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.
Fibrolamellar hepatocellular carcinoma, a form of liver cancer mainly found among children and young people, currently has surgery as the only treatment available. But even then less than 40 percent of patients will survive beyond five years.
It might help to discover what causes it.
Expectant moms get a lot of advice from the Internet, friends, and even strangers. It's a lot of judgment, given that this miracle of birth has already happened 13 billion times without anyone telling mothers to eat purple vegetables or their child won't get into Stanford.
The digital age, where publication is cheap, coupled with epidemiology which can show almost anything, has led to a lot of confusion. But when the word "stillbirth" is invoked, as was recently down in The Journal of Physiology, pregnant women will panic.
Yet they shouldn't. No babies were harmed in a study which nonetheless claims babies could be harmed if moms sleep on their backs.
When corporate media revealed during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election campaign that Donald Trump had expressed anti-vaccine sentiments, Democrats in "blue states breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, journalists could claim anti-vaccine sentiment was bipartisan.
Alternative medicine frauds like Dr. Allan Spreen of the ironically named Institute of Health Sciences (they claim their supplement can cure cancer in 6 weeks) may be rejoicing about a new study showing Vitamin D can protect against asthma attacks but the attacks were only reduced when people took standard asthma medication. Asthma affects more than 300 million people worldwide and is estimated to shorten lifespan for up to 400,000 people annually. Asthma deaths are primarily due to viral upper respiratory infections which cause asthma attacks.
Exercise of all kinds is known to be beneficial to bone health but there is reluctance to use high intensity programs in older women with low bone mass because of concerns about increased risk of fracture or other injury. Yet high intensity doesn't need to be prolonged, according to a new study in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research which found that even 30 minutes twice a week of high intensity resistance and impact training improved functional performance and bone density, structure, and strength in postmenopausal women with low bone mass (T-score –1.0), without adverse effects.
The realization that livestock like cows are ruminants - and produce a lot of methane while chewing - was a real boon to vegetarian activists because they got to say curbing meat would mean less global warming.Methane has 23X the warming power of the more popular CO2 in climate change estimates but it drastically shorter in duration. Still, that is enough. When natural gas caused American CO2 emissions from energy to plummet back to early 1990s levels, solar and wind lobbyists and their environmental allies claimed that methane, which they had endorses as an alternative to coal for decades, was suddenly a crisis.
Three detectors tracking gravitational waves emitted by a merger of two black holes have brought science a little closer to locating a gravitational wave's birthplace in space. Gravitational waves are ripples in space and time created when two massive, compact objects such as black holes merge. The new detections were made on August 14, 2017 by two gravitational-wave detectors in the United States - Hanford and Livingston at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), operated by Caltech and MIT
- and by the Virgo Gravitational-Wave Observatory in Italy. This marks the fourth detection of a binary black-hole system.
In the wake of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, many claims have been made that science denial, particularly as it relates to climate change, is primarily a problem of the political right.But what happens when scientific conclusions challenge liberals’ attitudes on public policy issues, such as gun control, nuclear power or immigration?
A new paper claims that guns are only involved in 5 percent of suicide attempts but are 50 percent of suicide deaths. Despite everyone claiming to want to be data-driven about gun deaths, few are and this is no exception.
Although 29 states and the District of Columbia allow marijuana use for medical purposes, there is no evidence it is medicine. Obviously some of the reason for that is because it's illegal and therefore hard to study, but regardless of the past it seems odd that scholars at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis surveyed medical school deans, residents and fellows, and examined a curriculum database maintained by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), and lament that medical marijuana is not being addressed in medical education.
In determining the gender of offspring, fathers may be getting shortchanged. Because mothers can influence their offspring in a number of ways, from copulation to birth, while fathers have control over sperm only, it has long been assumed mothers are more important. In mammals, it is also believed that offspring sex ratios can only be determined by the mother, since fathers have always been thought to inseminate an equal proportion of X and Y sperm, having a random effect on offspring sex that they could not shift from equality, or 50:50.
Brain-computer interfaces can replace bodily functions to a certain degree and now they can even compose music. At least in a sense.
Derived from an established brain-computer interface method which mainly serves to spell - more accurately - write, a team writing in PLOS One has shown how they developed a new application by which music can be composed just through the power of thought. All that is needed is a special cap which measures brain waves, composition software. Before you start to think you'll be the next Haydn, keep in mind it can't create musical knowledge.
