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.
We know that individuals who smoke take major health risks. Now a new research study from Lund University in Sweden shows that common treatment for breast cancer works less well in patients who smoke, compared to non-smokers.
The study is published in the British Journal of Cancer.
A recent study has shown that emissions in major cities caused by restaurants such as pizzerias and steakhouses using wood burners can be damaging to the urban environment.
The findings published in the journal Atmospheric Environment points out the underlining pollution causes of the Latin American city of Sao Paulo in Brazil. This work is a collaborative effort by ten leading air pollution experts from seven universities, led by the University of Surrey's Dr Prashant Kumar from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, under the umbrella of University Global Partnership Network (UGPN).
Warsaw, Poland, 17 June 2016 - A new study from the UK Centre for Substance Use Research, being presented today at the Global Forum on Nicotine, shows e-cigarettes are playing an important role in reducing the likelihood of young people smoking, in many cases acting as a 'roadblock' to combustible tobacco.
In detailed qualitative interviews with young people aged 16 to 25 across Scotland and England, the majority of participants viewed e-cigarettes as having reduced - not increased - the possibility of both themselves and other people smoking.
Diminishing a person's belief in free will leads to them feeling less like their true selves, according to recent research published in Social Psychological and Personality Science. In a pair of studies, researchers from Texas A&M University manipulated people's beliefs in free will to see how this would affect the subjects' sense of authenticity, their sense of self.
"Whether you agree that we have free will or that we are overpowered by social influence or other forms of determinism, the belief in free will has truly important consequences," says lead author Elizabeth Seto, a Graduate Student at the Department of Psychology at Texas A&M University.
An effective and less expensive tool for the inspection of food and drugs could soon be a reality. Scientists from the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin have been working with national and international partners to develop a conceptually new source of terahertz radiation. The innovation makes it much easier to generate this radiation, which is well suited to the analysis of soft materials and could therefore be more widely used in the food and pharmaceutical industry in future.
A new paper in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology reviewed all mammal species known from the end of the Cretaceous period in North America and found that over 93 percent became extinct across the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary, due to the same asteroid that killed the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago.
That's significantly more than previously thought - but mammals also recovered far more quickly than previously though.
Celiac disease is a rare immune-based condition brought on by the consumption of gluten in genetically susceptible patients. In recent years a larger number of people have stated they are gluten sensitive or even celiac despite lack of a diagnosis, and many dismissed that as the nocebo effect - people who give up something harmless and feel better, the opposite of people who take something harmless and feel better, a placebo. They argued that people who were embracing it because of pop culture books on wheat.
In the 1950s, thalidomide (Contergan) was prescribed as a sedative drug to pregnant women, resulting in a great number of infants with serious malformations. Up to now, the reasons for these disastrous birth defects have remained unclear. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have at last identified the molecular mechanism of thalidomide. Their findings are highly relevant to current cancer therapies, as related substances are essential components of modern cancer treatment regimens.
Women who commit deadly violence are different in many ways from male perpetrators, both in terms of the most common victims, the way in which the murder is committed, the place where it is carried out and the perpetrator's background. This is shown by a new study that also investigated homicide trends over time in Sweden.
Sweden is in the group of countries with the lowest number of murders per capita. As in other parts of the world, the majority of cases of deadly violence are committed by men: In nine cases out of ten, the perpetrator is a man.
It is also men that have been the main focus of studies in this area. We know less about the characteristics of women who commit deadly violence, because they have been the subject of far fewer studies.
Giant Ice Age species including elephant-sized sloths and powerful saber-toothed cats that once roamed the windswept plains of Patagonia, southern South America, were finally felled by a perfect storm of a rapidly warming climate and humans, according to a paper in Science Advances.
The timing and cause of rapid extinctions of the megafauna has remained a mystery for centuries.
The work led by the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) at the University of Adelaide, says that it was only when the climate warmed, long after humans first arrived in Patagonia, did the megafauna suddenly die off around 12,300 years ago, after the last Ice Age intermission.
The researchers asked test participants in different age cohorts to feel two needlepoints that were located closely to each other with the tips of their fingers. Older participants perceived two points as a single event even when they were located quite far apart, whereas younger people were still able to distinguish them as two distinct points, which is evidence for degraded tactile perception at higher age. This impaired perception experienced by older people goes hand in hand with a spatial enhancement of brain activity, which researchers generally interpret as a compensatory mechanism.
Learning and training improve perception
Professional footballers and their coaches often complain about the mental fatigue induced by the stress of frequent matches.
Now research from the University of Kent has demonstrated for the first time that mental fatigue can have a negative impact on football performance by reducing running, passing, and shooting ability.
Professor Samuele Marcora of Kent's School of Sport and Exercise Sciences worked with researchers from the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, and Ghent University in Belgium on the study published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sport & Exercise.
