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.
For the first time, researchers at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and University of Leeds have proved that gene variants associated with red hair, pale skin and freckles are linked to a higher number of genetic mutations in skin cancers. The burden of mutations associated with these variants is comparable to an extra 21 years of sun exposure in people without this variant.
The research, published today in Nature Communications, showed that even a single copy of a red hair-associated MC1R gene variant increased the number of mutations in melanoma skin cancer; the most serious form of skin cancer. Many non-red haired people carry these common variants and the study shows that everyone needs to be careful about sun exposure.
A decade ago, ancient technology - using natural water to perform work - was the green goal. Today, dams are bad but now wind is back in fashion.
Trying to think green when buying a car? Whether your new fuel-efficient engine helps or hurts the warming planet depends on where you live and what you're putting in the tank.
New cars aim to deliver high performance with maximum fuel efficiency, making them easier on both the environment and the wallet. To do this, auto manufacturers are adopting a smaller, more fuel-efficient engine type, called gasoline direct-injection (GDI) -- between model years 2009 to 2015, the percentage of new vehicles sold with GDI engines jumped from five to 46 per cent.
Sarcoma is an aggressive form of cancer responsible for up to 20 percent of childhood cancers. Tumors often first appear in the extremities and the abdomen. Surgery is a primary treatment, but it often is combined with chemotherapy. This week in ACS Central Science, researchers propose a scheme to target chemotherapy medications specifically to sarcomas, leading to greater efficacy and fewer side effects.
The days of pork may be coming to a close. The International Agency for Research on Cancer recently declared bacon as carcinogenic as plutonium, and now a group of animal activists say pigs are more like people than we know.
23andMe has launched Genotyping Services for Research (GSR) so that researchers – no matter their level of genetics expertise – can infuse genetics into their studies.
Though the physician wage gap between genders is virtually nonexistent in the private sector, that hasn't carried over to academia yet, where female academic physicians at public medical schools had lower average salaries than their male counterparts. Age, experience, medical specialty, faculty rank and other factors don't really account for it, according to an article published online by JAMA Internal Medicine.
Habitual cycling, whether as transportation to work or as a recreational activity, has been associated with lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes (T2D), according to an epidemiology paper in PLOS Medicine, which affirms that Type 2 diabetes is a lifestyle disease, brought on by too many calories and not enough exercise.
The cohort analysis, conducted by Martin Rasmussen of the University of Southern Denmark, and colleagues, included 24,623 men and 27,890 women from Denmark, recruited between the ages of 50 and 65, and compared the association between self-reported recreational and commuter cycling habits with
type 2 diabetes
Reactive oxygen species (ROS) such as peroxides and superoxides are important signalling molecules in an organism's regulation of metabolism and inflammation. Accumulation of ROS have been linked to neurodegeneration and cancer. Researchers at Umeå University and Hospital of Halland in Sweden now reveal an unexpected function of ROS. They dampen a key inflammatory process and weaken the immune system´s ability to combat pathogens such as those that cause pneumonia. The findings are published in the July 2016 issue of the Cell Press Journal Immunity.
Fossil bones and stone tools can tell us a lot about human evolution, but certain dynamic behaviours of our fossil ancestors - things like how they moved and how individuals interacted with one another - are incredibly difficult to deduce from these traditional forms of paleoanthropological data. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, along with an international team of collaborators, have recently discovered multiple assemblages of Homo erectus footprints in northern Kenya that provide unique opportunities to understand locomotor patterns and group structure through a form of data that directly records these dynamic behaviours. Using novel analytical techniques, they have demonstrated that these H.
Washington, DC - July 12, 2016 - Ebola and Marburg filovirus disease outbreaks have typically occurred as isolated events, confined to central Africa. However, the recent Ebola epidemic spread to several African countries, and caused 11,000 deaths. That epidemic underscored the need to develop vaccines and therapeutics that could be used to fight future disease outbreaks. Now new research suggests that antibodies to filoviruses from individuals who have survived these diseases may offer protection--not only against the particular filovirus that infected an individual, but against other filoviruses, as well. The research is published in Clinical and Vaccine Immunology, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology.
WHAT: Scientists at the National Institutes of Health are reporting new, unexpected details about the fundamental structure of collagen, the most abundant protein in the human body. In lab experiments, they demonstrated that collagen, once viewed as inert, forms structures that regulate how certain enzymes break down and remodel body tissue. The finding of this regulatory system provides a molecular view of the potential role of physical forces at work in heart disease, cancer, arthritis, and other disease-related processes, they say. The study appears in the current online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
