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.
Fibromyalgia is a blanket term for a general painful condition that affects approximately 10 million people in the United States.
Because it lacks consistent symptoms and treatments, some doctors believe an unknown number of instances are psychosomatic but a new paper in PAIN MEDICINE concludes that fibromyalgia may have a rational biological basis, located in the skin.
Sustainability programs are not just about advocation and action - a lot of thought also goes into how many people working together can change the world.
It doesn't matter what issue, conservation or climate change action, some groups work using strength of numbers while others believe a dedicated core is best - and just as many groups have been huge flops using both. The mystery of how to keep a group dynamic powerful rather than unproductive hasn't been solved.
A team of researchers has identified a highly promising new anti-tuberculosis compound that attacks the tuberculosis (TB) bacterium in two different ways.
Although isoniazid and rifampin, two front-line TB drugs, came into use in 1952 and 1967 respectively, new TB infections still occur at the rate of roughly one per second. At any moment about a third of the existing human population is infected. Though it is mostly winactive, latent TB, active TB still kills over one million people each year, with Russia, Africa, China and Southeast Asia especially hard hit.
Fracking, which mines natural gas using horizontal, hydraulically fractured wells, is widespread across Pennsylvania, with high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing (HVHHF) from the Marcellus and Utica shales covering up to 280,000 km² of the Appalachian Basin.
A new paper in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences by Dr.Erik Kiviat, of the Hudsonia ecology group, says that natural gas wells are a threat to biodiversity, including pollution from toxic chemicals, the building of well pads and pipelines, and changes to wetlands.
Natural gas is much cleaner than coal but it's also important that its energy return on investment (EROI) - the total input energy with the energy expected to be made available to end users - is similar to coal, according to a paper in the Journal of Industrial Ecology.
The paper looked at gas from horizontal, hydraulically fractured wells in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania and their analysis indicates that the EROI ratio of a typical well is likely between 64:1 and 112:1, with a mean of approximately 85:1. This range assumes an estimated ultimate recovery of 3.0 billion cubic feet per well, similar to the estimated ultimate recovery of coal, which falls between 50:1 and 85:1.
If you want to design new materials that are durable, lightweight and environmentally sustainable, it makes sense to look at old kinds: Natural composites, such as bone. Bone is strong and tough because its two constituent materials, soft collagen protein and stiff hydroxyapatite mineral, are arranged in complex hierarchical patterns that change at every scale of the composite, from the micro up to the macro.
While researchers have come up with hierarchical structures in the design of new materials, going from a computer model to the production of physical artifacts has been a persistent challenge because the hierarchical structures that give natural composites their strength are self-assembled through electrochemical reactions, a process not easily replicated in the lab.
The end of the Atlantic Ocean is coming.
A new subduction zone forming off the coast of Portugal shows that a passive margin in the Atlantic ocean is becoming active and Europe could to move closer to America, according to a paper in Geology.
The gap between hypothesis and observation is never more evident than efforts to figure out howblack holes produce so many high-power X-rays.
The big question in many aspects of medicine is whether there is more of something or if it is simply better diagnosis than in the past.
In youth baseball programs, throwing injuries seem to have gone up despite pitching limits that weren't evident in the past. Professional baseball once used a four-man rotation and there was no consideration at all about pitching for kids.
But a multicenter, national research study says serious pitching injuries requiring surgery have skyrocketed, with one estimate reporting serious throwing injuries are occurring 16 times more often today than just 30 years ago.
Water in the Earth's upper mantle and crust likely plays a less important role as a lubricant of plate tectonics than previously assumed, according to a paper presented by geoscientists present in the current issue of Nature (13/06/2013) after the examination of water in the mineral olivine.
Laboratory experiments over the past three decades have suggested the presence of water greatly weakens the mechanical strength of the mineral olivine, a key component of the Earth's upper mantle.
In the recent study, led by the Bayerisches Geoinstitut in Bayreuth, the Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometer (SIMS) facility at the Potsdam based GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences was used to reassess the importance of water in defining the rigidity of olivine.
In the last two generations, the designation 'spiritual but not religious' has become popular. It's hard to know what it means - atheists and religious people are at least taking some sort of stand - but one thing sociologists say they do know: Young adults who deem themselves "spiritual but not religious" are more likely to commit both violent and property crimes than young people who self-report religious belief ("religious and spiritual" or "religious but not spiritual").
Parasites comprise a large proportion of the diversity of species in every ecosystem but they are rarely included in analyses or models of food webs. Would it make a difference?
A new paper says that
including parasites does alter the structure of food webs, but that most changes occur because of an increase in diversity and complexity, rather than from unique characteristics of parasites.
