News Articles

Why do the distinctive piebald patches seen in black and white cats and some horses occur? The predominant hypothesis has been that piebald patterns form on animals' coats because pigment cells move too slowly to reach all parts of the embryo before it is fully formed but a new study found otherwise.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- By combining sophisticated RNA sequencing technology with a new device that isolates single cells and their progeny, MIT researchers can now trace detailed family histories for several generations of cells descended from one "ancestor."
This technique, which can track changes in gene expression as cells differentiate, could be particularly useful for studying how stem cells or immune cells mature. It could also shed light on how cancer develops.

Claims that sitting is bad for your health were all the rage last year - epidemiological curve matching claimed that you were in real peril if you didn't get up once an hour, while waitresses without epidemiologists surveying them disagreed that a desk job was more harmful.
It may be that emails get all of the mainstream media Scare Journalism in 2016. A new presentatin at the British Psychological Society's Division of Occupational Psychology annual conference in Nottingham by Dr Richard MacKinnon from the Future Work Centre suggests that it's not just the volume of emails that causes stress; it's our well-intentioned habits and our need to feel in control that backfires on us.

You may not think of men over 60 when you think of sex, but it happens. A lot. And when it can't happen the usual way, they are willing to pay for it - and they pay more and use less protection if they are a regular client.
Obviously the assumption, or documented medical fact, is that both parties are disease-free, but it still involves a certain amount of trust - and a certain amount more money.
The new survey in the American Journal of Men's Health asked about the habits of American men between the ages of 60 and 84 who pay for sex and found that the older they were, the more frequently they paid for sex and the more likely they were to have experienced unprotected sexual intercourse multiple times with their favorite commercial sex providers. 

Men in typically female-dominated occupations tend to value the social aspects of their career over financial rewards.
These are the findings of a study by Dr Kazia Solowiej, Dr Catharine Ross, and Professor Jan Francis-Smythe of the University of Worcester and Dr Catherine Steele of the University of Leicester. The study is presented today, Wednesday 6 January 2016, at the British Psychological Society's Division of Occupational Psychology annual conference in East Midlands Conference Centre, Nottingham.

Our skin is covered in millions of bacteria and most of them help keep us healthy. However, for patients with lymphoma, it may be a rather different story, as new research from the University of Copenhagen shows that toxins in the staphylococcus bacteria help cancer cells gain control over healthy cells. The Danish Cancer Society's Break Cancer Collection contributed DKK 3 million (US$0.5 million) to the research project.

When government pays for your health care, they get the right to tell you what behavior can be detrimental to your health - but before that they will pay for medication to help them stop smoking.
But only 10 percent are doing so. Why?
 Smoking is the leading cause of preventable disease in the United States and it puts a particularly heavy burden on Medicaid. One-third of US adults with Medicaid coverage currently smoke, a rate that is roughly twice as high as that for the general public.

Chickens that chicken out in unfamiliar surroundings may shed light on anxiety in humans, according to research published in the January issue of the journal GENETICS, a publication of the Genetics Society of America.
Domestic chickens are much less anxious than their wild cousins, the red junglefowl. The new research identifies genes that contribute to this difference and reveals that several of the genes influence similar behaviors in mice. The authors argue that these results, combined with evidence from studies in humans, demonstrate the potential of the chicken to serve as a powerful model for understanding the genetic underpinnings of human behavior.

Mexico's staggering homicide rate has taken a toll on the mortality rate for men -- and it could be even worse than the statistics indicate, a new study from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health suggests.
Improvements in living standards and in the availability of health care helped boost life expectancy throughout Latin America during the second half of the 20th century. But that trend slowed in the early 2000s and began reversing after 2005 due to the rising homicide rate in Central America and Mexico. In Mexico, that rate more than doubled from 9.5 per 100,000 deaths in 2005 to 22 per 100,000 by 2010.

Using paroxetine--a medication prescribed to treat conditions including depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety and posttraumatic stress disorder--during the first trimester of pregnancy may increase newborns' risk of congenital malformations and cardiac malformations. That's the conclusion of a recent analysis published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology.

Boulder, Colo., USA - Apatite has recently gained considerable attention as a mineral with many uses within the Earth and planetary sciences. Apatite chemistry has recently given new insight into a wide range of geological processes and tools, such as magmatism, metasomatism, planetary geochemistry, and geochronology. In their open-access Geology article, Emilie Bruand and colleagues expand the utility of apatite by presenting a novel way to fingerprint magma chemistry and petrogenesis using apatite inclusions within robust titanite and zircon.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- A new Sandia National Laboratories accelerator called Thor is expected to be 40 times more efficient than Sandia's Z machine, the world's largest and most powerful pulsed-power accelerator, in generating pressures to study materials under extreme conditions.
"Thor's magnetic field will reach about one million atmospheres, about the pressures at Earth's core," said David Reisman, lead theoretical physicist of the project.
Though unable to match Z's 5 million atmospheres, the completed Thor will be smaller -- 2,000 rather than 10,000 square feet -- and will be considerably more efficient due to design improvements that use hundreds of small capacitors instead of Z's few large ones.