations to help identify the prevalence and risk factors for a slew of health conditions. Neil Schneiderman, James L. Knight Professor of Health Psychology and principal investigator, says that the study could help answer many important questions, such as why U.S. Hispanics experience increased rates of obesity and diabetes yet fewer deaths from heart disease than non-Hispanics.

Adding Selenium to the HIV Cocktail

Antiretroviral therapy has extended the lives of patients with HIV, but now Barry Hurwitz and colleagues in the UM Behavioral Medicine Research Center have discovered that supplementing ongoing treatment with high selenium yeast may help to suppress HIV disease progression. A trace mineral, selenium is normally in the daily diet and has immune-enhancing properties. Published in the January 22 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, the Miami Selenium for Heart and Immune Health Trial studied 262 participants with HIV throughout South Florida from 2001 to 2005 and found that daily selenium supplements suppressed the amount of HIV virus in circulation over nine months.