Intermittent fasting, and fasting in general, has been a popular fad health gimmick, but the science isn't on its side. Instead, proponents believe mice are little people so if mice weaned on starvation diets lived longer, people would also.
A study released in the July 2016 issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology found that biphenotypic primary liver carcinoma (also called hepatocholangiocarcinoma) may be misclassified as hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) if interpretation is based on major imaging features alone.
Should we be warning consumers about over-consumption of meat as well as sugar?
That's the question being raised by a team of researchers from the University of Adelaide, who say meat in the modern diet offers surplus energy, and is contributing to the prevalence of global obesity.
There is just one problem. The only data available is types of food, they have no idea whether the obese people ate any meat. Or any sugar. If just the availability of meat makes people obese, they have overturned everything science knows about cellular respiration.
Argonne, Ill. (July 29, 2016) -- As scientists and policymakers around the world try to combat the increasing rate of climate change, they have focused on the chief culprit: carbon dioxide.
Produced by the burning of fossil fuels in power plants and car engines, carbon dioxide continues to accumulate in the atmosphere, warming the planet. But trees and other plants do slowly capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, converting it to sugars that store energy.
In a new study from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Illinois at Chicago, researchers have found a similar way to convert carbon dioxide into a usable energy source using sunlight.
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.
