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.
Men with low levels of the male sex hormone testosterone need not fear that testosterone replacement therapy will increase their risk of prostate cancer, according to an analysis of more than 250,000 medical records.
In the study, researchers found that, as a group, men prescribed testosterone for longer than a year had no overall increase in risk of prostate cancer and, in fact, had their risk of aggressive disease reduced by 50 percent.
A University of Iowa-led study of diabetes-related vision impairment holds good news -- and some bad news -- for patients with signs of these disorders.
Scientists have long known that patients with diabetes mellitus -- both Type 1 and Type 2 -- are at high risk for developing diabetic retinopathy, the most common cause of irreversible blindness in adults. Vision loss occurs due to microvascular damage to the retina. People with diabetes are typically not aware that they are also at risk for developing retinal diabetic neuropathy, a loss of the nerve cells in the retina.
When you think of a neuron, imagine a tree.
A healthy brain cell indeed looks like a tree with a full canopy. There's a trunk, which is the cell's nucleus; there's a root system, embodied in a single axon; and there are the branches, called dendrites.
Neurons in your brain pass signals from one to another like they're playing an elaborate, lightning-quick game of telephone, using axons as the transmitters and dendrites as the receivers. Those signals originate in the brain and are passed throughout the body, culminating in simple actions, such as wiggling a toe, to more complex instructions, such as following through on a thought.
All light sources work by absorbing energy - for example, from an electric current - and emit energy as light. But the energy can also be lost as heat and it is therefore important that the light sources emit the light as quickly as possible, before the energy is lost as heat. Superfast light sources can be used, for example, in laser lights, LED lights and in single-photon light sources for quantum technology. New research results from the Niels Bohr Institute show that light sources can be made much faster by using a principle that was predicted theoretically in 1954. The results are published in the scientific journal, Physical Review Letters.
Turin, Italy: Young women with early breast cancer face a difficult choice about whether to opt for a mastectomy or breast conserving therapy (BCT). This is because there is little evidence as to whether the greater risk of a return of the disease at the site of the original tumour after BCT is linked to a greater risk of the cancer spreading to other parts of the body, leading to higher death rates.
BALTIMORE, MD - Mirroring national estimates, a new study that will be presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies 2016 Meeting found the percentage of children enrolled in the U.S. Military Healthcare System diagnosed with and treated for mental health disorders increased significantly during the past 15 years.
Tablet and laptop users beware. Using digital platforms such as tablets and laptops for reading may make you more inclined to focus on concrete details rather than interpreting information more abstractly, according to a new study published in the proceedings of ACM CHI '16, the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, to be held May 7-12, 2016. The findings serve as another wake-up call to how digital media may be affecting our likelihood of using abstract thought.
CORVALLIS, Ore. - Although the coastal regions of the Greenland Ice Sheet are experiencing rapid melting, a significant portion of the interior of that ice sheet has remained stable - but a new study suggests that stability may not continue.
Researchers found that very little of the snow and ice on the vast interior of the ice sheet is lost to the atmosphere through evaporation because of a strong thermal "lid" that essentially traps the moisture and returns it to the surface where it refreezes.
However, there are signs that this lid is becoming leaky as global temperatures increase. The researchers say there may be a threshold at which warming becomes sufficient to turn on a switch that will destabilize the snow surface.
In modern microelectronics, nanobiotechnology, nanorobots increasingly have being used both organic biomacromolecules and fragments, as nucleotides, peptides, DNA, and inorganic elements, like as metallic nanoparticles, carbon nanotubes. The charge transfer in such heterogeneous systems to a large extent has to determined by the conformational changes of biological fragments. In studying the properties of these complex nanoparticles one of the effective tool is a hybrid method of molecular dynamics simulation, combining molecular-mechanical and quantum-mechanical approaches.
In 2014, scientists discovered a bizarre fossil--a crocodile-sized sea-dwelling reptile that lived 242 million years ago in what today is southern China. Its head was poorly preserved, but it seemed to have a flamingo-like beak. But in a paper published today in Science Advances, paleontologists reveal what was really going on--that "beak" is actually part of a hammerhead-shaped jaw apparatus, which it used to feed on plants on the ocean floor. It's the earliest known example of an herbivorous marine reptile.
It is one of the most famous paintings in American history: Christina's World, by Andrew Wyeth. The painting, which hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, depicts a young woman in a field, gazing at a farmhouse on an idyllic summer day.
But this lovely image has a dark side.
The subject in the painting is Christina Olson, Wyeth's good friend and neighbor. For most of her life, she suffered from a mysterious disorder, which slowly took away her ability to walk, and eventually to use her hands. She died at the age of 74 after a difficult life, and her disease has never been diagnosed.
Until now.
Thanks to science and technology, food is no longer a luxury, it is a commodity. If anti-science groups spent less time scaring uneducated people and more time caring about humanity, there would be enough food to feed 10 billion people right now, just by reducing food waste.
Right now, almost 50 percent of the world's fruit and vegetable crops are lost, much of it due to perishable foods, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. A new study has one interesting solution - an odorless, biocompatible silk solution so thin as to be virtually invisible that keeps fruit fresh for more than a week without refrigeration.
