PG-13 films have lots of “happy violence,” say UCLA researchers. Borrowing from the late communications theorist George Gerbner, happy violence is that which is “cool, swift, and painless.” PG-13 films don’t consider the consequences of violent acts, such as injury, death, and the shattered lives of the people involved.

Any why this matters, says Theresa Webb, a researcher in the department of epidemiology and the Southern California Injury Prevention Research Center at UCLA's School of Public Health, is simple: youth violence is a commonplace occurrence in American society. Homicide is the second leading cause of death among 15- to 24-year-olds overall.

By uncovering how one breast cancer drug protects the heart and another does not, Duke University Medical Center researchers believe they may have opened up a new way to screen drugs for possible heart-related side effects and to develop new drugs.

The Duke researches compared the actions of two breast cancer drugs in experiments involving human cells and rats. The drugs in question were the older drug trastuzumab, whose trade name is Herceptin, and the newer drug lapatinib, whose trade name is Tykerb.

Breast cancer survivors who eat a healthy diet and exercise moderately can reduce their risk of dying from breast cancer by half, regardless of their weight, suggests a new longitudinal study from the Moores Cancer Center at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

Previous studies have looked at the impact of diet or physical activity on breast cancer survival, with mixed results. This study is the first to look at a combination of both in breast cancer.

It's long been thought that humans hunted woolly mammoths to extinction. Anthropogenic global hunting, as it were. Or that a cataclysmic event did the trick.

It may be neither of those and just simple genetics.

DNA lifted from the bones, teeth, and tusks of the extinct mammoths revealed a “genetic signature” of a range expansion after the last interglacial period. After the mammoths’ migration, the population apparently leveled off, and one of two lineages died out.

A year-long clinical trial by Penn State researchers shows that diets focusing on foods that are low in calorie density - high in water and low in fat, like fruits, vegetables, soup, lean meat, and low-fat dairy products - can promote healthy weight loss while helping people to control hunger.

Genetically modified (GM) crops may contribute to increased productivity in sustainable agriculture, according to a new study which analyzes, for the first time, environmental impact data from field experiments all over the world, involving corn and cotton plants with a Bt gene inserted for its insecticidal properties.

The research was conducted by scientists at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, The Nature Conservancy, and Santa Clara University. The study is accompanied by a searchable global database for agricultural and environmental scientists studying the effects of genetically engineered crops.