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.
In 1855, a specimen of the brain of mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss was taken and preserved. But the over 150-year-old slice of his brain, which scientists had long been examining in the belief that it was Gauss's brain, turns out to not be his brain at all.
Instead, the preserved specimens of the brains of Gauss and Göttingen physician Conrad Heinrich Fuchs, a medical scholar and founder of the University of Göttingen's anatomical pathology collection, were switched, probably soon after the death of both men in 1855, says Renate Schweizer, a neuroscientist at Biomedizinische NMR Forschungs GmbH at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry.
After oxygen in the atmosphere and ocean rose about 600 million years ago, earth got the first proliferation of animal life. Between then and now, numerous short lived biotic events took place when oxygen concentrations in the ocean dipped episodically.
Engaging in some Do It Yourself projects or gardening can cut the risk of a heart attack/stroke and prolong life by as much as 30 per cent among the 60+ age group, indicates a new paper.
They might seem like routine activities but they are as good as exercise, and more fun, which is ideal for older people who don't often do that much formal exercise, according to the scholars who based their findings on almost 4,000 sixty-year-olds in Stockholm, Sweden, who had their cardiovascular health tracked for around 12 years. At the start of the study, participants took part in a health check, which included information on lifestyle, such as diet, smoking, and alcohol intake, and how physically active they were.
Protecting carbon-storing forests in the developing world may be easier than mobilizing government bureaucracies; a recent paper finds that local communities, using simple tools like ropes and sticks, can produce forest carbon data on par with results by government employees using high-tech devices.
Centuries of economic hypotheses have been based on the premise of rational actors: when given a choice between two items, people select the one they value more. But as with many simple premises, this one has a flaw in that it is demonstrably untrue.
Yet that was never really the case. Too many exceptions mean a rule was never a rule anyway - there are lots of examples where people act against their own apparent interests. One of these biases — the mere fact of possessing something raises its value to its owner — is known as the "endowment effect."
A new paper seeks to address whether this bias is truly universal and speculates that it may have been present in humanity's evolutionary past.
A group including a consultant, a sustainability advocate and an environmental scientist argued today at the Geological Society of America meeting in Denver that while the use of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling for "tight oil" is an important contributor to U.S. energy supply, it is not going to result in long-term sustainable production or allow the U.S. to become a net oil exporter.
Having children early and in rapid succession lead to high infant mortality rates in the South Asian countries of Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan, according to a paper in
the International Journal of Gynecology&Obstetrics.
1 in 14 births to young mothers in those countries ends with the death of the child within the first year, say researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine.
Experiments on individual photons conducted by physicists from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw (FUW) and the Faculty of Applied Physics and Mathematics at the Gdansk University of Technology (PG), have revealed yet another bizarre feature of the quantum world.
When a quantum object is transmitted, its quantum property, whether it behaves as a wave or as a particle, appears to depend on other properties that at first glance have nothing to do with the transmission, they argue.
You might think that health care professionals would become jaded to the plights of people over time - especially in an intensive care ward for burn patients.
Not so, according to a paper which catalogs the emotional and psychological anguish, known as "moral distress," experienced by nurses in an intensive care unit for burn patients.
A burn ICU can be an intense work environment. Many patients suffer significant pain and disfigurement. They may be in the ICU for weeks, and require numerous procedures and surgeries.
Think gender is determined by patriarchal biological concepts like a chromosome? You'll never make it in sociology thinking that way.
Instead, the social sciences are slowly overturning concepts like genital and chromosomes and other science, and it is being replaced by self-identity. The criteria for determining gender now, say Laurel Westbrook, assistant professor of sociology at Grand Valley State, and Kristen Schilt, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, have changed and self-identity is paramount. Only sex-segregated spaces believe that biology determines gender, they conclude.
Even brief usage of anabolic steroids may have long lasting, perhaps even permanent performance-enhancing effects, according to a new study.
It was previously believed that re-acquisition of muscle mass after periods of inactivity was due to motor learning. The new data from an investigation of the effects of steroids on muscle re-acquisition in mice suggests that there is a cellular 'memory mechanism' within muscle of brief steroid users.
The team investigated the effects of steroids on muscle re-acquisition in mice and discovered greater muscle mass and more myonuclei, which are essential components for muscle fiber function, were apparent after returning to exercise.
Hydraulic fracturing - fracking - is in the headlines a lot these days, and like all issues where science and policy mix, political opinion often outweighs facts. Natural gas due to fracking has driven CO2 emissions from US energy back to early 1990s levels and emissions from coal back to early 1980s levels, while keeping heat affordable for America's poor.
