News Articles

Mars One, a private effort to do what governments seem incapable of achieving, has believers excited about colonizing another planet, but the long-term consequences of living in low or no-gravity conditions remain unclear. Mice are not people but if they are an accurate model, it might not go well. A new paper in The FASEB Journal found that spaceflight may be associated with a process of accelerated aging of the immune system. Specifically, researchers found that mice in low gravity conditions experience changes in B lymphocyte production in their bone marrow similar to those observed in elderly mice living in Earth conditions. 

Public participation will have to be at the heart of big data projects in health care and biomedical research and a new report calls for greater transparency about how people's data are used.The report warns that if people's preferences and values are not taken into account and are instead picked by government elites, projects that could deliver significant public good may continue to be challenged and fail to secure public confidence. Recent health data projects, such as care.data, 100K Genomes, UK Biobank and the Scottish Informatics Programme (SHIP) have each, in their own way, raised ethical questions surrounding the use of data.  The report recommends the introduction of criminal penalties for misuse of data. 

A new study has linked a previously unexplored biological process to the failure of embryos to attach to the uterine wall during in vitro fertilization (IVF).IVF only has around a 25% success rate, largely due to the high rates of failure when embryos try to implant. Some women suffer from recurrent implantation failure, where the embryo is transferred but fails to attach to the endometrium – the mucus membrane of the uterine wall. This is a significant cause of the failure of IVF as most embryo losses occur at this early stage.

There’s no scientific definition of picky eating, but parents know it when they see it.  Sharon Donovan, a
University of Illinois
professor of nutrition, says that picky eaters do exhibit definable preferences and mealtime behaviors.The analysis showed that kids deemed picky eaters by their parents did react differently to common foods and behaved differently at mealtime than kids whose parents said their kids weren’t choosy. The differences were significant and occurred across 16 assessed behaviors, according to Soo-Yeun Lee of the University of Illinois.

Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a
relatively rare
congenital disease which causes muscle degeneration and eventual death in teenagers.  Around 1 in 3500 newborns is affected and by approximately 10 years of age, Duchenne patients are dependent on a wheelchair and in increasing need for care. They are not expected to make it to their late 20s and often die from heart or respiratory failure. There is no current cure for
Duchenne muscular dystrophy
 but recently researchers from Bern, France, England and Sweden tested a promising active substance successfully.

Teenagers who own smart phones spend more time online – including during the night, which may affect their sleep. A new University of Basel study on more than 300 students reports that teenagers' digital media use during the night is associated with an increased risk of sleep problems and depressive symptoms. Though they only became ubiquitous around 2007, most teenagers nowadays own smart phones. Due to wireless Internet connections and cheap data rates, teenagers with smart phones spend more time online and communicate with their peers for less money – for example via WhatsApp – which has changed their digital media use pattern profoundly. 

The warm ocean temperatures that brought an endangered green sea turtle to San Francisco in September have triggered a population explosion of bright pink, inch-long sea slugs in tide pools along California's central and northern coastline. The Hopkins' Rose nudibranch, while no strange sight in Southern California, is rarely spotted farther north. A team of scientists, including experts from the California Academy of Sciences, believes this far-flung Okenia rosacea bloom--along with a slew of other marine species spotted north of their typical ranges--may signal a much larger shift in ocean climate and a strong forthcoming El Niño.

Understanding how baleen whales hear has posed a great mystery to marine mammal researchers. New research by San Diego State University biologist Ted W. Cranford and University of California, San Diego engineer Petr Krysl reveals that the skulls of at least some baleen whales, specifically fin whales in their study, have acoustic properties that capture the energy of low frequencies and direct it to their ear bones.
Baleen whales, also known as mysticetes, are the largest animals on earth, and include blue whales, minke whales, right whales, gray whales and fin whales. These whales can emit extremely low frequency vocalizations that travel extraordinary distances underwater. The wavelengths of these calls can be longer than the bodies of the whales themselves.

The third chapter in the ongoing saga of the "first direct image of gravitational waves through the primordial sky" has been written. The first chapter was in March of last year when the BICEP2 team announced that it had observed the portion of cosmic background radiation (the "fossil radiation" from the Big Bang) generated by gravitational waves. This would have been the first observation of the cosmological effects of the elusive phenomenon predicted by Einstein's theory of General Relativity. 

A new study indicates that sexual behavior among female university students in Sweden has changed during the last 25 years, with behavior now appearing more risky than before.The surveys were taken as part of contraceptive counseling delivered at a Student Health Center in Sweden. 

Bowhunting has made a big comeback in the 21st century. Suddenly women love it - and their inclination to shoot something up close and personal without getting their hands messy is reason enough not to provoke American women.But it won't be for food, and perhaps it stopped being for food thousands of years ago. We may think of bowhunting in neolithic times as being functional - to find food - but it may have instead been social cohesion, according to archaeologists who have analyzed the Neolithic bows found in the site of La Draga (Girona, Spain). Most in-the-know Americans assumed The Hunger Games was ripping off Battle Royale. It

Though the anti-vaccine hotbeds in the United States are strongest in regions that are overwhelmingly Democratic, a new paper says it may not be Democrats that are most anti-vaccine. Why would they be? the authors argue, when Democrats like government the most.