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.
While there is speculation and numerical estimates about what might happen to Antarctica's nation-sized Ross Ice Shelf in a warming climate, oceanographers have a good idea of what happened to a 100,000-square-mile section within 1,500 years after the last Ice Age ended.
The Ross Ice Shelf is a vast floating extension of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, about the size of France, and the world's largest ice shelf. But it was once much larger, extending farther north and covering the entire Ross Sea. The present Ross Ice Shelf is about 500 miles wide and several hundred feet thick. Because the ice shelf is already floating, its breakup and melting would not pose a risk of raising global sea level.
Two small structural elements, called decorin and lumican, could be decisive in the development of a resistance to the drugs currently used for treating glioblastoma multiforme, such as temozolamide. Glioblastoma multiforme is the most frequent and aggressive tumor that affects the central nervous system, and it has a low survival rate: less than a year and a half after being diagnosed.
Dissemination of clinical trial results by leading academic medical centres in the United States remains poor, despite ethical obligations - and sometimes statutory requirements - to publish findings and report results in a timely manner, concludes a study in The BMJ this week.
Researchers found that only 29% of completed clinical trials led by investigators at major US academic centers were published within two years of completion and only 13% reported results on the largest clinical trial registry, ClinicalTrials.gov.
They say action is needed to rectify this lack of timely reporting and publication, "as they impair the research enterprise and threaten to undermine evidence based clinical decision making."
The first study to measure the full spectrum of age-related damage to all five senses found that 94 percent of older adults in the United States have at least one sensory deficit, 38 percent have two, and 28 percent have three, four or five.
The study, published in the February issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, also found that deficits in multiple senses were strongly associated with age, gender and race.
Diabetes describes a disease where the body is not receiving a sufficient supply of insulin. It commonly inflicts the pancreas, the organ responsible for insulin production. More specifically, it inflicts the cells that produce insulin, which are found in the endocrine tissue of the pancreas. However, new results from the Yoshiya Kawaguchi lab suggest the exocrine tissue, which is responsible for digestion, could have a role in treatment. "The pancreas is constituted of two tissues that are structurally and functionally distinct, which makes it unique", says Prof. Yoshiya Kawaguchi of the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application, Kyoto University, which is why most researchers attend the endocrine tissue for diabetes.
A study of mutant fruit flies discovered that homosexual behavior in groups can be altered by their environment. Specifically, they have shown that the sexual preferences of male fruit flies with a mutant version of a gene can vary depending on whether the flies are reared in groups or alone.The neurons that express the fruitless (fru) gene "basically govern the whole aspect of male sexual behavior," explains Tohoku University neurogenetics professor Daisuke Yamamoto. Normal male fruit flies tap the abdomen of a female to get a whiff of her sex pheromones before pursuing her to mate. In contrast, males with a mutant version of the fru gene show no interest in females; instead, they set off in vigorous pursuit of other males.
PITTSBURGH, Feb. 17, 2016 - The University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health was among a dozen sites nationwide to participate in the first clinical trial to show that testosterone treatment for men aged 65 and older improves sexual function, walking ability and mood.
Results of The Testosterone Trials (TTrials), led by the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will be published in tomorrow's New England Journal of Medicine.
LOS ANGELES -- As men age, their testosterone levels decrease, but prior studies of the effects of administering testosterone to older men have been inconclusive. Now, research shows that testosterone treatment for men over 65 improves sexual function, walking ability and mood, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine by a team of researchers that included lead researchers from Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute (LA BioMed).
Snails usually lumber along on their single fleshy foot; but not sea butterflies (Limacina helicina). These tiny marine molluscs gently flit around their Arctic water homes propelled by fleshy wings that protrude out of the shell opening. But little was known about how they move through water. 'Most zooplankton swim with a drag-based paddling technique,' explains David Murphy from the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, and even though one of Murphy's thesis advisors - Jeannette Yen - had filmed one of the enigmatic snails swimming while it was attached to a wire in 2003, it had not been possible to observe how fluid flowed around the animals to explain how they move.
Organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) are a group of environmental contaminants that were banned in industrialized countries decades ago, but sut since they accumulate through the food chain and remain for a very long time in the human body, especially adipose tissue, they can still be found in a majority of people in most countries.
The most commonly known of these compounds is the pesticide DDT, which has gotten a renewed look due to mosquitoes that carry the Zika virus. Though DDT was banned in the US due to public concern, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shows countries with mosquitoes related to malaria - which also carry Zika - how to effectively spray DDT inside homes.
A new study indicates that younger female gynecologic oncologists are less productive scholastically and that is why they are poorly represented in the higher academic ranks compared to male contemporaries.
There are obvious differences in gender make-up in the higher levels of academia. The reason for that is obvious: tenure. More women than ever are choosing to remain at universities but older males are not just going to be fired to achieve gender parity. And academia is far harder on women than the private sector, so women with childbearing and family responsibilities get penalized more than scientists at corporations do.
Sometimes synonymous mutations, which do not lead to a change in the protein sequence but which may still have major negative effects on the ability of bacteria to survive, occur in DNA.
New research in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution shows that an organism can efficiently compensate for the negative effects.
For a long time it has been believed that synonymous mutations are 'silent', i.e. that they have no effect - positive or negative - on the gene product (protein) or on the growth and survival of the organism. However, in recent years several studies have shown that these mutations still often cause problems for the organism even though they do not change the protein sequence.
