News Articles

When Seattle man, Jason Padgett, walked into a bar for a drink a few years ago, he was an ordinary man with seemingly average intelligence leading an unremarkable life. He worked contentedly in his father's furniture shop and had never done well academically or ever cared to do so. On exiting the bar that night, he was viciously mugged, hit on the head and knocked out.

Evolution has endowed females of certain species of amphibians, reptiles and fish with the ability to clone themselves and perpetuate offspring without males. It has even happened more recently but these virgin births don't mean males are unneeded. Fertilization is still ensuring the survival of the maximum number of healthy offspring.A species can increase its numbers faster in harsh environments when its females do not have to find worthy males and scientists have speculated that this ability arose independently in certain species, either due to conflict between the sexes or to ensure survival when mates were scarce. Many of these species now consist entirely of females.

Breast cancer patients often display mild cognitive defects even before chemotherapy and doctors are attributing that to a kind of preemptive post-traumatic stress disorder induced by diagnosis of the disease.Studies have shown that cancer patients often exhibit mild attention deficit and some decrease in memory and other basic cognitive functions. The phenomenon has generally been attributed to putative side-effects of chemotherapeutic drugs on the brain, and the condition is therefore popularly referred to as chemobrain - but more recent investigations have detected symptoms of chemobrain in patients who had not yet embarked on a course of chemotherapy.

A survey of California doctors found that a majority of the 525 who responded believe the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA, also called Obamacare) will steer the country's health care in the right direction, but California has only 28 percent Republicans so that isn't a huge surprise. Doctors were on the side of their political affiliations but were also distinctly divided by medical specialties.
Private practices are on the decline and independent business owners are strongly Republicans. In California, more doctors work for institutions but even with that partisan divide 39 percent thought their practice would be hurt by the legislation and only 36 percent thought it would have no effect. 25 percent believe it will help.

Macrophages destroy bacteria by engulfing them in intracellular compartments, which they then acidify to kill or neutralize the bacteria.
Some pathogenic bacteria, such as Salmonella enterica, have evolved to exist and even grow within these acidified compartments. Yet, how Salmonella responds to the acidic environment and how that environment affects the virulence of this pathogen are unclear. New research reveals that Salmonella fights acid with acid, by lowering the pH of its own interior in response to the acidification of the Salmonella-containing compartment by the macrophage, and by using that low pH as a signal to turn on genes needed to establish an infection.

In 2013, Typhoon Haiyan killed more than 6,000 people and destroying nearly $3 billion worth of property in the Philippines. While the country is still recovering from the storm, researchers have found that an aquifer on the island of Samar inundated with salt water by the storm surge could remain undrinkable for up to 10 years - a second aquifer on the island that was also inundated has recovered much more quickly.
Geology and infrastructure play key roles in determining whether aquifers that provide drinking water are inundated with seawater during a typhoon or hurricane and how long the contamination lasts.

Genetic modification of maize over the last century has led to desirable shoot characteristics and increased yield - and that likely contributed to the evolution of root systems that are more efficient in acquiring nutrients, such as nitrogen, from the soil, according to a new study. About half of the yield gains in commercial corn in the last 100 years has come from improved plant genetics, explained Larry York, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Nottingham. The other half came largely from agronomic practices, such as fertilizer use and higher planting densities. 

If you just watched the Master's Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, you saw the second-youngest player ever to win. That is a pretty good way for a young man to spend the next year.But for most golfers, like most young baseball players, the reality is much different. An EPGA tour player for 12 years commented to Dr. John Fry of Myerscough College on the life: "The word that jumps in my head is lonely".

A newly discovered protein plays a central role in promoting immunity to viruses and cancer, according to experiments in mice and human cells.  The hitherto unknown protein, which the researchers named lymphocyte expansion molecule, or LEM, modulates the proliferation of human T cells as well as in mice, by promoting the proliferation of cytotoxic T cells, which kill cancer cells and cells infected with viruses. The discovery was unexpected because the new protein had no known function and doesn't resemble any other protein. Researchers from Imperial College London who led the study are now developing a gene therapy designed to boost the infection-fighting cells, and hope to begin human trials in three years. 

In 2014, there were almost 200 health awareness days, weeks or months on the 2014 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' National Health Observances calendar.  Since there are only 250 days in a working year, that means one day each week was not given over to some kind of health awareness effort. H.H.S. says their mission is to advocate for "evidence-based" interventions for health problems, so what evidence did they use that 200 health "awareness" campaigns were making a difference? Are they really helping anyone, or is it just less-successful attempts to get people to dump water on their own heads?

A research team has created a prototype video camera that is fully self-powered.

Solar panels and digital cameras obviously have different purposes - one converts light to power while the other simply measures it - but both are constructed from essentially the same components. At the heart of any digital camera is an image sensor, a chip with millions of pixels. The key enabling device in a pixel is the photodiode, which produces an electric current when exposed to light. This mechanism enables each pixel to measure the intensity of light falling on it. The same photodiode is also used in solar panels to convert incident light to electric power. 

Malaria is a critical health problem in West Africa, 11 percent of deaths are related to it, but for a variety of reasons they have more confidence in alternative medicine than they do modern health care practices. 
However, some herbal medicines work and an analysis of the pharmacological properties of an herbal medication derived from Cochlospermum planchonii (a shrubby weed known as N'Dribala), Phyllanthus amarus and Cassia alata shows that it may be the case with SAYE, which means “jaundice” in the Dioula language.