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 presence of certain bacteria in the mouth may reveal increased risk for pancreatic cancer and enable earlier, more precise treatment. This is the main finding of a study led by researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center and its Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center to be presented April 19 in New Orleans at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.
Pancreatic cancer patients are known to be susceptible to gum disease, cavities, and poor oral health in general, say the study authors. That vulnerability led the research team to search for direct links between the makeup of bacteria driving oral disease and subsequent development of pancreatic cancer, a disease that often escapes early diagnosis and causes 40,000 US deaths annually.
The difficulty in subduing the pandemic strain of drug-resistant E. coli, called H30, may go beyond patient vulnerability or antibiotic resistance. This form of the disease-pathogen may have an intrinsic ability to cause persistent, harmful, even deadly infections.
The bacterium E. coli comes in many different varieties. Many strains live unobtrusively in the gut or innocuously in the environment. Some strains can cause diarrhea. Others can invade the urinary tract, the blood stream, or other parts of the body to provoke varying degrees of illness, from mild to serious and sometimes fatal.
DURHAM, N.C. -- Humans aren't alone in their ability to mix perfumes and colognes. Lemurs, too, get more out of their smelly secretions by combining fragrances to create richer, longer-lasting scents, finds a study led by Duke University.
The results appear online April 20 in Royal Society Open Science.
The "perfume" of the ring-tailed lemur could never be confused with Chanel. Male ring-tailed lemurs, our distant primate cousins, produce their distinctive musky odor with help from a pair of glands on their wrists that give off droplets of clear, fast-evaporating fluid, and a second pair of glands on their chests that secrete a brown, foul-smelling paste.
GPS tool has pinpointed origin of Yiddish speakers
Yiddish is thought to have been invented by Iranian and Ashkenazic Jews as they traded on the Silk Road
Findings provide opposing theory to the view that Yiddish is an old German dialect
The origin of Yiddish, the millennium old language of Ashkenazic Jews, is something which linguists have questioned for decades.
Now, a pioneering tool - the Geographic Population Structure (GPS) - which converts DNA data into its ancestral coordinates, has helped scientists pinpoint that the DNA of Yiddish speakers could have originated from four ancient villages in north-eastern Turkey.
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 20 April 2016 - A new study being presented today at the 4th Workplace and Indoor Aerosols conference in Barcelona shows, for the first time, that exhaled e-cigarette particles are liquid droplets that evaporate within seconds.
The research - a collaboration between Kaunas University of Technology in Lithuania, EMPA Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, ETH Zurich the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Fontem Ventures - is the first detailed study of its kind conducted to investigate particles in exhaled e-cigarette vapour.
Researchers from the University of Liverpool have published a study highlighting the effectiveness of using positive memories and images to help generate positive emotions.
It has been suggested that savouring positive memories can generate positive emotions. Increasing positive emotion can have a range of benefits including reducing attention to and experiences of threat.
The study, supervised by Dr Peter Taylor from the University's Institute of Psychology, Health and Society, investigated individuals' emotional reactions to a guided mental imagery task focussing on positive social memory called the 'social Broad Minded Affective Coping (BMAC)' technique.
Positive affect
Humans may have the most complex breast milk of all mammals. Milk from a human mother contains more than 200 different sugar molecules, way above the average 30-50 found in, for example, mouse or cow milk.
The role of each of these sugars and why their composition changes during breastfeeding is still a scientific puzzle, but it's likely connected to the infant immune system and developing gut microbiome.
A typical mouse laboratory is kept between 20 and 26 degrees C, but if the mice had it their way, it would be a warm 30 degrees C. While the mice are still considered healthy at cooler temperatures, they expend more energy to maintain their core temperature, and evidence is mounting that even mild chronic cold stress is skewing results in studies of cancer, inflammation, and more.
HANOVER, N.H. - Virtual and augmented reality have the potential to profoundly impact our society, but the technologies have a few bugs to work out to better simulate realistic visual experience. Now, researchers at Dartmouth College and Stanford University have discovered that "monovision" -- a simple technique borrowed from ophthalmology that dates to the monocle of the Victorian Age - can improve user performance in virtual reality environments.
Scientists from Rutgers University and the University of Pennsylvania have identified a biological pathway that could explain why current asthma therapies often prove ineffective.
The discovery has the potential to lead to new treatments for many of the 25 million people in the U.S., including seven million children, who suffer from the chronic condition.
Researchers Reynold A. Panettieri, inaugural director of the clinical and translational science institute at Rutgers, and Edward E. Morrissey, director of the Penn Center for Pulmonary Biology, determined that when certain genes in mice were inactivated, the mice developed an asthma-like condition, exhibiting airway hyper-responsiveness, or AHR, a classic sign of asthma.
A recent study has identified specific intake levels of xanthohumol, a natural flavonoid found in hops, that significantly improved some of the underlying markers of metabolic syndrome in laboratory animals and also reduced weight gain.
Laboratory mice were fed a high-fat diet, and given varying levels of xanthohumol. Compared to animals given none of this supplement, the highest dosage of xanthohumol given to laboratory rats cut their LDL, or "bad" cholesterol 80 percent; their insulin level 42 percent; and their level of IL-6, a biomarker of inflammation, 78 percent.
Contemporary chroniclers wrote about a "mystery cloud" which dimmed the light of the sun above the Mediterranean in the years 536 and 537 CE. Tree rings testify poor growing conditions over the whole Northern Hemisphere - the years from 536 CE onward seem to have been overshadowed by an unusual natural phenomenon. Social crises including the first European plague pandemic beginning in 541, are associated with this phenomenon. Only recently have researchers found conclusive proof of a volcanic origin of the 536 solar dimming, based on traces of volcanic sulfur from two major eruptions newly dated to 536 CE and 540 CE in ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica.
