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.
August 1, 2016 - Should children be considered for facial transplantation? While there are some special ethical and psychological concerns, these shouldn't rule out the possibility of performing face transplant in carefully selected children, according to an expert review in the August issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS).
A group of researchers at Immunology Frontier Research Center (IFReC), Osaka University and RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences jointly clarified the mechanism for inducing germinal-center B cells' differentiation into memory B cells, immune cells that remember antigens, at the molecular level.
When re-exposed to antigens such as bacteria or viruses, our bodies get rid of antigens by producing more antibodies than in the primary response. This is because memory B cells, which remember antigens in the primary immune response, are induced and respond faster in the secondary exposure to bacteria or viruses and differentiate into antibody-producing cells.
Researchers have identified 788 biomarkers in blood that could be used to develop an early stage cancer screening test for the general population.
The study, led by the University of Sheffield, is the first to create a comprehensive list of relevant cancer blood biomarkers that have been researched in the last five years. The study also groups them by molecular function and records the technologies that can be used to detect them.
A new, epidemic strain of C. difficile is proving alarmingly deadly, and new research from the University of Virginia School of Medicine not only explains why but also suggests a way to stop it.
Until now, scientists have not understood what made this strain worse than other strains of the bacteria, the most common cause of hospital-acquired infections. The new strain kills up to 15 percent of infected patients, including those who receive antibiotics, and has become increasingly common over the last 15 years. This has prompted the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to label it an "urgent threat."
A Potent Toxin
When it comes to prejudice, it does not matter if you are smart or not, or conservative or liberal, each group has their own specific biases. In a recent study, psychologists show that low cognitive ability (i.e., intelligence, verbal ability) was not a consistent predictor of prejudice. Cognitive ability, whether high or low, only predicts prejudice towards specific groups. The results are published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.
"Very few people are immune to expressing prejudice, especially prejudice towards people they disagree with," says lead author Mark Brandt (Tilburg University, Netherlands).
Newly discovered fossil evidence from Namibia strengthens the proposition that the world's first mass extinction was caused by "ecosystem engineers" - newly evolved biological organisms that altered the environment so radically it drove older species to extinction.
The event, known as the end-Ediacaran extinction, took place 540 million years ago. The earliest life on Earth consisted of microbes - various types of single-celled organisms. These held sway for more than 3 billion years, when the first multicellular organisms evolved. The most successful of these were the Ediacarans, which spread around the globe about 600 million years ago. They were a largely immobile form of marine life shaped like discs and tubes, fronds and quilted mattresses.
There are more than 120,000 varieties of rice stored at the germplasm bank at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, but a new paper focused on varieties that met important criteria - currently grown by farmers, have a high yield potential, be disease and pest-resistant, grow to the right size and have strong enough roots to withstand monsoon-force winds - to find out which ones could were optimal in regards to nitrogen.
Nitrogen is one of three main nutrients required for crops to grow, it also costs the most to produce.
WHAT:
Vaccination against a single strain of Zika virus should be sufficient to protect against genetically diverse strains of the virus, according to a study conducted by investigators from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH); Washington University in St. Louis; and Emory University in Atlanta.
A diet high in saturated fat can make your brain struggle to control what you eat, says a new study in Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience.
If people are looking to lose weight, stay clear of saturated fat. Consuming these types of fatty food affects a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, which helps regulate hunger.
The fat causes inflammation that impedes the brain to control the food intake. In other words, people struggle to control how much they eat, when to stop and what type of food to eat - symptoms seen in obesity.
French men love French women. So much so that given two equal candidates for a job, one male and one female, they are likely to score a female higher when it comes to being a science educator.
Claims of bias are rampant in the United States - women overwhelmingly dominate the social sciences, which men claim is bias, while men dominate the physical sciences, which women say is bias. Yet once women get into the private sector companies fall all over themselves to hire women, which means the problem may be just in academia. Female doctors are also not penalized for having families - unless they are at academic institutions.
Teenagers with easy access to drugs and alcohol in the home are more likely to drink and do drugs in their early and late 20s, according to an analysis of survey results from around 15,000 participants in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health over the course of three waves - when the survey participants were, on average, 16, 22 and 29 years old.
According to Cliff Broman, professor of sociology
at Michigan State University, the effects were more significant among Caucasians and males, which may be odd defiance of stereotype or a confounder, since Hispanic and Asian participants generally had drugs and alcohol more easily available to them in the home during adolescence.
They may be slimy, but they are a perfect environment for microorganisms: biofilms. Protected against external influences, here bacteria can grow undisturbed, and trigger diseases. Scientists at Kiel University, in cooperation with colleagues at the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH) in Hamburg-Harburg, are researching how it can be possible to prevent the formation of biofilms from the beginning. On this basis, alternatives to antibiotics could be developed, as many pathogens are already resistant to most commercially used antibiotics. The biologists have published their findings in the scientific journal "Frontiers in Microbiology". Their study shows that strategies from nature are particularly effective at inhibiting biofilms.
