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.
Using a reverse paint-by-numbers approach, scientists have located another gene that controls the brilliant patterning of Heliconius butterfly wings. Led by former Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) fellow Nicole Nadeau, the researchers identified variations in the gene that correspond to wing color and pattern variation in three different Heliconius species. Published in Nature, June 2016, the discovery puts scientists a step closer to unlocking the code responsible for diversity and evolution in butterflies and moths.
Researchers use accelerators to coax the electron into performing a wide range of tricks to enable medical tests and treatments, improve product manufacturing, and power breakthrough scientific research. Now, they're learning how to coax the same tricks out of the electron's antimatter twin - the positron - to open up a whole new vista of research and applications.
A Johns Hopkins study on data from more than 7,000 older Americans has found that those who show signs of probable dementia but are not yet formally diagnosed are nearly twice as likely as those with such a diagnosis to engage in potentially unsafe activities, such as driving, cooking, and managing finances and medications.
The findings, reported in the June issue of Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, highlight the need, investigators say, to make patients and their families explicitly aware of the memory disorder so that physicians and loved ones can take protective steps.
A new paper in American Journal of Geophysics, Geochemistry and Geosystems criticizes alarming projections of up to 2 meters in sea level rise due to increasing anthropogenic CO2 emissions - and implicitly media that acts as cheerleaders by foregoing critical thinking - because those claims are not based on data. Instead of noting that tide gauges with enough information to infer a trend don't show increased relative rate of rise, but instead show small positive negative and positive fluctuations, papers with claims of up to 2 meters in sea level rise are heavily promoted, including by groups who insist policy makers need to include those claims in flood maps.
Gay men who live outside major Canadian cities are less likely to get an HIV test than their metropolitan counterparts, according to a survey which also finds that the lower testing rates are likely connected to internalized feelings of homophobia and a reluctance to disclose sexual preferences at a doctor's office.
The team surveyed 153 people recruited through online dating sites and events in the gay community. The results were that 24 percent of men living in smaller communities had never had an HIV test, compared to the 14 to 17 percent of untested men living in large cities such as Vancouver and Toronto.
June 1, 2016: Aortic disease, including aortic aneurysm and aortic dissection, is an important cause of cardiovascular morbidity and death. There have been exciting developments in caring for patients with aortic aneurysm and dissection, including great advances in diagnosis and endovascular therapies. Despite this, there remains significant gaps in knowledge of the understanding of mechanisms of aortic pathology and opportunity to further improve patient care. With this in mind, Vascular Medicine, the official journal of the Society for Vascular Medicine, dedicated its June, 2016 issue to this important topic.
The majority of patients prefer their dermatologists to be dressed in professional attire with a white coat, according to an article published online by JAMA Dermatology.
Patient perceptions of their physicians may affect outcomes so it is possible that physician attire may affect those outcomes.
Robert S. Kirsner, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, and coauthors surveyed the attitudes of dermatology patients (261 were surveyed and 255 participated and completed enough questions to be included).
Scientists from RIKEN in Japan have discovered that acrolein--a toxic substance produced in cells during times of oxidative stress--in fact may play a role in preventing the process of fibrillation, an abnormal clumping of peptides that has been associated with Alzheimer's disease and other neural diseases. The key to this new role is a chemical process known as 4+4 cycloaddition, where two molecules with "backbones" made up of four-atom chains come together to form a ring-like structure with eight atoms. The group found that in some circumstances, acrolein can combine with a class of molecules called polyamines, which themselves are important biological players, to make substances that can prevent the fibrillation of Aβ40 peptides.
The earth's magnetic field has been existing for at least 3.4 billion years thanks to the low heat conduction capability of iron in the planet's core. This is the result of the first direct measurement of the thermal conductivity of iron at pressures and temperatures corresponding to planetary core conditions. DESY scientist Zuzana Konôpková and her colleagues present their study in the scientific journal Nature. The results could resolve a recent debate about the so-called geodynamo paradox.
WASHINGTON, DC, May 25, 2016 -- A new study suggests that psychotherapists discriminate against prospective patients who are black or working class.
"Although I expected to find racial and class-based disparities, the magnitude of the discrimination working-class therapy seekers faced exceeded my grimmest expectations," said Heather Kugelmass, a doctoral student in sociology at Princeton University and the author of the study.
Among middle-class people who contacted a therapist to schedule an appointment, Kugelmass found that 28 percent of whites and 17 percent of blacks received appointment offers. Appointment offer rates for both black and white working-class therapy seekers were 8 percent.
The imperial dominance of the ancient Wari Empire at the Huaca Pucllana site in Lima, Peru, was likely not achieved through population replacement, according to a study published June 1, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Guido Valverde from the University of Adelaide, Australia, and colleagues.
Aerosol particles generated by human activity counteract the warming of the earth's atmosphere by greenhouse gases. However, this effect might be smaller than first thought, as many particles were already generated from tree emissions in pre-industrial times. This was the finding of a simulation carried out as part of the international CLOUD experiment, in which researchers from the Goethe University played a major role. The results are published in the form of three papers in the renowned journals "Science" and "Nature".
