Government targets designed to lower the salt content of packaged foods will make little difference to the health of Australians, according to a new analysis published today.
Jan 14, 2021
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Scientists from the MIPT Research Center for Molecular Mechanisms of Aging and Age-Related Diseases have joined forces with their colleagues from Jülich Research Center, Germany, and uncovered how sodium ions drive glutamate ...
Dec 21, 2020
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Human bodily fluids and secretions contain molecules known as biomarkers that contain a wealth of information about the body's health and the presence of disease. Among secretions such as tears, sweat and saliva, tears are ...
Nov 23, 2020
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New research shows that COVID-19 exposure risk from contaminated candy could be successfully mitigated both by washing hands and washing candy using a simple at-home method. A team of researchers published this work today ...
Oct 30, 2020
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Children born to mothers who took the antiepileptic drug sodium valproate during pregnancy may have a four to five-fold increased risk of developing neurodevelopmental disorders in early childhood, according to a study in ...
Oct 22, 2020
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It's one of the world's deadliest animals, and it has a taste for human blood: the mosquito.
Oct 12, 2020
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Salt (sodium chloride) is well-known to increase blood pressure and to be a target of public health intervention. However, some controversy remains about the role of salt in cardiovascular disease in the general population, ...
Oct 08, 2020
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In a development that may finally offer hope to children with Dravet syndrome and their parents, a promising investigational new therapeutic appears to alter the destructive course of the deadly disease in a mouse model.
Aug 26, 2020
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Researchers at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares (CNIC) and the Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria Princesa (IIS Princesa) have made a major advance toward deciphering the mechanism through which ...
Jul 29, 2020
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Testing procedures for gestational diabetes in pregnant women around the world need greater scrutiny to be reliable, researchers from The Australian National University (ANU) warn.
Jul 16, 2020
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Sodium (pronounced /ˈsoʊdiəm/) is a metallic element with a symbol Na (from Latin natrium or Arabic natrun) and atomic number 11. It is a soft, silvery-white, highly reactive metal and is a member of the alkali metals within "group 1" (formerly known as ‘group IA’). It has only one stable isotope, 23Na.
Elemental sodium was first isolated by Sir Humphry Davy in 1806 by passing an electric current through molten sodium hydroxide. Elemental sodium does not occur naturally on Earth, but quickly oxidizes in air and is violently reactive with water, so it must be stored in an inert medium, such as a liquid hydrocarbon. The free metal is used for some chemical synthesis and heat transfer applications.
Sodium ion is soluble in water in nearly all of its compounds, and is thus present in great quantities in the Earth's oceans and other stagnant bodies of water. In these bodies it is mostly counterbalanced by the chloride ion, causing evaporated ocean water solids to consist mostly of sodium chloride, or common table salt. Sodium ion is also a component of many minerals.
Sodium is an essential element for all animal life and for some plant species. In animals, sodium ions are used in opposition to potassium ions, to allow the organism to build up an electrostatic charge on cell membranes, and thus allow transmission of nerve impulses when the charge is allowed to dissipate by a moving wave of voltage change. Sodium is thus classified as a “dietary inorganic macro-mineral” for animals. Sodium's relative rarity on land is due to its solubility in water, thus causing it to be leached into bodies of long-standing water by rainfall. Such is its relatively large requirement in animals, in contrast to its relative scarcity in many inland soils, that herbivorous land animals have developed a special taste receptor for sodium ion.
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