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.
Dr. Sébastien Jacquemont, a geneticist at the University of Montreal, has correlated genetics to intelligence. "We have just discovered, for example, that a missing copy of a region in chromosome 16 results in a 25-point intelligence quotient (IQ) drop in carriers. Addition of a copy in the same genomic region results in an approximate 16-point drop. Strangely enough, even if carriers show much differentiated sets of symptoms - and sometimes no symptoms at all - the specific effect of these two mutations seems to remain the same."
Bullying is a common technique to gain power or prestige, and has been for as long as humans and other animals have existed. It can take many forms. School yard tactics, like taking lunch money, have grown into Internet campaigns, such as tormenting kids on Facebook, and it has even become organized movements, like the dark-money funded group SourceWatch attacking scientists and pro-science groups for their donors.
A new review article seeks to outline roles and recommendations for peers, parents, schools and new media platforms to stop bullying.
Epigenetics is spreading its wings out to the painkiller world, at least in an animal model. Of course, it is well-known that just about everything has been linked to causing cancer in rats. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has studied hundreds and hundreds of compounds and only one substance has been placed into group 4 (probably not carcinogenic) so if your name gets mentioned in a meeting, you are going to be found to cause cancer.
So don't worry just yet. Unless you are raising money for an environmental group or work at a law group, there is a huge gas between rats and humans.
Surgeons removing a malignant brain tumor don’t want to leave cancerous material behind, but they also need to protect healthy brain matter and minimize neurological harm. Once the patient’s skull is open, there’s no time to send tissue samples to a pathology lab to be frozen, sliced, stained, mounted on slides and investigated under a bulky microscope in order distinguish between cancerous and normal brain cells.A handheld, miniature microscope could allow surgeons to “see” at a cellular level in the operating room and determine where to stop cutting. The researchers hope that after testing the microscope’s performance as a cancer- screening tool, it can be introduced into surgeries or other clinical procedures within the next 2 to 4 years.
Athens, Ga. - If environmentalists want to protect fragile ecosytems from landing in the hands of developers--in the U.S. and around the globe--they should team up with ecotourists, according to a University of Georgia study published in the Journal of Ecotourism.
Environmentalists often fear that tourists will trample all over sensitive natural resource areas, but tourism may bring the needed and only economic incentives to help drive conservation, said study co-author Bynum Boley, an assistant professor in UGA's Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources. Ecotourism and natural resource conservation already have a mutually beneficial relationship that is ideal for creating a sustainable partnership.
People bereaved by the sudden death of a friend or family member are 65% more likely to attempt suicide if the deceased died by suicide than if they died by natural causes. This brings the absolute risk up to 1 in 10, reveals new UCL research funded by the Medical Research Council.
The researchers studied 3,432 UK university staff and students aged 18-40 who had been bereaved, to examine the specific impacts associated with bereavement by suicide. The results are published in BMJ Open.
As well as the increased risk of suicide attempt, those bereaved by suicide were also 80% more likely to drop out of education or work. In total, 8% of the people bereaved by suicide had dropped out of an educational course or a job since the death.
ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Expanding lung cancer screening to include people who quit smoking more than 15 years ago could detect more cases and further reduce associated mortality, according to a study by Mayo Clinic researchers published in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System report data suggesting that e-cigarettes are toxic to human airway cells, suppress immune defenses and alter inflammation, while at the same time boosting bacterial virulence. The mouse study is published January 25 by the Journal of Molecular Medicine.
Washington, DC (January 26, 2016) - Public trust is incredibly hard won once a corporation has been mired in negative publicity. Volkswagen and Chipotle face huge obstacles in regaining consumers after debacles, but can simply owning up to their transgressions on social media really help? A recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota and Youngstown State University found that embracing supporting and opposing perspectives to comments by a corporation can enhance its trustworthiness.
January 26, 2016 (Ottawa): Pharmacists who screened at-risk patients for chronic kidney disease (CKD) found previously unrecognized disease in 1 of every 6.4 patients tested, according to a study to be published in the January/February 2016 issue of the Canadian Pharmacists Journal.
"It was actually surprising for us," says the study's primary author, Dr. Yazid Al Hamarneh, a pharmacist and the scientific officer for Consultation and Research Services in Alberta's SPOR (Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research) SUPPORT Unit. "We knew that we would find unrecognized cases, but not that many."
The study is one of the first to provide concrete evidence of the benefits of allowing community pharmacists to order laboratory tests and see patients' test results.
DNA profiling reveals grey squirrels are not as good invaders as we think, and that humans played a much larger role in spreading them through the UK.
Grey squirrels were imported to the UK from the 1890s onwards, and the traditional view is that they spread rapidly across the UK due to their ability cope with new landscapes. Different populations of grey squirrels were thought to have interbred into a 'supersquirrel' that was better able to adapt and spread.
In October 2015, a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Universidad de Sucre in Colombia ran the first tests confirming the presence of Zika virus transmission in the South American country.
In a study published today [Jan 26, 2016] in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, the team documents a disease trajectory that started with nine positive patients and has now spread to more than 13,000 infected individuals in that country.
"Colombia is now only second to Brazil in the number of known Zika infections," says study lead author Matthew Aliota, a research scientist in the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine (SVM).
