Banner
What Next For Messenger RNA (mRNA)? Maybe Inhalable Vaccines

No one likes getting a needle but most want a vaccine. A new paper shows progress for messenger...

Toward A Single Dose Smallpox And Mpox Vaccine With No Side Effects

Attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his US followers over the last 25 years have staunchly opposed...

ChatGPT Is Cheaper In Medicine And Does Better Diagnoses Even Than Doctors Using ChatGPT

General medicine, routine visits and such, have gradually gone from M.D.s to including Osteopaths...

Even After Getting Cancer, Quitting Cigarettes Leads To Greater Longevity

Cigarettes are the top lifestyle risk factor for getting cancer, though alcohol and obesity have...

User picture.
News StaffRSS Feed of this column.

News Releases From All Over The World, Right To You... Read More »

Blogroll

Drinking heavy amounts of alcohol over a long period of time may decrease brain volume, according to a new study.

The study involved MRI scans of 1,839 people from the Framingham Offspring study, ages 34 to 88, who were classified as non-drinkers, former drinkers, low drinkers (one to seven drinks per week), moderate drinkers (eight to 14 drinks per week), or high drinkers (more than 14 drinks per week). MRI scans were performed and used to measure brain volume, which can be thought of as a measure of brain aging.

In a special issue, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment explores ecology in an era of globalization, looking at the impacts of human migration, production systems, and invasive species on ecosystems and people throughout North, Central, and South America. Scientists from throughout the Americas gathered last year in Merida Mexico and held a conference on this very topic. The following are highlights from the meeting, including more extensive work done since the event.

Combining diamond anvils and powerful lasers, laboratory researchers have developed a technique that should be able to squeeze materials to pressures 100 to 1,000 times greater than possible today, reproducing conditions expected in the cores of supergiant planets.

Until now, these pressures have only been available experimentally next to underground nuclear explosions.

There is renewed hope for treatment of a rare genetic condition, Progeria, that causes rapidly accelerated aging and leads to an average life expectancy of 13 years.

Scientists studying the genes of two infants who died of mysterious illnesses found the infants had mutations in LMNA, the same gene altered in patients with the premature aging condition. But the infants' unusual mutations caused them to make many more bad copies of the gene's primary protein, lamin A, than progeria patients.

Great Tits are, of course, songbirds - specifically Parus major. An international team of researchers have now found evidence for the existence of a "curiosity-gene" in our feathered friends.

The gene (Drd4) carries the building instructions for a receptor in the brain, which forms the docking station for the neurotransmitter dopamine. Birds with a specific variant of this dopamine receptor D4 gene show a stronger exploratory behaviour than individuals with other variants.


A hungry great tit is interested in the food on the table (left), but will remain hungry if he is too shy to approach the unknown object (right). Credit: Kees van Oers

New observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have overturned conventional ideas about the early life of some massive globular clusters, showing that they can go through several periods of intense stellar formation rather than the previously accepted single burst. The analysis of Hubble data from the massive globular cluster NGC 2808 provides evidence that star birth occurred over three generations early in the cluster's life.


This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of a dense swarm of stars shows the central region of the globular cluster NGC 2808. Astronomers were surprised when Hubble spied three generations of cluster stars.