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.
Our sun will one day become a faint white dwarf star - but prior to that, for a few tens of thousands of years as its atmosphere is blown away into space it could be surrounded by spectacular and colorful glowing clouds of ionized gas known as planetary nebulae.
"What are the radiation doses to airplane passengers from the intense bursts of gamma-rays that originate from thunderclouds?" researchers asked at a press conference during the European Geosciences Union in Vienna today.
An unusual fossil of Euphanerops, a fossil jawless fish that swam in the seas around 370 million years ago, has fins behind its anus - a pair of them. The find makes the fish one of the first vertebrate to develop paired appendages such as fins, legs or arms.
Long ago, obesity and high blood pressure were signs of being a wealthy elite. But the world has progressed and now even the poorest countries can eat enough to be fat. As recently as 1980 those health risks were more prevalent in countries with a higher income but a new analysis in Circulation shows that the average body mass index of the population is now just as high or higher in middle-income countries. For blood pressure, the situation has reversed among women, with a tendency for blood pressure to be higher in poorer countries.
Rising temperatures will lead to a "greening" of the Arctic by mid-century, according to a new numerical model.
The greening not only will have effects on plant life, the researchers noted, but also on the wildlife that depends on vegetation for cover. The greening could also have a multiplier effect on warming, as dark vegetation absorbs more solar radiation than ice, which reflects sunlight.
In the paper, scientists detail their new computer projections stating that wooded areas in the Arctic could increase by as much as 50 percent over the coming decades. The researchers also show that this dramatic greening will accelerate climate warming at a rate greater than previously expected.
Chlorogenic acids, natural substances extracted from unroasted coffee beans, can help control the elevated blood sugar levels and body weight that underpin type 2 diabetes.
Researchers visiting South Sudan identified a new genus of bat after discovering a rare specimen and determining the bat was the same as one originally captured in nearby Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1939 and named Glauconycteris superba but that it did not fit with other bats in the genus Glauconycteris.
They placed this bat into a new genus - Niumbaha. The word means "rare" or "unusual" in Zande, the language of the Azande people in Western Equatoria State, where the bat was captured. The bat is just the fifth specimen of its kind ever collected, and the first in South Sudan, which declared independence in 2011.
Seemingly benign differences in genetic code can predispose people to chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy, a condition that is hard to predict and often debilitating enough to cause cancer patients to stop their treatment early, a Mayo Clinic study has found.
Chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy affects an estimated 20 to 30 percent of cancer patients treated with chemotherapy agents. The symptoms can be as mild as a light tingling or numbness, but can progress to a loss of feeling in the hands and feet, or to the point where patients can no longer walk normally and are left with a permanent feeling of numbness or pain. Currently, there is no way to predict which patients undergoing chemotherapy will develop this side effect or to what degree.
Some assume that evolution only occurs gradually, over hundreds or thousands of years, but scientists have shown otherwise numerous times and now a new paper in Ecology Letters affirms that environmental change can drive hard-wired evolutionary changes in animal species in a matter of generations.
Researchers found significant genetically transmitted changes in laboratory populations of soil mites in just 15 generations leading to a doubling of the age at which the mites reached adulthood and large changes in population size. The results demonstrate that evolution can be a game-changer, even in the short-term.
An analysis of how carbon is trapped and released by iron-rich volcanic magma offers clues about our early atmospheric evolution and also that of other terrestrial bodies.
The composition of a planet's atmosphere starts far beneath the surface. When mantle material melts to form magma, it traps subsurface carbon. As magma moves upward toward the surface and pressure decreases, that carbon is released as a gas. On Earth, carbon is trapped in magma as carbonate and degassed as carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that helps Earth's atmosphere trap heat from the sun. But how carbon is transferred from underground to the atmosphere in other planets — and how that might influence greenhouse conditions — wasn't well understood.
Discovery of a new protein that controls the presence of the Vel blood group antigen on our red blood cells will make it possible to use simple DNA testing to find blood donors for patients who lack the Vel antigen and need a blood transfusion, say researchers.
The world produces a lot of food, enough to feed billions more than are living right now. There is a distribution issue, which will be solved as science engineers more crops that can grow in more local conditions, but one way to make more food available right now will also save people money - reducing food waste.
4 out of every 10 pounds produced in the United States alone goes to waste, claimed John Floros, Ph.D., dean of the College of Agriculture at Kansas State University, in a keynote talk at the American Chemical Society meeting.
