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.
An Australian Government report into the state of the Great Barrier Reef found that its condition in 2014 was "poor and expected to further deteriorate in the future". In the past 40 years, the Reef has lost more than half of its coral cover and there is growing concern about the future impacts of ocean acidification and climate change.
But science could restore the Great Barrier Reef to its former glory through better policies that focus on evidence-based policies, according to paper in Nature Climate Change. But all the stressors on the Reef need to be reduced for it to recover, so nothing is off the hook.
A new study finds that many women diagnosed with breast cancer are concerned about a genetic predisposition for developing other cancers and the chances of a loved one developing cancer.
Magnetic fields such as those generated by overhead power lines are considered a potential health risk because epidemiological papers correlate them to neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Like other concepts that catch the attention of a certain segment of the public, such as GMOs causing cancer, vaccines causing autism, or cell phones causing cancer, it relies on a kernel of scientific truth that is extrapolated out to be a broad effect: Our bodies run on our internal electricity and magnetic fields shape how electricity behaves.
Many people have heard of the Golden Ratio, a ratio that is the midpoint between asymmetry and symmetry - when "the whole is to the larger as the larger is to the smaller". In numerical terms, it is 1.618.
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), an antibiotic-resistant superbug, can cause life-threatening skin, bloodstream and surgical site infections or pneumonia - a new reports finds that cigarette smoke may make things even worse.
"We already know that smoking cigarettes harms human respiratory and immune cells, and now we've shown that, on the flipside, smoke can also stress out invasive bacteria and make them more aggressive," said senior author Laura E. Crotty Alexander, MD, assistant clinical professor of medicine at UC San Diego and staff physician at the Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System.
A new study demonstrates for the first time how elemental carbon became an important construction material of some forms of ocean life after one of the greatest mass extinctions in the history of Earth more than 252 million years ago.
As the Permian Period of the Paleozoic Era ended and the Triassic Period of the Mesozoic Era began, more than 90 percent of terrestrial and marine species became extinct.
Various proposals have been suggested for this extinction event, including extensive volcanic activity, global heating, or even one or more extraterrestrial impacts.
A new study has found that nearly all pancreatic cancers enslave and deform mitochondria, the powerhouses of cells, and force them to divide unnaturally, to lose their normal shape and collapse around the cell's nucleus. This creates an environment even more conducive to tumor growth.
Sulfolobus islandicus microbes can go dormant, ceasing to grow and reproduce, in order to protect themselves from infection by Sulfolobus spindle-shaped virus 9 (SSV9).
The dormant microbes are able to recover if the virus goes away within 24 to 48 hours, otherwise they die.
Sulfolobus is a species of archaea (a domain of single-celled organisms distinct from bacteria) found in acidic hot springs all over the world, where free viruses are not as common as in other environments. These microbes will go dormant in the presence of just a few viruses, whether active or inactive. While inactivated virus particles cannot infect a host, researchers found they could still cause dormancy, and ultimately, death in Sulfolobus.
Inhalable particles include all particulate matter with a diameter smaller than 10 micrometers (PM10), which is broken down into finer particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5), which can enter the lung, and ultrafine particles with diameters less than 0.1 micrometers (100 nanometers), which can enter the blood stream.
America has expensive health care but it also has the best health care. As the Federal government has discovered in trying to implement the Affordable Care Act, giving something away for free will not maintain that level of quality.Instead, the future could be one where there are two classes of care - those with private insurance and those without. Higher treatment costs are already linked to better survival rates, according to a study by Yale School of Medicine researchers in the Cancer Outcomes Public Policy and Effectiveness Research (COPPER) Center at Yale School of Medicine and Yale Cancer Center.
1 to 1.5 percent of the global population has epilepsy, about 50 million people, but various epidemiological data indicate that between 20 to 35 percent of children with autism have epilepsy. If there are neurobiological causes of this comorbidity, they are unknown. Researchers at the University of Veracruz in Mexico have been searching for neurobiological reasons why a child with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is 20-30 percent more susceptible to seizures that a child without ASD. Angel Alberto Puig Lagunes, a doctoral student in Brain Research, works with two experimental models, one with autism and another of epilepsy, to understand the differences in the amount of neurotransmitters and receptors that may determine susceptibility to seizures.
Commercial weight loss plans come and go. It is hard to have a week go by without some new weight loss gimmick being listed on the New York Times bestseller list, and a diet plan and pre-packaged meals are sure to follow.Many people will ask doctors for recommendations when it comes to a weight loss plan but that can be hard to do. A new review analyzed 4,200 studies for solid evidence of the effectiveness of weight loss plans but concluded only a few studies met the scientific gold standard of reliability.
