Scientists have reported that an experimental vaccine targeting one of the most common genetic drivers of pancreatic cancer, called mutant KRAS, is safe and generated a durable immune responses aimed at preventing the cancer.
Anyone who tells you they have a super food or a potion to impact a complex trait is sellinf you something. Life is rarely simple. The things we care about most, from crop yields to disease risks, are instead "complex traits."
Human height is a textbook example of a complex trait while attributes like risk for a particular human disease are shaped by multiple genetic and environmental influences.
The value of the Science 2.0 approach, and the wealth of Big Data that geneticists now have available, is in finding the genes involved and then quantifying their importance when other circumstances are factored in.
For obvious reasons spaceflight has been reserved for governments and the very wealthy. And when it comes to governments, the criteria are stringent. They will get thousands of applications per year and quickly weed out most of them. Predominantly you have to already be a government employee to have any chance of being an astronaut so that is a big disqualification for much of the best and brightest in America.
In American culture, media and men are criticized for how women feel about their bodies while in Europe women are given more credit for being able to decide for themselves how they feel.
Europeans may be onto something. A paper in Psychology of Women Quarterly finds that body dissatisfaction among young girls isn't caused by ads for skinny jeans on television or males, it is caused by older girls in schools.
Most dogs are happy and they are "man's best friend" because they brighten our day. If you rescue a starving dog they will love you forever whereas if you rescue a starving human, in a week they will have decided they did you a favor. With cats, that sentiment lasts until the first meal is over.
But inside, your dog may be more pessimistic, according to a paper from Dr. Melissa Starling of the Faculty of Veterinary Science at the University of Sydney.
Dogs were taught to associate two different sounds (two octaves apart) with whether they would get the preferred reward of milk or instead get the same amount of water. Once the dogs have learnt the discrimination task, they are presented with 'ambiguous' tones.
While abortion is a common feature of the developed world, there remains some controversy about when it should be allowed. Only the United States and Canada still allow late-term abortion on demand because in the modern world a baby in the third trimester is already clear alive and will remain so with some care. In the third trimester the survival rate in America is 96%, only slightly below full-term children.
Can sound vibrations replace pesticides? Researchers are adapting different eco-friendly methods to try and boost harvests and open up a new chapter in sustainable farming.Scientists in Northern Italy are experimenting with what they call eco-friendly sound and odor devices to fight off insects from their cultivated fields., though environmental activists don't accept the science of pesticides that have passed registration for 40 years and genetic modification almost as long so believing they will consider sound vibrations friendly is a stretch.
Between 2006 and 2011, high-dose opioid prescribing in Canada increased by 23 percent despite clinical guidelines recommending that most patients should avoid high-doses of these drugs, according to new research.
Researchers at St. Michael's Hospital and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) found that rates of high-dose opioid dispensing across Canada increased from 781 units per 1,000 people in 2006 to 961 units per 1,000 people in 2011.
Scientists have devised a new antibiotic based on vancomycin that is effective against vancomycin-resistant strains of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and other disease-causing bacteria. The new vancomycin analog appears to have not one but two distinct mechanisms of anti-microbial action, against which bacteria probably cannot evolve resistance quickly.
Over half of the Earth's accessible agricultural land is already under cultivation because ecological factors such as climate, soil quality, water supply and topography determined the suitability of land for agriculture when people had to just find the best spots.
There are various knobs turning for the future of food. Science has made it possible for food to be grown with less environmental strain in more and more areas but climate change may impact global agriculture.
From government control of health care to new reproductive technologies in this century, we'll need to be able identify key issues, articulate their values and concerns, deliberate openly and find ways forward.
The Hastings Center and the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues have teamed up to publish a series of essays to highlight the best practices in teaching bioethics and to identify gaps in our knowledge of how best to inspire and increase moral understanding, analytical thinking in the moral domain, and professional integrity. The first three of these essays, which appear in the current Hastings Center Report, focus on bioethics education for practicing clinicians.
New research has found clownfish larvae can swim up to 400 kilometers in search of a home, which makes them better able to cope with environmental change.
Clownfish spend their entire adult lives under the protection of their host anemone but as babies they must wander the open ocean.
As part of the international study, a team of researchers to southern Oman, where they collected samples of the only two known populations of the Omani clownfish, Amphiprion omanensis.
Clownfish spend their entire lives nestling in the protective tentacles of host anemones. Credit: Tane Sinclair-Taylor
Artificial sweeteners are promoted as aids to weight loss and diabetes prevention but a new study finds they could actually hasten the development of glucose intolerance and metabolic disease, and in a surprising way: by changing the composition and function of the gut microbiota, the substantial population of bacteria residing in our intestines. The work was based on experiments in mice and humans by Dr. Eran Elinav of the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Department of Immunology, who led this research together with Prof. Eran Segal of the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics.
