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.
Medical societies recommend that patients with advanced cancer receive palliative care soon after diagnosis, and receive hospice care for at least the last three days of their life. Those recommendations don't match real-life practice, according to Risha Gidwani, DrPH, a health economist at Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Economics Resource Center and colleagues who examined care received by all veterans over the age of 65 with cancer who died in 2012, a total of 11,896 individuals.
In the 1970s, current Obama administration science czar Dr. John Holdren wrote a book advocating various measures to stop global starvation, including a world government and mandatory birth control.
Food is no longer an issue, science took care of that despite the protestations of Holdren and fellow doomsday prophet Professor Paul Ehrlich, so culture moved onto something new that would require social engineering and selecting who gets to give birth: global warming.
250 methane flares release the climate gas methane from the seabed and into the Arctic Ocean. During the summer months this leads to an increased methane concentration in the ocean. But surprisingly, very little of the climate gas rising up through the sea reaches the atmosphere.
"Our results are exciting and controversial", says senior scientist Cathrine Lund Myhre from NILU - Norwegian Institute for Air Research, who is cooperating with CAGE through MOCA project.
The results were published in Geophysical Research Letters.
DURHAM, N.C. -- Prescribing certain medications on the basis of a patient's race has long come under fire from those uneasy with using race as a surrogate for biology when treating disease.
But there are multiple challenges to overcome before we can move beyond race-based treatment decisions, writes Duke University geneticist and bioethicist Charmaine Royal in a perspective piece published May 25 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
In "Will Precision Medicine Move Us beyond Race?" Royal and colleagues Vence Bonham of the National Institutes of Health and Shawneequa Callier of The George Washington University describe some of the thorny issues raised by race-based drugs.
Cincinnati, OH, May 27, 2016 -- Many pediatricians and pediatric subspecialists believe that their clinical care extends from treating ill children through end-of-life care. However, are pediatricians actually meeting the needs of families and their dying child? In a new study scheduled for publication in The Journal of Pediatrics, researchers surveyed bereaved parents and found that pediatric end-of-life care needs improvement.
A year and a half ago, researchers at Brown University found a molecular gas pedal for melanin production. Now they've found a brake. For scientists, the finding deepens not only the basic understanding of how eyes, skin and hair gain color, but also what perhaps can be done in disorders, such as albinism, when that doesn't happen.
The study in the Nature journal Scientific Reports shows that pigmentation is reduced by the activity of "TPC2," a protein that channels the flow of positive sodium ions out of the melanosomes, compartments that produce melanin in cells. When TPC2 lets those ions out, the inside of the melanosomes become more acidic, the researchers found, and that shuts down the enzyme that drives melanin production.
Government subsidies should be used to encourage investment in energy storage systems if renewable power is to be fully integrated into the sector, according to researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA).
Variable output renewable energy systems, such as wind turbines and solar panels, are growing across Europe and contribute to supply and price volatility in electricity markets.
Systems for energy storage, for example reversed hydro power plants, large scale compressed air systems and batteries, provide ways to compensate for this variable power supply by storing excess power and releasing it when there is a production shortage.
A new meta-analysis showing the effectiveness of ketamine for dealing with persistent post-surgical pain (PPSP) is to be presented at Euroanaesthesia 2016 (London, May 27-30 ). Ketamine, a cheap and safe drug, may have the potential to save health systems billions of dollars globally by being used in place of other drugs to prevent PPSP.
Mammals have an exquisitely tuned sensory system that tells them whether they are smelling an orange or a rose. Like keys on a piano keyboard, each component of an odor blend strikes only one chord of olfactory neuron activation. These chords are combined to form a melody that is "heard" in the brain as distinctly citrusy or sweet and flowery.
Smell in mammals turns out to be more complex than we thought. Rather than one receptor family exclusively dedicated to detecting odors, a study in mice reports that a group of neurons surrounding the olfactory bulb use an alternative mechanism for catching scents. These "necklace" neurons, as they're called, use this newly discovered olfactory detection system to respond to odors that elicit instinctive responses, such as pheromones and the smell of seeds and nuts. Harvard researchers report the finding May 26 in Cell.
Malnourished children are most likely to die from common infections, not starvation. New experimental evidence, reviewed May 26 in Trends in Immunology, indicates that even with a healthy diet, defects in immune system function from birth could contribute to a malnourished state throughout life. Researchers speculate that targeting immune pathways could be a new approach to reduce the poor health and mortality caused by under- and overnutrition.
Through new experiments involving the famous Schrödinger cat state paradox, researchers have shown that a "quantum cat" can be both alive and dead, and in two places at once.
The results, which involve inducing a large number of photons to have matching states (or to become entangled), show the ability to manipulate complex quantum states, with applications for computation and long-distance communication. They also represent perhaps the first time scientists have been able to achieve such quantum coherence at a macroscopic scale.
