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.
U.S. medical schools have made significant progress to strengthen their management of clinical conflicts of interest but a new study concludes most schools still lag behind national standards.
The Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP) study, which compared changes in schools' policies in a dozen areas from 2008 to 2011, reveals that institutions are racing from the bottom to the middle, not to the top. In 2011, nearly two-thirds of medical schools still lacked policies to limit ties to industry in at least one area explored, including gifts, meals, drug samples, and payments for travel, consulting, and speaking.
Tiny crystals of zircon, a mineral found in the igneous rock rhyolites, from the Snake River Plain in the Yellowstone hotspot has solidified evidence for a new way of looking at the life cycle of super-volcanic eruptions.
The pattern emerging from new and previous research completed in the last five years is that another super-eruption from the still-alive Yellowstone volcanic field is less likely for the next few million years than previously thought. The last eruption 640,000 years ago created the Yellowstone Caldera and the Lava Creek Tuff in what is now Yellowstone National Park.
Resident European shrimps may be beating back invaders from America, which means Europe has fared better on this battlefront than it has against the Californian grey squirrel and American crayfish.
The researchers mapped the occurrence of the interloper and found it only existed where native shrimps were absent or rare. When native shrimps were common, the American shrimp simply could not establish and it disappeared.
Chemists recently achieved a breakthrough in efforts to develop an economical means of harnessing artificial photosynthesis by narrowing the voltage gap between the two crucial processes of oxidation and reduction, according to a new paper.
The team reports it has come within two-tenths of the photovoltage required to mimic oxidation and reduction respectively using unique photoanodes and photocathodes the team developed using novel nanowire components and coatings. Narrowing the gap using economical chemical components, the group moves researchers closer to using the man-made reaction for unique applications such as solar energy harvesting and storage.
Normally muscles contract in order to support the body, but in a rare condition known as cataplexy the body's muscles "fall asleep" and become involuntarily paralyzed. Cataplexy is incapacitating because it leaves the affected individual awake, but either fully or partially paralyzed. It is one of the bizarre symptoms of the sleep disorder called narcolepsy.
Observational studies have reported that statins improve outcomes of various infections. Ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) is the most common infection in the intensive care unit (ICU) and is diagnosed in approximately 8 to 28 percent of ICU patients receiving mechanical ventilation.
Ventilator-associated pneumonia is associated with increased mortality rates and high health care costs. New treatments are needed to improve the outcomes of VAP, according to background information in the article.
Phones are terrific today. They can play games and watch videos and check email - they are just terrible at making calls.
And during a natural disaster, when too many people take to their mobile phones at once, cellular networks easily overload. Mai Hassan, a PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia, has developed a solution to ensure that calls don't get dropped and texts make it to their destination.
Hassan found a way to opportunistically use television and radio channels to transmit cellular signals when systems are pushed beyond capacity.
Thermonuclear fusion can be achieved through a controlled reaction between two light variants of hydrogen, called deuterium and tritium - that sounds simple enough but improving the ignition stage of fusion reaction isn't trivial.
Theoretical calculations described in a paper published in EPJ D involve increasing the uniformity of irradiation using high-power laser beams on the external shell of a spherical capsule containing a mix of deuterium and tritium.
Kissing helps us size up potential partners and, once in a relationship, may be a way of getting a partner to stick around, according to psychologists in a new paper.
The scholars set up an online questionnaire in which over 900 adults answered questions about the importance of kissing in both short-term and long-term relationships.
The survey responses were that women rated kissing as generally more important in relationships than men. Furthermore, men and women who rated themselves as being attractive, or who tended to have more short-term relationships and casual encounters, also rated kissing as being more important.
Research using DNA to map the history of human migration is helping unravel the timing and source of human settlement in Central Europe.
One of the great debates in archaeological research for the past century has been the degree to which cultures or people move. When you see a pronounced cultural shift in the archaeological record, for instance, is it because of a new people appearing on the scene, or is it simply the diffusion of a new culture? This new Genographic study shows definitively that, for Germany over a four-millennia-long time span from 5500 B.C. to 1500 B.C., it was people who were on the move, carrying their genes with them.
Children who stutter have less grey matter in key regions of the brain responsible for speech production than children who do not stutter, according to brain scans of 28 children ranging from five to 12 years old. Half the children were diagnosed with stuttering; the other half served as a control.
Results showed that the inferior frontal gyrus region of the brain develops abnormally in children who stutter. This is important because that part of the brain is thought to control articulatory coding—taking information our brain understands about language and sounds and coding it into speech movements.
One of the more controversial issues from the recent first part of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) is the failure of global climate models to predict a hiatus in warming of global surface temperatures since 1998.
Several ideas have been put forward to explain this hiatus, including what the IPCC refers to as 'unpredictable climate variability' that is associated with large-scale circulation regimes in the atmosphere and ocean.
