Scientists have reported that an experimental vaccine targeting one of the most common genetic drivers of pancreatic cancer, called mutant KRAS, is safe and generated a durable immune responses aimed at preventing the cancer.
Astronomers from around the world have used data from satellites and observatories to explain the brightest Gamma-ray Burst (GRB) ever recorded.
An unusually bright GRB, now deemed GRB 130427A, was observed on April 27th 2013 by the Swift satellite and was then found this be a result of an extremely powerful stellar explosion. This explosion produced a jet of matter moving close to the speed of light, which was formed when a massive star collapsed to make a black hole at its centre. As a result, a blast wave caused the rest of the star to expand outwards, producing a glowing shell of debris observed as an extremely bright supernova.
Los Alamos' RAPTOR
(RAPid Telescopes for Optical Response)
telescopes in New Mexico and Hawaii received a very bright cosmic birth announcement for a black hole on April 27th.
The RAPTOR (RAPid Telescopes for Optical Response) system is a network of small robotic observatories that scan the skies for optical anomalies such as flashes emanating from a star in its death throes as it collapses and becomes a black hole - an object so dense that not even light can escape its gravity field.
This birth announcement arrived from the constellation Leo in the form of an exceptionally bright flash of visible light that accompanied a powerful burst of cosmic gamma-ray emissions.
Faced with inevitable pain, most people choose to get over with as soon as possible, according to a new paper in which participants chose between real painful stimuli in the form of electric shocks, and imagined painful dental appointments occurring at different times in the future.
Most people chose to hasten the experience of pain, and would even accept more severe pain to avoid having to wait for it, a smaller proportion preferred to put it off into the future.
There are widespread differences in how genes are expressed in men and women's brains, based on post-mortem adult human brain and spinal cord samples from over 100 individuals analyzed by byscientists at the University College London Institute of Neurology who studied the expression of every gene in 12 brain regions.
Contrary to sociological claims that poor people are more likely to be criminals, increasing the minimum wage will not lower violent crime or property crime, according to research presented today at the American Society of Criminology’s 69th annual meeting in Atlanta. The scholars studied official U.S. crime data and economic data from 1977 to 2012 to compare violent crime and property crime rates among states that abided only by the federal minimum wage standards, and the 18 states that had raised their minimum wage requirement at one time or another above the federal mandate.
Health care costs are going to continue to go up and a new paper says that physicians control more than 80 percent of those costs.
That part is true, though doctors are often forced to practice such "defensive medicine" for legal reasons.
Neutrinos can pass right through your body, the walls of your house, entire planets, even emerging from near the surface of fascinating and frightening black holes.
And now, an international scientific collaboration using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory telescope built over a mile deep in the Antarctic ice has taken an 'astronomical' step forward in unmasking the origins of some of these high-energy particles, the so-called "messengers of the universe."
The researchers have observed 28 very high-energy particle events and they constitute the first solid evidence of neutrinos coming from "cosmic accelerators"—potentially such sources as exploding stars or accreting black holes.
Drinking and marriage don't mix - unless both spouses do, according to a recent paper by the University at Buffalo Research Institute on Addictions (RIA) which followed 634 couples from the time of their weddings through the first nine years of marriage.
The results: couples where only one spouse was a heavy drinker had a much higher divorce rate than other couples but if both spouses were heavy drinkers, the divorce rate was the same as for couples where neither were heavy drinkers.
In drug design, the protein K-Ras has been on everyone's target list for more than 30 years due to its status as the most commonly mutated oncogene in human cancers.
Despite its high profile, K-Ras has been "undruggable" - many pharmaceutical, biotech, and academic laboratories have failed to design a drug that successfully targets the mutant gene.
Older men with moderate testosterone,
a key male sex hormone involved in maintaining sex drive, sperm production and bone health
, tend to live longer, according to a new paper.
Physicians have long known that low testosterone levels can signal health problems, but the new study found men may not fare better when levels of the hormone rise too high.
The population-based cohort study analyzed the mortality rate in a group of 3,690 community-dwelling men between the ages of 70 to 89 in Perth, Western Australia. Participants' testosterone and DHT levels were measured between 2001 and 2004. Researchers analyzed the group's survival rate as of December 2010.
When Neil Armstrong took his first step for all mankind in 1969, researchers obviously had no idea how much of a nuisance the lunar soil beneath his feet would be. The scratchy dust clung to everything it touched, causing scientific instruments to overheat and, for Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, a sort of lunar dust hay fever. The annoying particles even prompted a scientific experiment to figure out how fast they collect, but the data got lost.
Maybe you like to eat carp. Invasive Asian carp have been successfully harvested and served on a dinner plate but the idea of similarly harvesting invasive plants and converting them into ethanol isn't realistic yet - even less realistic than currently mandated and subsidized ethanol.
Obviously, harvesting invasive plants for use as biofuels is a great idea and merits basic research but from a policy point of view, let's hope the government does not start throwing money at companies. For now, it faces poses numerous obstacles and is too expensive to consider, at least with the current ethanol pathways.
