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.
Let's be honest, most human dads do less work raising the kids than human moms. That's not true in all species, though. In a few, fathers care for their developing embryos more than mothers, and biologists speculated that this paternal devotion had evolved from ancestors entirely lacking parental care.A new paper provides a new wrinkle. When fathers are more involved, parental care gets a lot more elaborate.
Cookbooks are popular. Cookbooks are instructional.But they are woefully lacking information about a vital thing - food safety. An analysis of 1,497 recipes from 29 cookbooks that appeared on the New York Times best sellers list for food and diet books, all of which included handling raw animal ingredients, such as meat, poultry, seafood or eggs, didn't note food safety much at all.Specifically, the researchers looked for three things:* Did the recipe tell readers to cook the dish to a specific internal temperature?
If you read the claims of environmental groups, trace levels of chemicals are the source of most cancers, even if they are well below harmful levels, due to vague claims of "bioaccumulation." If you read the recent claims of the EPA, air pollution is causing acute deaths, even though the United States has some of the cleanest air in the world and no one can find any deaths it has caused during the entire existence of the EPA.
Politicians are arguing with each other about health care. One side is yelling that people have coverage, even if they can't afford to use it and twice as many people will lose than ever got it. Another side claims emergency room visits and pediatric care are a luxury.What is clear is that something needs to be fixed. While advocates for the ACA will say that only 6 to 8 percent of US health care expenditures are primary care, critics argue that we already had the best in the world. What is clear to all is that payment models introduced under the Affordable Care Act raised expectations for patients and doctors, but any gains were modest.
People with cystic fibrosis suffer repeated lung infections because their airway mucus is too thick and sticky to keep bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens from causing chronic infection. How mucus becomes abnormal in
cystic fibrosis
airways has never been fully understood, but a new study has determined that mucin proteins, which give mucus its gel-like properties, fail to unfold normally in
cystic fibrosis
airways, making airway mucus much more thick and sticky than it would be otherwise.Cystic fibrosis is a rare genetic disease that affects about 70,000 people worldwide. It occurs when a person has two defective copies of the CFTR gene, which triggers the creation of the CFTR protein. When that protein is mutated, the result is cystic fibrosis.
The numerous nutrition guidelines promoted by the U.S. federal government are obeyed by just 2 percent of Americans. If only 2 percent of any population can obey your guidelines, they are a nutritional wishlist created by groups of experts promoting their diet fads, not evidence-based information.However, one group is constantly criticized by everyone else - pregnant mothers - and a new study shows that no pregnant women in any demographic are able to achieve the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Which means those guidelines are irrelevant, not that expectant moms need even more criticism.
A new paper claims the size and shape of your nose evolved in response to local climate conditions. The nose is one of our distinctive facial features. It conditions the air we breathe so it is warm and moist when it reaches the lungs, which helps prevent infections. And that may be why people whose ancestors lived in hot, humid places tend to have wider nostrils than people whose ancestors came from cold and dry environments.
ECHA, the European Chemicals Agency, has released findings from its Committee for Risk Assessment (RAC) which concluded that glyphosate (e.g. Roundup, by the agriculture company Monsanto, though it's been off-patent for 17 years) is not a carcinogen, nor is it a mutagen, nor is it toxic for reproduction.
By using lasers to manipulate a superfluid gas known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, the team was able to coax the condensate into a quantum phase of matter that has a rigid structure — like a solid, and can flow without viscosity, a key characteristic of a superfluid. Basically, they have created a supersolid, a
new form of matter which combines the properties of solids with those of superfluids. Isn't that a contradiction? “It is counterintuitive to have a material which combines superfluidity and solidity,” says team leader Wolfgang Ketterle, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at MIT. “If your coffee was superfluid and you stirred it, it would continue to spin around forever.”
Metabolism, the set of processes through which we gain energy from food and produce the biomolecules we need in our body's cells, is universal to life. The biochemical pathways that underpin these processes are highly similar across all organisms and species.
To the outside world, muscles look like they contract or do work but at the very small scale it ismyosin molecules pulling actin filaments and myosin and actin are essentially nanomachines that convert the chemical energy of ATP hydrolysis - how cells in our muscles create energy - into mechanical work.New electron cryomicroscopy images reveal unexpectedly large conformational changes in the myosin molecule during the pull and that may show how myosin generates force and create a paradigm for the construction of true nanomachines.
As anti-smoking groups like the American Council on Science and Health have long contended, while nicotine may be addictive, so are lots of things, from video games to coffee. It's the toxins in cigarette smoke that will kill you.
For that reason, public-health oriented anti-smoking groups have embraced nicotine vaping devices ("e-cigarettes") as one tool in the tool chest of harm reduction and (preferably) smoking cessation. Yet some smoking groups, and even the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have migrated from being a war on cigarettes to being in war on some tobacco products, including nicotine vapor yet, oddly, not nicotine gums and patches.
