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Fist things first. Elliptical trainers are primarily cardiovascular machines. Ellipticals work the big muscles in your legs to get your heart and lungs working hard enough to achieve a cardio training effect. If you wanted, you could achieve exactly the same cardio training effect by running in place in your underwear and bare feet that you can with the most expensive elliptical cross trainer. You exercise your body, not the equipment. Cheap elliptical trainers can provide all the training effect you can use.

Tags: Elliptical trainers, cardiovascular machines, cardio training

Scientists are using a virtual-reality, three-dimensional video game that challenges spatial memory as a new tool for assessing the link between depression and the hippocampus, the brain's memory hub. Spatial memory is the memory of how things are oriented in space and how to get to them. Researchers found that depressed people performed poorly on the video game compared with nondepressed people, suggesting that their hippocampi were not working properly.

Research has shown the efficacy of a pharmaceutical drug known as sunitinib which halts progress of metastatic kidney cancer. The work was published recently in the prestigious international medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine.

A study published in the March 1 issue of the journal Sleep finds that sleep deprivation impairs the ability to integrate emotion and cognition to guide moral judgments.

Oregon Health & Science University research shows how calcium regulates the recharging of high-frequency auditory nerve cells after they've fired a signal burst. The study indicates calcium ions play a greater role in keeping in check the brain's most powerful circuits, such as those used for processing sound signals, than previously thought. A better understanding of that role could someday help prevent the death of neurons behind such neurological disorders as stroke and multiple sclerosis.

Sweat may be another way to pass on hepatitis B infection during contact sports, suggests research published ahead of print in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Hepatitis B virus attacks the liver and can cause lifelong infection, cirrhosis (scarring) of the liver, liver cancer, liver failure and death.

A comparison of the 1918 Spanish influenza and the H5N1 avian influenza viruses suggests that while the two viruses appear to trigger a similar abnormal immune response in animal models, there are distinct differences. Researchers from the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle report their findings today at the ASM Biodefense and Emerging Disease Research Meeting.

Parents of children with sleep problems are more likely to have sleep-related problems themselves, including more daytime sleepiness, according to a new study by researchers at the Bradley Hasbro Children's Research Center and Brown Medical School.

Tall toddlers and rapidly growing teens are likely to find themselves with lower cholesterol, particularly the "bad" type, in later life, suggests research in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. Conversely, piling on the pounds after the age of 15 boosted cholesterol levels, the study showed.

An international group of scientists has expanded the universal language for the genes of both disease-causing and beneficial microbes and their hosts. This expanded "lingua franca," called the Gene Ontology (GO), gives researchers a common set of terms to describe the interactions between a microbe and its host.