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.
A new mathematical model developed at the University of British Columbia integrates environmental and molecular sequence information to better explain how microbial networks drive nutrient and energy cycling in marine ecosystems.
The work could dramatically improve researchers’ and policy makers’ ability to predict how the world’s marine microbial communities (microbiome) respond to climate change, and resulting impacts on fisheries, biodiversity, climate and more.
The model and associated simulations were published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A team of physicians and laboratory scientists has taken a key step toward a cure for sickle cell disease, using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to fix the mutated gene responsible for the disease in stem cells from the blood of affected patients. For the first time, they have corrected the mutation in a proportion of stem cells that is high enough to produce a substantial benefit in sickle cell patients.
The first animals evolved from their single-celled ancestors around 800 million years ago, but a new paper suggests that this leap was a lot less dramatic than scientists have assumed, because the single-celled ancestor of animals likely already had some of the mechanisms that animal cells use today to develop into different tissue types.
The researchers studied a single-celled amoeba called Capsaspora owczarzaki, which is a close relative of today's multi-celled animals. Capsaspora was originally discovered living inside a freshwater snail and the team sequenced the Capsaspora genome in an earlier project and discovered that the amoeba contained many genes that, in animals, are related to multicellular functions.
Mars' largest moon, Phobos, has captured public imagination because the dominant feature on its surface (22-kilometers across) is Stickney crater (9-km across), a mega crater that spans nearly half the moon.
The crater lends Phobos a physical resemblance to the planet-destroying Death Star in the film "Star Wars." But over the decades, understanding the formation of such a massive crater has proven elusive for researchers. For the first time, physicists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab have demonstrated how an asteroid or comet impact could have created Stickney crater without destroying Phobos completely. The research, which also debunks a theory regarding the moon's mysterious grooved terrain, was published in Geophysical Review Letters.
The nearby star Proxima Centauri hosts an Earth-sized planet (called Proxima b) in its habitable zone but the star seems nothing like our sun. It's a small, cool, red dwarf star only one-tenth as massive and one-thousandth as luminous as the sun. However, new research shows that it is sunlike in one surprising way: it has a regular cycle of starspots.
Starspots (like sunspots) are dark blotches on a star's surface where the temperature is a little cooler than the surrounding area. They are driven by magnetic fields. A star is made of ionized gases called plasma. Magnetic fields can restrict the plasma's flow and create spots. Changes to a star's magnetic field can affect the number and distribution of starspots.
The US has one of the highest rates of obesity in the world, with soda consumption identified as one of the factors. On average, Americans consumed 46 gallons of soda in 2009, giving the US one of the highest rates of per capita soda consumption of any country. A recent report estimated that soda consumption caused one-fifth of weight gain in the US between 1977 and 2007.
Although individuals often consume natural products because of their potential health benefits, a new review indicates that it is not clear whether the benefits of plant-derived compounds that mimic estrogen outweigh the possible health risks.
Phytoestrogens are compounds from plants that are similar in structure to estrogen and are found in a variety of foods, especially soy. Some women may consume phytoestrogens promoted as natural alternatives to hormone replacement therapy to help ease menopausal symptoms such as hot flushes or to protect against bone loss.
ontroversy over prostate cancer screening guidelines that discourage use of PSA tests did not significantly reduce use of the test, a five-year review of more than 275,000 visits at UT Southwestern Medical Center showed.
Revised guidelines from the United States Preventive Services Task Force in 2012 advised against PSA-based screening for prostate cancer, concluding that the potential harms of overtreatment outweighed the possible benefits of early detection. UT Southwestern cancer researchers' review of electronic medical records showed that this conclusion did not discourage the number of tests ordered, contrary to some other findings.
EAST LANSING, Mich. --- Intelligence -- and not just relentless practice -- plays a significant role in determining chess skill, indicates a comprehensive new study led by Michigan State University researchers.
The research provides some of the most conclusive evidence to date that cognitive ability is linked to skilled performance -- a hotly debated issue in psychology for decades -- and refutes theories that expertise is based solely on intensive training.
The bacterium that causes citrus greening disease, Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus (CLas), is not only decimating citrus orchards, it also does a number in the guts of the insect that transmits it.Citrus greening disease, also called Huanglongbing, has taken a terrible toll on Florida's $9 billion citrus industry and infected trees have already been detected in California. It is vector-borne, which means it is spread by insects, namely the Asian citrus psyllid.
Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), one of the nation's largest environmental groups, which has been bankrolled with $50 million from the heirs to the Walmart fortune, has spent millions of dollars pushing a wholesale change in how the U.S. manages its fisheries, to the detriment of fishermen and with no benefit to nature
Humanities scholars mostly focus on the bereavement customs of White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) whereas Catholics, the overwhelming majority of Latinos, are overlooked in their unique funeral customs, which sometimes include overnight wakes and presenting food to the deceased.
Candi K. Cann, Ph.D., a humanities assistant professor at Baylor University took a group of her students in 2015 to a Latino funeral home in a Central Texas city where nearly 30 percent of the total population identifies as Hispanic or Latino, according to U.S. Census statistics.
