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.
The crucibles that bore out early building blocks of life may have been, in many cases, modest puddles.
Now, researchers working with that hypothesis have achieved a significant advancement toward understanding an evolutionary mystery -- how components of RNA and DNA formed from chemicals present on early Earth before life existed.
In surprisingly simple laboratory reactions in water, under everyday conditions, they have produced what could be good candidates for missing links on the pathway to the code of life.
Researchers wondered whether bed bugs preferred certain colors for their hiding places, so they did some testing in the lab.
The tests consisted of using small tent-like harborages that were made from colored cardstock and placed in Petri dishes. A bed bug was then placed in the middle of the Petri dish and given ten minutes to choose one of the colored harborages. A few variations of the test were also conducted, such as testing bed bugs in different life stages, of different sexes, individual bugs versus groups of bugs, and fed bugs versus hungry bugs.
Seven top international tobacco control experts are prompting regulators at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to have a broad "open-minded" perspective when it comes to regulating vaporized nicotine products, especially e-cigarettes.
Writing in the journal Addiction, published online April 25, the researchers synthesize much of the evidence published to date on e-cigarettes, and suggest that use of these products can lead to reduced cigarette smoking overall with a potential reduction in deaths from cigarette smoking.
Researchers have used 'network theory' for the first time to visually depict the movement of dinosaurs around the world during the Mesozoic Era - including a curious exodus from Europe.
The research, published today in the Journal of Biogeography, also reaffirms previous studies that have found that dinosaurs continued to migrate to all parts of the world after the 'supercontinent' Pangaea split into land masses that are separated by oceans.
Study lead Dr Alex Dunhill from the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds, said: "We presume that temporary land bridges formed due to changes in sea levels, temporarily reconnecting the continents."
Our experience of space-time is that of a continuous object, without gaps or discontinuities, just as it is described by classical physics. For some quantum gravity models however, the texture of space-time is "granular" at tiny scales (below the so-called Planck scale, 10-33 cm), as if it were a variable mesh of solids and voids (or a complex foam). One of the great problems of physics today is to understand the passage from a continuous to a discrete description of spacetime: is there an abrupt change or is there gradual transition? Where does the change occur?
Scientists from Duke-NUS Medical School (Duke-NUS) have derived a structural model of a transporter at the blood-brain barrier called Mfsd2a (1). This is the first molecular model of this critical transporter, and could prove important for the development of therapeutic agents that need to be delivered to the brain --- across the blood-brain barrier. In future, this could help treat neurological disorders such as glioblastoma.
The most aggressive form of pancreatic cancer - often described as one of the hardest malignancies to diagnose and treat -- thrives in the presence of neighboring tumor cells undergoing a particular form of "orchestrated cell death." This is according to a major study recently published in the journal Nature.
In September 2015, then 44 year-old CEO of BioViva USA Inc. Elizabeth Parrish received two of her own company's experimental gene therapies: one to protect against loss of muscle mass with age, another to battle stem cell depletion responsible for diverse age-related diseases and infirmities.
The treatment was originally intended to demonstrate the safety of the latest generation of the therapies. But if early data is accurate, it is already the world's first successful example of telomere lengthening via gene therapy in a human individual. Gene therapy has been used to lengthen telomeres before in cultured cells and in mice, but never in a human patient.
CORVALLIS, Ore. - The soaring canopy and dense understory of an old-growth forest could provide a buffer for plants and animals in a warming world, according to a study from Oregon State University published today in Science Advances.
Comparing temperature regimes under the canopy in old-growth and plantation forests in the Oregon Cascades, researchers found that the characteristics of old growth reduce maximum spring and summer air temperatures as much as 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit), compared to those recorded in younger second-growth forests.
Landowners who include biodiversity as a management goal, the scientists said, could advance their aims by fostering stands with closed canopies, high biomass and complex understory vegetation.
A team of researchers at Sinai Health System's Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute (LTRI) and University of Toronto's Donnelly Centre has developed a new technology that can stitch together DNA barcodes inside a cell to simultaneously search amongst millions of protein pairs for protein interactions. The paper will be published today in the journal Molecular Systems Biology.
The smoking cessation aids varenicline (Chantix) and bupropion (Zyban) do not show a significant increase in neuropsychiatric adverse events compared to the nicotine patch and a placebo, according to data published in The Lancet.
After reports claiming varenicline and bupropion might cause adverse neuropsychiatric events, such as increased agitation, depression, hostility or suicidal behavior, the
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requested that both medications carry boxed warnings in their labeling, which resulted in limitation in use and thus fewer ways to quit.
Natural solutions are all the rage to people who believe in a 20th century "balance of nature" hypothesis. Scientists know better, it is obvious that there is no ecological balance, no environmental harmony, and never has been, the winners are in nature are instead species who got somewhere first or were better suited to an area and outlasted others and so seemed to be a balanced fit.
