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Statins are associated with increased risk for diabetes, though it is unclear why. One hypothesis is that statins increase expression of LDL receptors and increase cholesterol uptake into cells including the pancreas, which could cause pancreatic dysfunction. Familial hypercholesterolemia causes decreased LDL transport into cells and researchers have hypothesized that with familial hypercholesterolemia, decreased pancreatic LDL transport would lessen cell death and ultimately lead to lower rates of diabetes.  

We may idealize the last century but natural forces have always caused climate on Earth to fluctuate - sometimes quite a bit. But science is about controlling nature and not letting random behavior control our destinies and since we know that some periods were good and some awful, we'd like to avoid the awful.We can't control everything - the earth is still going to orbit the sun and such orbital forcing of climate change happens over thousands of years and brings ice ages and warming periods. 

Many mammals, and some birds, escape the winter by hibernating for three to nine months. This period of dormancy permits species which would otherwise perish from the cold and scarce food to survive to see another spring. The Middle East, with temperate winters, was until recently considered an unlikely host for hibernating mammals.

Though every month we read about some new advance in artificial intelligence, how much progress is really being made?  Neuromorphic computing has created software and electronic hardware that mimic brain functions and signal protocols but, like economic models that successfully predict the past, they have only slightly improved the efficiency and adaptability of conventional technology and are not really making bold advances. 

Male partners of infertile obese females may increase the odds of conceiving a child by improving their own weight and dietary habits, preliminary results from a pilot study from Canada suggest. The results will be presented Thursday, March 5, at ENDO 2015, the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society in San Diego.

In this country, poor diet, obesity and high rates of smoking have compounded to give nearly 75 percent of adults poor cardiovascular health.It's not the United States, it is China, yet an alarming number of health plans promoted by American nutrition pundits advocate Asian lifestyles. The 2010 China Noncommunicable Disease Surveillance Group collected cardiovascular health data from a nationally representative sample of more than 96,000 men and women in the general Chinese population.

A history of psychedelic drug use is associated fewer suicidal thoughts, planning and attempts, according to survey results analyzed by Johns Hopkins and the University of Alabama at Birmingham.In a national survey of over 190,000 U.S. adults, lifetime use of certain psychedelic drugs was associated with a 19 percent reduced likelihood of psychological distress within the past month, a 14 percent reduced likelihood of suicidal thinking within the past year, a 29 percent reduced likelihood of suicide planning within the past year and a 36 percent reduced likelihood of attempting suicide within the past year. 

Apple has found a new use for their iPhone - medicine. People had already created lots of apps, of course, but ResearchKit, due out next month, is the first Apple framework to make it easier. The framework allows new ways to create apps to track movement, take measurements, and record data and has three active modules: surveys, informed consent, and active tasks. Active tasks is the only one not intuitive - it means they can ask you to perform activities while the sensors are monitoring.

A new paper says they can detect sexism in a smile. A man’s true attitude towards the female sex can be detected according to how he smiles and chats to her, according to Jin Goh and Judith Hall of Northeastern University writing in Sex Roles. 

A new test that uses combinations of cells from a single donor’s blood can predict whether a new drug will cause a severe immune reaction in humans.

Drug discovery is an expensive, bureaucracy-laced process. Due to more restrictions requiring a lot more trials, drug discovery is an average 14 year process costing $2 billion and only 1 out of 5,000 drugs will get approved and out to the market. It's easy to imagine why once a company knows the product is not viable or safe, it is abandoned.

A Swiss teenager, recently returned home from a discotheque, came to the emergency department with classic sudden symptoms of stroke, only to be diagnosed with Lyme disease. The highly unusual case presentation was published in "Acute Lyme Neuroborreliosis with Transient Hemiparesis and Aphasia", Annals of Emergency Medicine.