News Articles

A worldwide study of the DNA of 100,000 women has discovered two new genetic variants associated with an increased risk of breast cancer.
The genetic variants are specifically linked to the most common form of breast cancer, oestrogen receptor positive, and provide important insights into how the disease develops.
Scientists believe screening women for all the genetic variants so far identified could eventually pick out those at highest risk of breast cancer and improve strategies for preventing the disease.
The study was led by scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and is published today (Thursday) in Human Molecular Genetics.

Primary Sjögren's syndrome (pSS) is the second most common systemic autoimmune disease behind rheumatoid arthritis, with female patients outnumbering males by a ratio of 9:1. Those affected often experience dryness of the eyes and mouth, together with a variety of other symptoms such as extreme fatigue and arthritis. There is also a high prevalence of vaginal dryness and difficult or painful sexual intercourse in women with pSS, along with symptoms common across rheumatic diseases such as pain, stiffness, negative body image, anxiety, reduced libido, and side-effects from treatments.

In a study to be presented on Feb. 5 in an oral pleanary session at 8 a.m. PST, at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine's annual meeting, The Pregnancy Meeting in San Diego, researchers will report that induced or augmented labor are not associated with increased odds of Autism spectrum disorder.

New research shows a pattern of underreporting of on-campus sexual assaults by universities and colleges across the nation, and some schools have continued to underreport even after being fined for violations of federal law, according to a study published by the American Psychological Association.
"When it comes to sexual assault and rape, the norm for universities and colleges is to downplay the situation and the numbers," said researcher Corey Rayburn Yung, JD, a law professor at the University of Kansas. "The result is students at many universities continue to be attacked and victimized, and punishment isn't meted out to the rapists and sexual assaulters."

Older people are continuing to enjoy active sex lives well into their seventies and eighties, according to new research from The University of Manchester and NatCen Social Research.
More than half (54%) of men and almost a third (31%) of women over the age of 70 reported they were still sexually active, with a third of these men and women having frequent sex - meaning at least twice a month - according to data from the latest wave of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA).
The paper, lead authored by Dr. David Lee, an Age UK Research Fellow at The University of Manchester's School of Social Sciences and entitled Sexual health and wellbeing among older men and women in England, is published in the American academic journal, Archives of Sexual Behavior.

A new study by researchers heightens concerns over the detrimental impact of the apolipoprotein E (APOE) ε4 allele -- the most prevalent genetic risk for Alzheimer's disease -- upon cognition, olfaction, and metabolic brain indices in healthy urban children and teens.

A new study led by scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) points to the deep ocean as a major source of dissolved iron in the central Pacific Ocean. This finding highlights the vital role ocean mixing plays in determining whether deep sources of iron reach the surface-dwelling life that need it to survive.
"Our study is a long-term view--over the past 76 million years--of where iron has been coming from in the central Pacific," says Tristan Horner, a postdoctoral fellow in the Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry Department at WHOI and lead author of the paper to be published February 3, 2015, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The American pika, a small animal with a big personality that has long delighted hikers and backpackers, is disappearing from low-elevation sites in California mountains, and the cause appears to be climate change, according to a new study.
Researchers surveyed 67 locations with historical records of pikas and found that the animals have disappeared from ten of them (15 percent of the sites surveyed). Pika populations were most likely to go locally extinct at sites with high summer temperatures and low habitat area, said Joseph Stewart, a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz and first author of a paper reporting the new findings, published January 29 in the Journal of Biogeography.

Last month, we got treated to three of Jupiter's moons - Europa, Callisto and Io - parading across the giant gas planet's banded face.There are four Galilean satellites - named after the 17th century astronomer Galileo Galilei who discovered them among the  first observations ever made with a telescope. They complete orbits around Jupiter ranging from two to seventeen days in duration and can commonly be seen transiting the face of Jupiter and casting shadows onto its layers of cloud. Seeing three of them transiting the face of Jupiter at the same time is less common, occurring only once or twice a decade in most cases. It last happened in 2013.

If you own a home, termites are the enemy, but if you want to hold back a desert, their large dirt mounds can be crucial to protecting semi-arid ecosystems and agricultural lands. That's obviously important for feeding people and insert obligatory global warming reference here, because it means those areas could be a lot more resilient to changing climates than climate scientists believe.

The American century was the result of a can-do attitude born in the 19th century. As prosperity began to increase, collectives, such as unions, became the norm, and they were endorsed by many educated elites - but they were still promoting individualism in doing so.That individualism rose as we shifted from blue-collar union jobs to the white-collar kind. Though American conservatives claim to care about small business and American liberals claim to care about unions, the white-collar service jobs that have replaced both have caused the individualism Americans are known for today - including distrust of centralized government, subjective definitions of words and invented baby names, and even family structure.

SALT LAKE CITY, Feb. 5, 2015 - The conservation value of growing coffee under trees instead of on open farms is well known, but hasn't been studied much in Africa. So a University of Utah-led research team studied birds in the Ethiopian home of Arabica coffee and found that "shade coffee" farms are good for birds, but some species do best in forest.
"Ethiopian shade coffee may be the most bird friendly coffee in the world, but a primary forest is irreplaceable for bird conservation, especially for birds of the forest understory," says doctoral student Evan Buechley, lead author of a new study that will be published online Feb. 11 in the journal Biological Conservation.