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.
Ontario rotavirus hospitalizations drop 71% after launch of infant vaccine program
Immunizing babies against rotavirus in Ontario led to a 71% drop in hospitalizations for the infection, new research from Public Health Ontario (PHO) and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) has shown.
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria most often are associated with hospitals and other health-care settings, but a new study indicates that chicken coops and sewage treatment plants also are hot spots of antibiotic resistance.
The research, led by a team at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, is published May 12 in Nature.
The scientists surveyed bacteria and their capacity to resist antibiotics in a rural village in El Salvador and a densely populated slum on the outskirts of Lima, Peru. In both communities, the researchers identified areas ripe for bacteria to shuffle and share their resistance genes. These hot spots of potential resistance transmission included chicken coops in the rural village and a modern wastewater treatment plant outside Lima.
From our vantage point on the ground, the sun seems like a still ball of light, but in reality, it teems with activity. Eruptions called solar flares and coronal mass ejections explode in the sun's hot atmosphere, the corona, sending light and high energy particles out into space. The corona is also constantly releasing a stream of charged particles known as the solar wind.
But this isn't the kind of wind you can fly a kite in.
Scientists from Princeton University and NASA have confirmed that 1,284 objects observed outside Earth's solar system by NASA's Kepler spacecraft are indeed planets. Reported in The Astrophysical Journal on May 10, it is the largest single announcement of new planets to date and more than doubles the number of confirmed planets discovered by Kepler so far to more than 2,300.
A sportscaster lunges forward. "Interception! Drew Brees threw the ball right into the opposing linebacker's hands! Like he didn't even see him!"
The quarterback likely actually did not see the defender standing right in front of him, said Dobromir Rahnev, a psychologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Rahnev leads a research team making new discoveries about how the brain organizes visual perception, including how it leaves things out even when they're plainly in sight.
Rahnev and researchers from the University of California, Berkeley have come up with a rough map of the frontal cortex's role in controlling vision. They published their findings on Monday, May 9, 2016 in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A new study from Tel Aviv University, Cornell University and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine reveals genetic proof of the Jewish roots of the Bene Israel community in the western part of India. They have always considered themselves Jewish.
"Almost nothing is known about the Bene Israel community before the 18th century, when Cochin Jews and later Christian missionaries first came into contact with it," says first author Yedael Waldman of both TAU's Department of Molecular Microbiology and Cornell's Department of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology. "Beyond vague oral history and speculations, there has been no independent support for Bene Israel claims of Jewish ancestry, claims that have remained shrouded in legend."
New research from Denmark involving more than 100,000 individuals suggests that the excess risk of premature death associated with obesity has decreased over the past 40 years. All-cause mortality was higher in obese individuals than in normal weight individuals in 1976-78, but not in 2003-13.
Many try to lose weight to avoid diabetes and cardiovascular disease and hopefully live longer. This is often driven by recommendations from health care authorities and is further supported by the media and not least, by commercials often presenting normal weight or even thin people as ideal humans.
Roses are red, violets are blue. Everybody knows that, but what makes them so? Although plant breeders were aware of some of the genes involved, there was as yet no quantitative study of how pigment turns a flower red, blue or yellow. Casper van der Kooi conducted just such a study, combining biology and physics.
A new claims the epigenetics of lactose intolerance may provide an approach to understanding schizophrenia - perhaps because both lactose intolerance and schizophrenia are inherited and neither condition emerges in the first years of life and in a booming fad like epigenetics, that is all you need.
More than 65 per cent of adults worldwide are lactose intolerant and cannot process the milk sugar lactose. Lactose intolerance is influenced by one gene, which determines if a person will lose the ability to process lactose over time. More specifically, those with some variants of this gene will gradually produce less lactase, the enzyme that breaks down lactose, as they age.
When does free speech become important? In the halls of academia, it often comes down along political and cultural lines. An endorsement of business mogul Donald Trump leaves academics and students running for a safe speech while a professor bullying a journalism student claims she was oppressed.
When academics do choose to litigate speech disputes with colleges and universities, they end up losing nearly three-quarters of the time, and Michael LeRoy, a professor of labor and employment relations at
University of Illinois
says that is a sign of growing tension between academic freedom and campus speech codes, without recognizing that these issues only go to action when they are the most flagrant sort of violation.
San Jose, Calif., May 10, 2016 -- A team of more than 80 mathematicians from 12 countries has begun charting the terrain of rich, new mathematical worlds, and sharing their discoveries on the Web. The mathematical universe is filled with both familiar and exotic items, many of which are being made available for the first time. The "L-functions and Modular Forms Database," abbreviated LMFDB, is an intricate catalog of mathematical objects and the connections between them. Making those relationships visible has been made possible largely by the coordinated efforts of a group of researchers developing new algorithms and performing calculations on an extensive network of computers.
COLUMBIA, Mo. - According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Native American adolescents have higher rates of cigarette smoking than other racial or ethnic groups. New research from the University of Missouri on the smoking habits of Native American adolescents finds that family warmth and support, as well as participation in school activities, can play a role in tobacco prevention.
