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.
Tomorrow, we are being photographed from space.No, it is not another NSA spying operation, it is NASA's Cassini and MESSENGER spacecraft, taking pictures of Earth from Saturn and Mercury.The image taken from the Saturn system by Cassini will occur between 2:27 and 2:42 PDT (that's 5:27 and 5:42 p.m. EDT and 21:27 and 21:42 UTC) tomorrow, July 19th. Since Cassini is 898 million miles away from us, nearly 10 times the distance from the sun to Earth, it may not see you specifically but NASA is encouraging the public to get participatory and wave at Saturn at the time of the portrait and then pictures via social media.
Women are waiting longer before getting married - if they get married at all, according to a new analysis.
The U.S. marriage rate is now at 31.1 - which in statistical terms means roughly a rate of 31 marriages per 1,000 married women, not 31 percent. That rate is 60 percent lower than 1970. In 1920 the marriage rate was 92.3. The wave of gay marriage legislation across the US will likely cause a temporary blip in that, at least until expensive gay divorces kick in, but the overall trend will remain downward.
An “intelligent knife”, dubbed the iKnife (naturally) can tell surgeons whether the tissue they are cutting is cancerous or not.In operating room situations, the iKnife diagnosed tissue samples from 91 patients with 100 percent accuracy, saving about 30 minutes of time that would usually be needed for laboratory tests.
A research project at Kansas State University has potential to treat human deafness and loss of balance.
More than 28 million people in the United States suffer some form of hearing loss and mutation of the SLC26A4 gene, normally found in the cochlea and vestibular organs of the inner ear as well as in the endolymphatic sac, a non-sensory part of the inner ear, is implicated as one of the most common forms of hereditary hearing loss in children worldwide.
When the mutant mice lack SLC26A4 expression, their inner ears swell during embryonic development. This leads to failure of the cochlea and the vestibular organs, resulting in deafness and loss of balance.
Fish is good for you so health advocates would prefer that people eat more of it. Environmentalists don't want fish to be depleted while natural food advocates don't want food that isn't free-range.
It's a tough culture for fisheries but biologists see a silver lining: Evolutionary changes induced by fisheries may benefit the fishers - and that means everyone else too. They just have to be well-managed. If they are well-managed, everyone wins. If not, there are economic losses as stocks decline from overfishing and further suffer from evolution.
A new biomaterial that facilitates generating bone tissue - artificial bones, in their words - from umbilical cord stem cells has gotten a patent for researchers in Granada, Spain.
The material is an activated carbon cloth support for cells that differentiate, giving rise to a product that can promote bone growth. They received a patent though the method has not yet been applied using in vivo models but it could help manufacture medicines for the repair of bone or osteochondrial, tumour or traumatic lesions and to replace lost cartilage in limbs.
Now that they have obtained artificial bones in the laboratory, they are going to implant this biomaterial in experimental animal models to see if it can regenerate bone in them.
Oxytocin, a hormone with powerful effects on brain activity that is linked to the formation of social bonds, could have benefits for children with the autism disorder - but it is unlikely, according to the results of a new study.
Autism is a complex condition of unknown cause in which children exhibit reduced interest in other people, impaired social communication skills and repetitive behaviors.
Research in people who are healthy shows oxytocin can increase levels of trust and eye-gazing and improve their identification of emotions in others.
Previous research suggested that oxytocin would be helpful in children with autism as well and so
oxytocin
nasal sprays have grown in popularity.
Our digestive system is home to trillions of bacteria which battle for our health. Sometimes they help us digest food and something they battle harmful microbes.
When we take antibiotics to combat bacterial infections, beneficial bacteria can also be killed off, leaving us at risk of infection by harmful bacteria. Clostridium difficile is one of those harmful bacteria and is the leading cause of hospital infections in England and Wales and in hospitals all over the developed world.
As C. difficile becomes more resistant to antibiotics, it becomes harder to treat, so new ways of controlling C. difficile infections are needed.
Bring on the bacteriophages.
Were dinosaurs warm-blooded like birds and mammals and not cold-blooded like reptiles as commonly believed?
Professor Roger Seymour of the University of Adelaide argues that cold-blooded dinosaurs would not have had the required muscular power to prey on other animals and dominate over mammals as they did throughout the Mesozoic period.
A study using adults who listened to short Hungarian phrases and then sang them back found that singing in a foreign language can significantly improve learning how to speak it.
Three randomly assigned groups of twenty adults took part in a series of five tests as part of a study conducted by researchers at the University of Edinburgh's Reid School of Music. The singing group performed the best in four of the five tests.
In one test, participants who learned through singing performed twice as well as participants who learned by speaking the phrases. Those who learned by singing were also able to recall the Hungarian phrases with greater accuracy in the longer term.
The water level in the Dead Sea has been dropping at an increasing rate since the 1960s, exceeding a meter per year during the past decade. This drop has triggered the formation of sinkholes and widespread land subsidence along the Dead Sea shoreline, resulting in severe economic loss and infrastructural damage. In a new paper, researchers examined the spatiotemporal evolution of sinkhole-related subsidence using Satellite based Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) measurements and field surveys, and resolved millimeteric-scale precursory subsidence in all sinkhole sites that they examined in Israel during 2012.
Toward an operational sinkhole early warning system along the Dead Sea
In North America, the environmental segment of the conservation community regards humanity as the enemy. Not so in South America. They want you to visit - just don't ruin the place.A team of scientists from the Senckenberg Research Institute in Dresden were doing a study about the ways ecotourism and conservation can cohabitate nicely - and they discovered a new species of frog. As with most new discoveries, this micro-endemic species was immediately declared endangered because no one had seen it before.
