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Regular consumption of calcium appears to cut the risk of developing colon cancer or other tumours of the digestive system, a new study said.

“In both men and women, dairy food and calcium intakes were inversely associated with cancers of the digestive system,” the authors of the study in the Archives of Internal Medicine wrote.

Women who consumed the most calcium, some 1,881 milligrammes a day, cut their cancer risk by 23 percent over those who had the lowest calcium intake of around 494 milligrammes a day.

For men, those with the highest intake of calcium some 1,530 milligrammes daily, had a 16 percent smaller risk of developing cancer, the study authors, from the National Cancer Institute in Maryland, said.

Scientist Yikyung Park and his colleagues based their results on data gathered from 293,907 men and 198,903 women, aged between 50 and 71, who participated in the National Institutes of Health-AARP Diet and Health Study.

Participants filled in a food questionnaire when they enrolled in the study between 1995 and 1996, reporting how much and how often they consumed dairy products and other foods.

Over the next seven years of follow-up, some 36,965 cancer cases were identified in men and 16,605 in women.

Their records were then matched against state cancer registries identifying new cases of cancer through 2003.

The study found that there appeared to be no link between increased calcium consumption and a fall in prostate or breast cancers.

“In conclusion, our findings suggest that calcium intake consistent with current recommendations is associated with a lower risk of total cancer in women and cancers of the digestive system, especially colorectal cancer, in both men and women,” the authors write.

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Tokyo Electric Power Co. will build a solar power plant in the US state of California through its subsidiary Eurus Energy Holdings Corp., according to a report.

It plans to begin operations at the 1000 kilowatt plant by 2010 on a site yet to be selected, the Nikkei business daily reported.

Eurus, already engaged in wind power generation in the United States, wants to take advantage of incentives expected to be provided by the new US government to boost solar power generation nationwide, Nikkei said.

Tokyo Electric is one of four Japanese corporate giants moving into the US renewable energy market with solar and wind power technologies, the daily said.

Petroleum wholesaler Showa Shell Sekiyu KK will start selling solar cells in the United States in June at the earliest after establishing a sales network there, the report said.

The unit of Anglo-Dutch giant Royal Dutch Shell will ship cells from a plant now under construction in Miyazaki prefecture, southern Japan.

Sanyo Electric Co. is set to expand the solar cell production capacity of its Mexican plant, which assembles products for the North American market, by 150 percent to 50,000 kilowatts, the daily said.

In anticipation of growing US demand, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. will raise its domestic production capacity for wind turbines by about 30 percent to 1.6 million kilowatts possibly by March 2010, Nikkei said.

The 787-billion-dollar US economic stimulus package, which was passed on Tuesday, earmarks 38 billion dollars for investments in the environmental and energy sectors.

It also provides 20 billion dollars in tax incentives to spur private-sector investment in this area.

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Scientists on Sunday unveiled lab-made human antibodies that can disable several types of influenza, including highly-lethal H5N1 bird flu and the “Spanish Flu” strain that killed tens of millions in 1918.

Tested in mice, the antibodies work by binding to a previously obscure structure in the flu virus which, when blocked, sabotages the pathogen’s ability to enter the cell it is trying to infect, according to the study.

Because this structure - described by one scientist as a “viral Achilles’ heel” - is genetically stable and has resisted mutation over time, the antibodies are effective against many different strains.

The breakthrough “holds considerable promise for further development into a medical tool to treat and prevent seasonal as well as pandemic influenza,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which helped fund the study.

Clinical trials on humans could begin within a couple of years, the researchers said. Seasonal flu kills more than 250,000 people every year, and pandemic flu, which occurs with the emergence of deadly viral y, remains an ever-present threat.

Vaccines have long been the first line of defence against flu, but even seasonal viruses evolve so rapidly that the vaccines need to be updated every year. Even then, they are not always effective.

A team led by Wayne Marasco, a professor at Harvard Medical School, began the study by scanning tens of billions of so-called monoclonal antibodies in the laboratory.

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