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.
Gender stereotyping may start as young as three months, according to a study of babies' cries from the University of Sussex.
Adults attribute degrees of femininity and masculinity to babies based on the pitch of their cries, as shown by a new study by researchers from the University of Sussex, the University of Lyon/Saint-Etienne and Hunter College City University of New York. The research is published in the journal BMC Psychology.
The study found:
Adults often wrongly assume babies with higher-pitched cries are female and lower pitched cries are male
When told the gender of the baby, adults make assumptions about the degree of
masculinity or femininity of the baby, based on the pitch of the cry
In the Middle Ages, women became important for the development of piano composition and play. But why? There have long been rules and conventions regarding what women can and can’t do in the world of music at all times. Straddling the legs around a cello was considered immoral, for example, and so sitting by the piano became what ladies did. By the 19th century, almost every piano composition was written for women and girls.“Women’s piano playing has had enormous significance for the development of piano composition,” argues Lise Karin Meling, associate professor at the Department of Music and Dance at the University of Stavanger.
Deaths from violent conflict and lack of available care are major causes of mortality among pregnant women in war zones and so more needs to be done to protect women from violence in conflicts and to provide appropriate medical care required, argue doctors in an editorial published in The BMJ today.
Though no one has any idea how many pregnant women die in conflict every year, they argue that humanitarian law should protect them anyway. But how? The United Nations never solves conflicts, it can only pass resolutions. Laws don't protect the 140,000 women who die in conflict each year. Over 300,000 women already will die in pregnancy and childbirth.
In computer models, European scholars estimate substantially different climate change impacts for global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C by 2100, the two temperature limits policy makers agreed on in the Paris climate agreement.
The simulation concluded that an additional 0.5°C would mean a 10-cm-higher global sea-level rise by 2100, longer heat waves, and would result in virtually all tropical coral reefs being at risk.
In The BMJ today, leading experts debate whether the food industry should fund health research, and if so, under what circumstances.
The food industry is crucial, fulfills key societal needs, and employs more people than any other sector in the UK, argue Paul Aveyard, professor of behavioral medicine at the University of Oxford, and Derek Yach, executive director at the Vitality Institute in New York.
"For these reasons, government policies seek to support the industry," they say, and "from this perspective, it would be absurd for health policy researchers to shun collaborating with the food industry."
Bremerhaven/Germany, 21 April 2016. Sea ice physicists from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), are anticipating that the sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean this summer may shrink to the record low of 2012. The scientists made this projection after evaluating current satellite data about the thickness of the ice cover. The data show that the arctic sea ice was already extraordinarily thin in the summer of 2015. Comparably little new ice formed during the past winter. Today Dr Marcel Nicolaus, expert on sea ice, has presented these findings at a press conference during the annual General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna.
In rare instances, DNA is known to have jumped from one species to another. If a parasite's DNA jumps to its host's genome, it could leave evidence of that parasitic interaction that could be found millions of years later -- a DNA 'fossil' of sorts. An international research team led from Uppsala University has discovered a new type of so-called transposable element that occurred in the genomes of certain birds and nematodes.
The results are published in Nature Communications.
ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Most basal cell skin cancers are easily removed -- those on the arm, leg or back. But when the cancer is on the eyelid or when it starts to invade surrounding tissue, it's no longer straightforward.
A team of researchers who specialize in treating cancers of the eye wanted to identify a marker that would indicate aggressive basal cell skin cancer, and perhaps also provide a potential target for treatment.
"Basal cell carcinoma around the eye is very common. The eyelids seem to be a magnet for basal cell," says Alon Kahana, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences at the University of Michigan Kellogg Eye Center.
PHILADELPHIA (April 20, 2016) - During the past two decades, vitamin D status, defined as serum concentration of 25-hydroxyvitamin D, has emerged as a predictor of key clinical outcomes including bone health, glucose metabolism, cardiovascular health, immune health and survival. Now, a University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing (Penn Nursing) team, including senior author Terri Lipman, PhD, CRNP, FAAN, the Miriam Stirl Endowed Term Professor of Nutrition, Professor of Nursing of Children and Assistant Dean for Community Engagement, has examined the association between 25-hydroxyvitamin D and diabetes control in children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes.
April 20, 2016 Sepsis, more commonly known as blood poisoning, is an exceptional healthcare problem. It is more common than heart attacks, and kills more people than any type of cancer and despite this, it remains largely unknown. According to a 2013 paper published in The New English Journal of Medicine1, it affects more than 19 million people around the world yearly and the number keeps increasing. There is hope for a reliable treatment, however, as researchers at the IBS Center for Vascular Health have developed a targeted therapy for mitigating sepsis by strengthening as well as protecting blood vessels.
Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes have invented a new way to create three-dimensional human heart tissue from stem cells. The tissue can be used to model disease and test drugs, and it opens the door for a precision medicine approach to treating heart disease. Although there are existing techniques to make three-dimensional tissues from heart cells, the new method dramatically reduces the number of cells needed, making it an easier, cheaper, and more efficient system.
How people think and feel about their lives depends on multiple factors, including genes. In a paper published in Nature Genetics, a multi-institutional team, including a researcher from Baylor College of Medicine, reports that they have found genetic variants associated with our feelings of well-being, depression and neuroticism.
This is one of the largest studies on the genes involved in human behavior. More than 190 researchers in 140 institutions in 17 countries analyzed genomic data from nearly 300,000 people.
