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.
Hunter-gatherers living in ice age conditions cooked fish, according to the findings of a team from the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden and Japan, who carried out chemical analysis of food residues in pottery up to 15,000 years old from the late glacial period, the oldest pottery so far investigated.
The research team was able to determine the use of a range of hunter-gatherer "Jōmon" ceramic vessels through chemical analysis of organic compounds extracted from charred surface deposits. The samples analyzed are some of the earliest found in Japan, one of the first centers for ceramic innovation, and date to the end of the Late Pleistocene - a time when humans were adjusting to changing climates and new environments.
Why can you not stop eating until you scarf down a whole bag of Doritos? Is it a special gene? Epigenetics, like your mom ate one when she was pregnant with you, or is Frito-Lay just fiendishly clever?
Ban-happy critics blame fat and carbohydrate content but a new study found that was not the case. If it were, we could just add ingredients to unpopular foods like Brussels sprouts and affect the rewards center in the brain positively so people eat more of those.
NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center is the official U.S Government source for space weather forecasts, alerts, watches and warnings. NASA and NOAA,as well as the US Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA) and others, keep a constant watch on the sun to monitor for space weather effects such as geomagnetic storms, the idea being that with advance notification many satellites, spacecraft and technologies can be protected from the worst effects.
A component of egg whites, already a popular whole egg substitute among cholesterol-conscious consumers concerned, may have another beneficial effect - reducing blood pressure, according to a study presented earlier this week at the American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting.
The researchers used a peptide called RVPSL. Scientists previously discovered that the substance, like the family of medications that includes Captopril, Vasotec and Monopril, was an angiotensin-converting-enzyme (ACE) inhibitor. It has the ability to inhibit or block the action of ACE, a substance produced in the body that raises blood pressure.
Almost everyone who has had an arm or leg amputated experiences a phantom limb, a vivid sensation that the missing limb is still present, like having an itch.
Neuroscientists at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have shown that it isn't just for amputees - the sensation of having a physical body is not as self-evident as we might think and have evoked the illusion of having a phantom hand in non-amputated individuals.
Brain studies are a mass of contradictions. When you leave your job and your home and your technology behind for a vacation, you 'disconnect' some claim.
"Actually, you've just given your brain a whole new challenge," says Thomas D. Albright, director of the Vision Center Laboratory at of the Salk Institute and an expert on how the visual system works. "You may think you're resting, but your brain is automatically assessing the spatio-temporal properties of this novel environment-what objects are in it, are they moving, and if so, how fast are they moving?
Researchers recently studied the reaction of aphids when a parasitic wasp with genetic variation laid eggs in them and found that different genotypes of the wasp affected where the aphids went to die, including whether they left the plant host entirely. The team also found an example of the emergence of a shared phenotype that was partly wasp and partly aphid.
A traditional Balkan bedbug remedy has been shown stab and trap the biting insects, according to a paper in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
Just in time, too. Bedbugs have made a dramatic comeback in the U.S. in recent years, infesting everything from homes and hotels to schools, movie theaters and hospitals. Although not known to transmit disease, their bites can cause burning, itching, swelling and psychological distress. It helps to catch infestations early, but the nocturnal parasites' ability to hide almost anywhere, breed rapidly and "hitchhike" from place to place makes detection difficult. They can survive as long as a year without a blood meal.
Male and female birds often show differences in body size, with males typically being larger. Some birds, like many ratites – large, flightless species such as emus and cassowaries – are the opposite, with the females towering over the males.
But some extinct ratites, among the largest female birds in the world, were almost twice as big as their male mates. A new paper says that the size difference in giant moa was not due to any specific environmental factors but instead evolved as a result of scaling-up of smaller differences in male and female body size shown by their smaller-bodied ancestors.
New research has questioned the reliability of neuroscience studies, concluding that most had an average power of around 20 percent – a finding which means the chance of the average study discovering the effect being investigated is only one in five.
The conclusions neuroscience papers drew could be wrong due to small sample sizes, the authors say.
Many factors can push a wild animal population to the brink of collapse and ecologists have long sought ways to measure the risk of such a collapse.
Last year, MIT physicists demonstrated that they could numerically predict a population's risk of collapse by monitoring how fast it recovers from small disturbances, such as a food shortage or overcrowding. However, this strategy would likely require many years of data collection.
The same research team writing in Nature now describes a new way to predict the risk of collapse, based on variations in population density in neighboring regions. Such information is easier to obtain than data on population fluctuations over time, making it potentially more useful, according to the researchers.
Violent crime is undercounted or overcounted, depending on who you ask. Some statistics count gun violence twice, for example, as a criminal getting shot and a police officer doing the shooting.
On the other side, in a paper published in the Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Wayne State University Ph.D. student Zavin Nazaretian and David M. Merolla, assistant professor of sociology, say that "capping" — which only allows survey respondents to represent a maximum of three incidents per crime type regardless of how many incidents they report — is undercounting violent crime by 87 percent and household crime by 36 percent.
