More men than women develop Parkinson’s disease and new work presented at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies says that it is do to sex differences in how brain cells change. Parkinson’s disease affects about 9 million people and becomes increasingly prevalent with age.
Tax and spend politicians and their supporters have begun framing austerity in a negative way. Austerity - spending what you make, or even less so you have a reserve - is now regarded as a negative by people that believe taxes and more government lead to growth, even if those beliefs are what led to their economic collapse.
Worldwide healthcare access and quality improved remarkably from 2000-2016 but there are unsurprising disparities between wealthy and poor countries - and countries like the United States which showed high quality but varying levels of access before the federal government took control of medical access with the controversial Obamacare law passed by Democrats.
Diagnoses of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) skyrocketed in the 1990s, leading to concern that teachers wanted all kids to be automatons in classrooms and too many older parents were concerned about kids just being kids.
Pharmaceutical industry marketing of opioid products to physicians through non-research payments, which can include speaking fees and meals, was associated with greater opioid prescribing in a recent JAMA Internal Medicine article.
There is no existing cure for the common cold. The reason is simple: it is caused by a family of viruses with hundreds of variants, making it nearly impossible to become immune to or vaccinate against all of them. On top of that, the viruses evolve rapidly, meaning they can quickly gain resistance to drugs.But there may be some new hope. A paper in Nature Chemistry discusses a new molecule, IMP-1088, that dual inhibits human N-myristoyltransferases NMT1 and NMT2 protein. Viruses 'hijack' NMT from human cells to construct the protein 'shell', or capsid, which protects the virus genome.
The litigation group Earthjustice, the sue-and-settle arm of Sierra Club, has joined other controversial environmental trial lawyer groups, such as Center for Biological Diversity, Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Union of Concerned Scientists, in a lawsuit to try and force EPA to keep Obama-era standards that environmental lawyers helped write. The now discarded additional regulations would have further limited carbon dioxide emissions from cars and light trucks for the model years 2022-25.
American government-funded science likes to declare wars. War on cancer, war on obesity, during the Obama administration there were seven different "Manhattan Projects" related to science and health. It connotes action, it makes the public feel like something important is happening with taxpayer money, revolutionary, instead of being iterative and slow.Plants are more practical. They developed an evolutionary strategy to "tolerate" rather than "resist" infection to maintain health. And that may be the roadmap for tuberculosis.
If you want to spread fake news, and rarely have it corrected, Twitter is the best way to go, according to a new analysis. Experience does not help. Instead, the social media platform’s most active users are complicit in detecting and spreading falsehoods, even during public emergencies. An analysis in Natural Hazards, looked at four false rumors — two each from the Boston Marathon and Hurricane Sandy, including an infamous falsehood about the New York Stock Exchange flooding. The authors looked at whether Twitter users spread the false news, sought to confirm it, or cast doubt upon it:
What started as a technology development project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in August 2013, has become The Mars Helicopter, a small, autonomous rotorcraft which will travel with the agency’s Mars 2020
There are many different types of human papilloma virus (HPV). Some are associated with the development of cervical lesions that can become cancerous and are considered as high-risk HPV types. Two of these high-risk types (HPV16 and HPV18) account for about 70% all cases of cervical cancer worldwide.
Most people who have sexual contact at some point in their life will be exposed to HPV. In the majority of women, HPV infection will be cleared by the immune system but when the immune system does not clear the virus, persistent HPV infection may lead to abnormal cervical cells which can progress to cervical cancer if left untreated.
In 2015, 4,528 "children" - the mean age was 18, pediatricians presenting at the Pediatric Academic Societies 2018 annual meeting today counted children as anyone under age 21 - died from firearm-related injuries. Eighty-seven percent were male and 44 percent were black. And the pediatricians argue that background checks and thus waiting periods to buy ammunition might help lower those incidents.
It sounds gross to humans - unless you read those "Twilight" books in which case maybe it's sexy - but a lot of animals consume blood. That's right, even your cat familiar. The question is why? Blood is actually a poor source of energy. It consists of 78 percent liquid and what is left is 93 percent proteins and only one percent carbohydrates (1). Blood provides very little in the way of vitamins. Not only that, a blood-based diet exposes animals to blood-borne pathogens.And yet some bat species (order Chiroptera) feed exclusively on blood and have managed to survive evolution that should have killed them, and their reliance on low-grade nourishment, off.
