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.
Renewable energy may offer the imagery of a 'greener alternative' to traditional energy sources, but that hasn't really survived in the wild. The moment subsidies dry up, so do corporations reliant on government funding. And mounting evidence suggests that renewable energy infrastructure and the power transmission lines needed to serve them may impact avian populations, according to lead editor Jennifer Smith, a post-doctoral research associate at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute&State University writing in The Condor: Ornithological Applications.
Results of the Wellcome Trust funded trial of the experimental anti-Ebola drug TKM-130803 have been published today (April 19) in PLOS Medicine. Using a novel approach designed to get rapid indications of a drug's effectiveness, the trial showed that at the dose given the drug did not improve survival compared to historic controls.
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Jeffrey Grossman thinks we've been looking at coal all wrong. Instead of just setting it afire, thus ignoring the molecular complexity of this highly varied material, he says, we should be harnessing the real value of that diversity and complex chemistry. Coal could become the basis for solar panels, batteries, or electronic devices, he and his research team say.
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.
