After decades of public safety campaigns focused on drinking and driving, it may be time to focus on the seventh leading cause of injury-related death, according to Bureau of Occupational Health and Injury Prevention at New York State Department of Health and Columbia University scholars looking at New York State.
Researchers have discovered that chromosomes play an active role in animal cell division. This occurs at a precise stage – cytokinesis – when the cell splits into two new daughter cells. It was observed by a team of researchers including Gilles Hickson, an assistant professor at the University of Montreal’s Department of Pathology and Cell Biology and researcher at the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Centre, his assistant Silvana Jananji, in collaboration with Nelio Rodrigues, a PhD student, and Sergey Lekomtsev, a postdoc, working in the group led by Buzz Baum of the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology at University College London.
Youth from low-income families who succeed academically and socially may actually pay a price when it comes to their health, because relentlessly pursuing goals can undermine health.
Researchers have uncovered further evidence of a system in the brain that persistently maintains memories for long periods of time.
Paradoxically, it works in the same way as mechanisms that cause mad cow disease, kuru, and other degenerative brain diseases.
In four papers published in Neuron and Cell Reports, the laboratory of Eric Kandel at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) show how prion-like proteins - similar to the prions behind mad cow disease in cattle and Creutzfeld-Jakob disease in humans - are critical for maintaining long-term memories in mice, and probably in other mammals.
Currently recommended daily allowances of vitamin D may be insufficient in children, according to researchers at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Vitamin D is present in a few foods, milk is usually fortified with it and with enough exposure to sunlight the body naturally produces it.
Metals, which conduct electricity, and insulators, which don’t, are polar opposites. At least that’s what we’ve believed until now. But we have discovered that a well-known insulator can simultaneously act like a conductor in certain measurements. We don’t yet know the reason for this mysterious behaviour but it is likely due to new and exciting quantum effects.
Pain treatment researchers have discovered thousands of new peptide toxins hidden deep within the venom of just one type of Queensland cone snail. The scientists hope the new molecules will be promising leads for new drugs to treat pain and cancer.
Though women outnumber men in all but tenured positions, there is concern that the numbers are still not high enough. If that is true, you wouldn't know it by filing patents with the U.S. Patent and Trade Office over the past 40 years.
Though drinking alcohol while pregnant is considered a cultural no-no in the United States, that is not the case for other current and former British subjects.
Data of almost 18,000 women in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand finds that 20% all the way up to almost 80% of those questioned drank during pregnancy, and across all social strata.
The prevalence of drinking alcohol ranged from 20% to 80% in Ireland, and from 40% to 80% in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
Women who smoked were more likely to drink alcohol as well.
Donuts, electric current and quantum physics - if you are a theoretical physicist interested in topological insulators, materials whose ability to conduct electric current originates in their topology, it makes perfect sense.
The easiest way to understand what "topological" means in this context is to imagine how a donut can be turned into a coffee cup by pulling, stretching and moulding - but without cutting it.
Topologically speaking, therefore, doughnuts and coffee cups are identical, and by applying the same principle to the quantum mechanical wave function of electrons in a solid one obtains the phenomenon of the topological insulator. This is advanced quantum physics, highly complex and far removed from everyday experience.
Climate change models predict that sea temperatures will rise significantly, including in the tropics. In these areas, rainfall is also predicted to increase, reducing the salt concentration of the surface layer of the sea. Together, these changes would dramatically affect the microscopic communities of bacteria and plankton that inhabit the oceans, impacting species higher up the food chain. Worryingly, future conditions may favour disease-causing bacteria and plankton species which produce toxins, such as the lethal PST (paralytic shellfish toxin). These can accumulate in shellfish such as mussels and oysters, putting human consumers at risk.
Though pesticides are getting all of the attention from environmental groups when it comes to concern about bees, the science community instead knows it is mites and climate - were it as simple as pesticides, places like Australia and the United States, where the neonicotinoids often blamed by activists are common, would show losses, but instead they were limited to one section of Europe.
Using gene therapy, researchers at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School have restored hearing in mice with a genetic form of deafness. Their work, published online July 8 by the journal Science Translational Medicine, could pave the way for gene therapy in people with hearing loss caused by genetic mutations.
"Our gene therapy protocol is not yet ready for clinical trials--we need to tweak it a bit more--but in the not-too-distant future we think it could be developed for therapeutic use in humans," says Jeffrey Holt, PhD, a scientist in the Department of Otolaryngology and F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center at Boston Children's and an associate professor of Otolaryngology at Harvard Medical School.
