In the 1980s, scientists captured the precise mechanics of a protein machine. It looked strange, to researchers its tall thin structure with stubby legs invoked the enchanted broomstick that stole the show in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment of Disney's 1940 Fantasia film.
The Ebola virus problem in West Africa has gotten lots of high-profile media coverage in developed nations - and no lack of reasons for people to clamor for more funding. No less than Dr.
Due to increased awareness of suicide and military life, there has been concern military lifestyle may be causing more suicides. A new study instead finds that new soldiers are twice as likely to have three or more psychological disorders, or comorbidity, prior to enlisting as civilians.
They may regard the military as a solution to their problems.
Ferns are an old plant species, dinosaurs munched on them over 200 million years ago. If we want to know how to survive against nature's onslaught over the long haul, ferns are as good a place as any to start.
Even recent ones can show us how to evolve and outlast. A group of ferns evolved much more recently, and they did it while colonizing the extreme environment of the high Andes. Their completely new morphology (form and structure) arose and diversified within the last 2 million years. How this group of ferns grew in a unique ecosystem of the Andean mountains was the subject of a new study by Dr. Patricia Sanchez-Baracaldo and Dr. Gavin Thomas.
There is no substitute for a hearing test, especially in an age group that doesn't self-report very well.
Currently, the American Academy of Pediatrics and
the Bright Futures children's health organization
recommends screening adolescents with subjective questions but that does not reliably identify teenagers who are at risk for hearing loss, according to researchers at Penn State College of Medicine.
"We found that you can't rely on the Bright Futures questions to select out teenagers at high risk for hearing loss who would warrant an objective screen," said Deepa Sekhar, M.D., M.Sc., assistant professor of pediatrics.
Think you're extreme? 12,000 years ago Ice Age Humans lived and worked at an altitude of almost 15,000 feet, high in the Peruvian Andes.
The sites in the Pucuncho Basin, located in the Southern Peruvian Andes, are the highest-altitude Pleistocene archaeological sites found to-date. The primary site, Cuncaicha is a rock shelter at 4,480 meters above sea level, with a stone-tool workshop below it. There is also a Pucuncho workshop site where stone tools were made at 4,355 meters above sea level.
White children diagnosed with type 1 diabetes increased significantly from 2002 to 2009 in all but the youngest age group, according to a new paper in Diabetes.
A new study finds that though most U.S. adults fail to meet recommended daily levels of 10 key nutrients, those with disabilities do substantially worse.
At least 10 percent of U.S. adults fit into one or more category of disability, from those who have difficulties with activities of daily living, such as dressing, bathing and eating, to those who cannot use their legs or struggle to accomplish routine tasks, such as money management or household chores.
Up to 64% of people worldwide use medicinal plants to treat illnesses and relieve pain, and the herbal medicine market is worth $60 billion annually. Despite the increasing popularity of herbal medicine, the sale of medicinal plants is mostly unregulated, because they do not claim to be medicine in countries where regulation happens.
It's obvious why people in developing nations embrace herbal alternatives to medicine - medicine is expensive. In wealthier countries, it is instead embraced by people who have plenty of money but don't trust science.
While studying the atmosphere on Saturn's moon Titan, scientists discovered intriguing zones of organic molecules unexpectedly shifted away from its north and south poles. These misaligned features seem to defy conventional thinking about Titan's windy atmosphere, which should quickly smear out such off-axis concentrations.
"This is an unexpected and potentially groundbreaking discovery," said Martin Cordiner, an astrochemist working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the lead author of a study published online today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "These kinds of east-to-west variations have never been seen before in Titan's atmospheric gases. Explaining their origin presents us with a fascinating new problem."
A new study found that people ages 60 and older who do not have dementia benefit from light alcohol consumption; it has been associated with higher episodic memory, the ability to recall memories of events.
Moderate alcohol consumption was also linked with a larger volume in the hippocampus, a brain region critical for episodic memory. The relationship between light alcohol consumption and episodic memory goes away if hippocampal volume is factored in, providing new evidence that hippocampal functioning is the critical factor in these improvements.
Beta Pictoris is a young star, only about 20 million years old, located about 63 light-years from us. It is surrounded by a huge disc of material, a very active young planetary system where gas and dust are produced by the evaporation of comets and the collisions of asteroids.
By sequencing the genomes of tumor cells, thousands of genetic mutations have been linked with cancer.
Sifting through this deluge of information to figure out which of these mutations actually drive cancer growth has proven to be a tedious, time-consuming process but MIT researchers have now developed a new way to model the effects of these genetic mutations in mice. Their approach, based on the genome-editing technique clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) is much faster than existing strategies, which require genetically engineering mice that carry the cancerous mutations.
