A new cancer vaccine platform works by enhancing the ability of the immune system to recognize cancer by leveraging anti-viral memories it already has - due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the worst outbreak of the last 70 years.
It's done - the independent sequence and assembly of the six billion base pairs from the genome of one person, Craig Venter of the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), has been completed.
Two general versions of the human genome currently exist but those were a melding of DNA from various people. In the case of one version from Celera Genomics, it was a consensus assembly from five individuals, while a government-funded version was a haploid genome based on sequencing from a limited number of individuals.
It seems both versions greatly underestimated human genetic diversity.
Scientists have found monoclonal antibodies which may make a successful Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) vaccine a reality.
Hepatitis treatment is expensive and only successful in half of patients. Untreated or unresponsive patients can go on to develop cirrhosis of the liver, with life affecting consequences or the need for a transplant.
In a collaborative effort with groups across Europe and the USA, scientists from Nottingham University have recently identified antibodies that can successfully prevent infection with many diverse strains of Hepatitis C virus in laboratory models.
Nothing starts a debate in the medical community like death. Abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, all controversial subjects; three anesthesiologists and a medical ethicist tackle the last one in a commentary and two editorials published in September's Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
In a commentary column, David Waisel, M.D., an anesthesiologist practicing at Children's Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School, asserts that it is time to reassess the AMA's position on this issue and allow doctors to participate in state-mandated executions to help provide the condemned a more humane path to death.
Dr. Waisel cites numerous details about the technical problems associated with lethal injection, the form of capital punishment most commonly used in the United States today. Dr.
DNA is one of the most popular building blocks of nanotechnology and is commonly used to construct ordered nanoscale structures with controlled architectures. For the most part, DNA is looked upon as a promising building block for fabricating microelectronic circuits from the bottom up. Now a team of researchers at Young propose the marriage of DNA self-assembly with standard microfabrication and lithography tools to form features such as nanochannels, nanowires, and nanoscale trenches. This discovery may open up new avenues for nanofabrication at dimensions not accessible by conventional optical lithography.
Nutrients taken from avocados are able to thwart oral cancer cells, killing some and preventing pre-cancerous cells from developing into actual cancers, according to researchers at Ohio State University.
Researchers found that extracts from Hass avocados kill or stop the growth of pre-cancerous cells that lead to oral cancer. Hass avocados are year-round fruits known for their distinctive bumpy skin that turns from green to purplish-black as they ripen.
While there are more than 500 varieties of avocados grown worldwide, Hass avocados are the most readily available at supermarkets nationwide. Similar research has not been conducted on other varieties of avocados.
The findings are published online in the journal Seminars in Cancer Biology.
Lead author Steven M.
Purging is often associated with bulimics, who eat large quantities of food and then vomit.
A University of Iowa professor says that purging is its own disorder, distinct because it involves women who eat small quantities of food and then vomit, unlike bulimics who may instead fast or over-exercise after eating.
"Purging disorder is new in the sense that it has not been officially recognized as a unique condition in the classification of eating disorders," said Pamela Keel, associate professor of psychology in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, "But it's not a new problem.
Probiotics, the friendly bacteria beloved of yoghurt advertisers, may be an effective substitute for growth promoting antibiotics in pigs, giving us safer pork products, according to scientists speaking today (Wednesday 5 September 2007) at the Society for General Microbiology’s 161st Meeting at the University of Edinburgh, UK, which runs from 3-6 September 2007.
Scientists from the UK’s Veterinary Laboratories Agency in Weybridge, Surrey have shown that probiotics – the good bacteria taken by millions of people worldwide – can reduce the disease-causing Salmonella bacteria which infect people and pigs.
“Salmonella is responsible for thousands of food poisoning cases each year with many of the cases originating from infected pork products.
A new study by Jeremy Graff and colleagues from Eli Lilly and Company has demonstrated the anti-cancer effect of a new therapeutic in a mouse model of human tumors and has spawned clinical trials to test the ability of this therapeutic to treat human cancers. As highlighted in the accompanying commentary by Celeste Simon and colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, if the therapeutic is as effective in clinical trials as it was in mice it will be useful for the treatment of a broad range of cancers.
ADHD is characterized by hyperactivity, impulsive behavior and an inability to pay attention to tasks; the condition affects social behaviors and achievement at school and work.
A new study says an estimated 8.7 percent of U.S. children age 8 to 15 meet the diagnostic criteria for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Less than half of that are being treated for it.
Is ADHD really on the rise or are the criteria too broad? It depends on who you ask because it doesn't follow any particular medical pattern. Boys have it more than girls and hispanics less than whites. The poorest one-fifth of children were more likely than the wealthiest one-fifth of children to have it.
The largest-ever study of treatments for diabetes has shown that a fixed combination of perindopril and indapamide also reduces the risks of heart and kidney disease.
One of the study leaders, Professor Stephen MacMahon from The George Institute for International Health in Australia, said, "these results represent an important step forward in health care for the millions of people with diabetes worldwide. This treatment reduced the likelihood of dying from the complications of diabetes by almost one-fifth, with virtually no side-effects.”
Globally, there are approximately 250 million people with diabetes, most of whom will eventually be killed or disabled by the complications of their condition. The most common cause of death in people with diabetes is heart disease.
During the last Ice Age, the ice dammed enormous lakes in Russia. The drainage system was reversed several times and the rivers flowed southwards. A group of geologists is now investigating what took place when the ice melted and the lakes released huge volumes of fresh water into the Arctic Ocean.
”The ice-dammed lakes in Russia were larger than the largest lakes we know today,” Eiliv Larsen, a geologist at the Geological Survey of Norway (NGU), tells me. He is in charge of the important SciencePub International Polar Year project that is studying natural climate changes in the Arctic and the ways in which man has adapted to them.
Moving glaciers
”The entire drainage system in Russia has been reversed several times during the past 130 000 years.
With prices of gourmet coffee approaching sticker-shock levels, scientists in Illinois are reporting development of a method to "fingerprint" coffee to detect when corn has been mixed in to short-change customers.
Gulab Jham and colleagues point out that such adulteration of Brazilian coffee is among the most serious problems affecting coffee quality -- with cereal grains, coffee twigs, and brown sugar sometimes mixed into the genuine article. Their research focuses on detecting corn, probably the most widely used adulterant.
