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What Next For Messenger RNA (mRNA)? Maybe Inhalable Vaccines

No one likes getting a needle but most want a vaccine. A new paper shows progress for messenger...

Toward A Single Dose Smallpox And Mpox Vaccine With No Side Effects

Attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his US followers over the last 25 years have staunchly opposed...

ChatGPT Is Cheaper In Medicine And Does Better Diagnoses Even Than Doctors Using ChatGPT

General medicine, routine visits and such, have gradually gone from M.D.s to including Osteopaths...

Even After Getting Cancer, Quitting Cigarettes Leads To Greater Longevity

Cigarettes are the top lifestyle risk factor for getting cancer, though alcohol and obesity have...

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According to a music researcher, discrimination of women is common in the club scene. Female DJs don’t get gigs because the music they play is “too feminine.”

It's no secret that elite clubs are fast-tracking customers that fit the "vibe" they are trying to create, but it isn't just the young, pretty ones. If the clothes are wrong, they will not get past the velvet rope, and that's discrimination, argues Tami Gadir, a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo, who is researching women’s experiences in the electronic music scene. She is studying female DJs in particular, but in her experience, the gender differences pervade the electronic club scene in its entirety.

Scientists have measured the catastrophic genetic damage caused by smoking in different organs of the body and identified several different mechanisms by which tobacco smoking causes mutations in DNA. The researchers found that smokers accumulated an average of 150 extra mutations in every lung cell for each year of smoking one pack of cigarettes a day.

In rare cases, someone who is thin could still end up with type 2 diabetes while an obese person may be surprisingly healthy. Some Asian countries have a higher diabetes rate than the United States even though the obesity rate is relatively low. New research points toward an answer to the riddle of the obesity paradox: An accumulation of a toxic class of fat metabolites, known as ceramides, may increase the risk for type 2 diabetes.

Among patients in Singapore receiving gastric bypass surgery, ceramide levels predicted who had diabetes better than obesity did. Even though all of the patients were obese, those who did not have type 2 diabetes had less ceramide in their adipose tissue than those who were diagnosed with the condition.

Evolutionary biology long ago solved the philosophical conundrum 'what came first, the chicken or the egg?' by showing that eggs came long before chickens. 

But more relevant to evolution is the 'mother' molecule that led to the formation of life. What is it and how did it replicate itself?

RNA may be the answer to the first question, because it has more flexibility in how it recognizes itself than previously believed. The finding might change how we picture the first chemical steps towards replication and life.
With the aid of a new immunosuppressive agent known as PIF (preimplantation factor), researchers at the World Health Organisation (WHO) Institute of Primate Research in Nairobi,  Kenya, have successfully transplanted an ovary from one individual to another, even managing to restore a monthly cycle. 

Approximately 11 percent of women worldwide suffer from premature ovarian failure. This can have many different causes: chemotherapy administered for a malignant disease might irreversibly damage the ovaries and, because of the advances in modern cancer therapy, the number of young women surviving cancer is on the increase. The women, some of whom are still very young, prematurely enter menopause. Genetic diseases can also trigger early menopause.
It would seem obvious that a diluted nicotine vapor is much less harmful than toxic chemicals in cigarette smoke - yet groups like the Centers for Disease Control and Tobacco Free Kids have instead adopted a 'quit or die' mentality about smoking.

Yet we engage in harm reduction when it comes to needle exchanges and, strangely, the political party that was against those is for e-cigarettes, while the party that is on the other side wants any smoking cessation or harm reduction tool not controlled by pharmaceutical companies to be penalized.