News Articles

Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Researchers have shown for the first time that it is possible to use a multi-gene test to identify patients with early breast cancer who can be spared chemotherapy and who will still be alive and well five years after diagnosis.
New results from the West German Study Group (WSG) phase III PlanB trial, presented at the 10th European Breast Cancer Conference (EBCC-10) today (Friday), showed that 94% of women who had been assessed as at low risk of a recurrence of their disease by the 21-gene Recurrence Score (Oncotype DX) test were disease-free after five years.

Magnetic resonance image isn't everything. A new University of Alberta study shows that vibrating the spine may reveal more when it comes to treating back pain. Teaming with the University of South Denmark to study the lumbar spine of twins, Greg Kawchuk and his team demonstrate that structural changes within the spine alter its vibration response significantly.
Instead of using large seismic vibrations to find oil, we used gentle vibrations to find out where problems exist in the back," explains Kawchuk, professor of physical therapy at the U of A's Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine. "By studying and testing vibration responses in identical twins, we were able to demonstrate that structural changes within the spine alter its vibration response."

Scholars are making a bold claim about gun deaths - they say they will be reduced by 80 percent if three laws are enacted. In a study published in The Lancet, state-level data from 2010 on gun-related deaths and 25 state-specific gun laws identified three laws that were most strongly associated with reductions in overall gun-related mortality.

A new study jointly led by King's College London and the University of Southampton has found a link between gum disease and greater rates of cognitive decline in people with early stages of Alzheimer's Disease.
Periodontitis or gum disease is common in older people and may become more common in Alzheimer's disease because of a reduced ability to take care of oral hygiene as the disease progresses. Higher levels of antibodies to periodontal bacteria are associated with an increase in levels of inflammatory molecules elsewhere in the body, which in turn has been linked to greater rates of cognitive decline in Alzheimer's disease in previous studies.

Highlights

Over nearly 25 years of follow-up, blacks had a higher risk of hypertension, diabetes, and kidney failure than whites, after adjustments.

Most blacks with gene variants that have been linked to kidney disease experienced kidney function decline similar to blacks without the variants.
Washington, DC (March 10, 2016) -- New research investigates the ties between certain genetic variants and kidney disease in African Americans. The findings, which appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN), suggest that widespread screening for these variants in the black general population is not yet justified.

Scientists have developed a mathematical model to derive the probability of extreme waves. This model uses multi-point statistics, the joint statistics of multiple points in time or space, to predict how likely extreme waves are.
The results, published today, Friday 11 March, in the New Journal of Physics, demonstrate that evolution of these probabilities obey a well-known function, greatly reducing the complexity of the results.
"It's common in science and engineering to consider noise and fluctuations as something we need to avoid or eliminate in order to gain the best results" explains Matthias Wächter, an author on the paper. "For us, understanding noise and fluctuations is helpful for understanding complex systems."

COLUMBIA, Mo. - In 2012, Americans sent more than 14 million tons of textile waste to trash dumps around the country, despite many options for consumers to repurpose or recycle textile waste, including donating old clothes to charities and recycling the materials to be remade into other products. Pamela Norum, professor and interim department chair of textile and apparel management at the University of Missouri, found that younger adults from ages 18-34 are much less likely to throw old clothes and other textile waste into the garbage than older adults. She also found that millennials were more likely to donate clothing to secondhand stores such as Goodwill and the Salvation Army.

Anthocyanins, pigments that give plants their red, blue, or purple hues, are not typically produced in citrus fruits grown under tropical or subtropical conditions.
Now, scientists have genetically engineered a lime that contains anthocyanins, which they say has several potential benefits. Manjul Dutt, Daniel Stanton, and Jude Grosser, from the Citrus Research and Education Center at the University of Florida, say that the discovery will allow the cultivation of new citrus fruits in the major subtropical citrus belt and/or the production of ornamental plants, depending on the cultivar.
The process also creates opportunities for novel fruit, leaf, and flower colors to be produced by regulating anthocyanin biosynthesis.

Varnish does more than just provide a protective sheen to a violin. It influences the vibrations and impulses that the wood absorbs and therefore the quality of sound the instrument produces, says Marjan Gilani of the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Material Science and Technology (EMPA) in Switzerland. In research published in Springer's journal Applied Physics A, Gilani and her colleagues demonstrate the importance of the vibro-mechanical properties of varnish, its chemical composition, thickness and penetration into wood.

Human communication is powered by rules for combining words to generate novel meanings. Such syntactical rules have long been assumed to be unique humans. A new study, published in Nature Communications, show that Japanese great tits combine their calls using specific rules to communicate important compound messages. These results demonstrate that syntax is not unique to humans. Instead, syntax may be a general adaptation to social and behavioural complexity in communication systems.

We do not merely recognize objects - our brain is so good at this task that we can automatically supply the concept of a cup when shown a photo of a curved handle or identify a face from just an ear or nose. Neurobiologists, computer scientists, and robotics engineers are all interested in understanding how such recognition works - in both human and computer vision systems. New research by scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) suggests that there is an "atomic" unit of recognition - a minimum amount of information an image must contain for recognition to occur.

Dead European honeybees have almost 57 different pesticides detected, according to a new paper in the Journal of Chromatography A.
Should that be a concern? Not really. The great thing about modern technology is that we can detect parts per trillion, orders of magnitude what can be harmful. Yet proponents of low-dose effect, like environmental groups and researchers enabling them, will want to claim that being able to detect something means it must be bad.