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.
By analyzing medical records gathered over three decades on more than 11,000 Americans participating in a federally funded study, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine say they have more evidence that driving diastolic blood pressure too low is associated with damage to heart tissue.
The researchers caution that their findings cannot prove that very low diastolic blood pressure -- a measure of pressure in arteries between heartbeats when the heart is resting and also the "lower" number in a blood pressure reading -- directly causes heart damage, only that there appears to be a statistically significant increase in heart damage risk among those with the lowest levels of diastolic blood pressure.
Populations of New World screwworm flies - devastating parasitic livestock pests in Western Hemisphere tropical regions - could be greatly suppressed with the introduction of male flies that produce only males when they mate, according to new research from North Carolina State University, the USDA's Agricultural Research Service, the Panama-United States Commission for the Eradication and Prevention of Screwworm (COPEG) and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
Withholding tetracycline in the larval diet essentially means "It's a boy" when the genetically modified male flies successfully mate with females in the field, says Max Scott, an NC State entomologist who is the corresponding author of a paper describing the research.
When it comes to the billions of neurons in your brain, what you see at birth is what get -- except in the hippocampus. Buried deep underneath the folds of the cerebral cortex, neural stem cells in the hippocampus continue to generate new neurons, inciting a struggle between new and old as the new attempts to gain a foothold in memory-forming center of the brain.
In a study published online in Neuron, Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT in collaboration with an international team of scientists found they could bias the competition in favor of the newly generated neurons.
A new hypothesis aims to explain how the complex vertebrate body, with its skeleton, muscles, nervous and cardiovascular systems, arises from a single cell during development and how these systems evolved over time. They give it a proper name, embryo geometry, but scientists are going to hold off on calling it a theory until it shows some chance of validation. Until then, it is like String Theory, more philosophy than science.
The paper, along with illustrations - or "blueprints" - depicting how it applies to different vertebrate organ systems, is in Progress in Biophysics&Molecular Biology.
Skin bleaching with the use of glutathione is on the rise, despite the potential ethical issues and adverse side effects associated with the practice, warns a doctor in The BMJ this week.
Ophelia Dadzie, a consultant dermatologist at The Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Founder and Director of London Ethnic Skin Limited, says that "there is a lack of authoritative public health information in the UK about the efficacy and safety of this practice."
Skin bleaching is a cosmetic procedure that involves lightening constitutive skin colour, and one such agent used is glutathione, an antioxidant that can be administered orally or intravenously.
The Griffith University study investigated parasite interactions in wild birds and found they are a crucial indicator of malaria infection risk.
The study Co-infections and environmental conditions drive the distributions of blood parasites in wild birds has been published in the Journal of Animal Ecology.
A special variant of a sugar molecule in the human nose might explain why pneumococcal infections are more common in humans than in other animals, researchers from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden report in a study published in the journal Cell Host & Microbe. The discovery can help in the search for a broader vaccine able to protect against all types of pneumococci.
The bacterium S. pneumoniae or the pneumococcus exists naturally in the noses of children and adults, but is also one of the most common causes of infectious diseases in the world, with meningitis and pneumonia being amongst the most severe. Pneumococci cause more severe infections in humans than in other mammals, something that has hitherto remained a mystery.
An analysis of the fossil known as the Minden Monster has enabled paleontologists to assign the largest predatory dinosaur ever found in Germany to a previously unknown genus, among a group that underwent rapid diversification in the Middle Jurassic.
In a new research collaboration between the University of Witwatersrand and the University of Adelaide, previously held views on the evolutionary development of the human brain are being challenged. The findings of their studies, published today in
the Royal Society Open Science*, unseats previous theories that
the progression of human intelligence is simply related to the increase in size of the brain.
The regulation and function of sleep is one of the biggest black boxes of today's brain science. A new paper published online on August 2 in the journal Brain Structure & Function finds that rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is suppressed by adenosine acting on a specific subtype of adenosine receptors, the A2A receptors, in the olfactory bulb. The study was conducted by researchers at Fudan University's School of Basic Medical Sciences in the Department of Pharmacology and the University of Tsukuba's International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine (WPI-IIIS). The research team used pharmacological and genetic methods to show that blocking A2A receptors or neurons that contain the A2A receptors in the olfactory bulb increases REM sleep in rodents.
We see all of the rosy claims coming from the Federal government about unemployment rates yet around us we see no one can buy a home, young people have resigned themselves to living with their parents, and the deficit this year has climbed at a rate that is unprecedented.It's because government unemployment statistics only tally people who get unemployment, and unemployment checks expire. It does not count people who have given up or who are chronically unemployed but that shows we have been in a period of stagnation for almost 10 years. Labor Day is about to arrive but since 2009 it has become less meaningful than ever. U.S. labor force participation at 62 percent and declining, which means it could soon be below 50 percent.
A popular belief that there is a higher number of births around the full moon has been shown to be true for dairy cows by a group of University of Tokyo researchers.
Previous studies have found conflicting evidence on the moon cycle affecting the timing of human births and many researchers remain unconvinced that the moon influences human births.
Associate Professor Tomohiro Yonezawa of the Graduate School of Agriculture and Life Sciences explains that the results may have varied because "multiple factors, such as the mothers' nutrition, social environment, and genetic background could disguise the moon's influence. However, cows may provide a good model for teasing apart the lunar effect from other factors that also influence birth."
