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.
Though the rich get richer and the stock market is booming, which has led to claims by the administration that things are fine, the American public hasn't been this pessimistic about the future since Jimmy Carter was president. Pessimism has instead leaped 40% higher since 2009, when the Great Recession was in full swing.
A diet of junk food not only makes rats fat, but also reduces their appetite for novel foods, a preference that normally drives them to seek a balanced diet, according to a study in Frontiers in Psychology which helps to explain how excessive consumption of junk food can change behavior, weaken self-control and lead to overeating and obesity.
In the 1970s, Florida environmentalists who had invented the notion that landfills were going to overrun America came up with the idea of making coral reefs out of tires. A few short decades later, the clean-up costs when those all came loose were 100X the supposed savings and tires have fallen out of favor as clever quick fixes since then.
Leave it to people in Tennessee to find a new use for old tires. Oak Ridge National Laboratory
researchers have found a way to use them to make better lithium-ion batteries.
Oxidized lipids are known to play a key role in inflaming blood vessels and hardening arteries, which causes diseases like atherosclerosis. A new study at UCLA demonstrates that they may also contribute to pulmonary hypertension, a serious lung disease that narrows the small blood vessels in the lungs.
Using a rodent model, the researchers showed that a peptide mimicking part of the main protein in high-density lipoprotein (HDL), the so-called "good" cholesterol, may help reduce the production of oxidized lipids in pulmonary hypertension. They also found that reducing the amount of oxidized lipids improved the rodents' heart and lung function.
In the culture war on cigarette smoking that lingered long after the science and health issues were settled, nothing spoke to the fuzzy, non-evidence-based nature of arguments than claims that second-hand smoke would give someone lung cancer.
Cigarette smoking is annoying and smelly, to be sure, and asthmatics can't be happy in a smoke-filled room any more than non-smokers are, but there are no instances where second-hand smoke has caused cancer. The American Heart Association recently went to war on electronic-cigarettes, a nicotine vapor device, after embracing nicotine patches and lozenges, and some of the claims they made in their policy recommendation defied belief, like that second-hand smoke from e-cigarettes could be just as harmful.
Cellular reproduction seems simple but the ability to faithfully copy genetic material and distribute it equally to daughter cells is fundamental to all forms of life - and complex. Even seemingly simple single-celled organisms must have the means to meticulously duplicate their DNA, carefully separate the newly copied genetic material, and delicately divide in two to ensure their offspring survive.
Organisms in a symbiotic relationship will often shed genes as they come to rely on the other organism for crucial functions but researchers have uncovered an unusual event in which a bacterium that lives in a type of cicada split into two species - doubling the number of organisms required for the symbiosis to survive.
Rice University scientists have produced a detailed analysis of water produced by hydraulic fracturing of three gas reservoirs and suggest environmentally friendly remedies - advanced recycling rather than disposal of "produced" water pumped back out of wells - could calm fears of accidental spillage and save millions of gallons of fresh water a year.
Politicians often say one thing in public and other things in private. That is no surprise, people in all jobs do the same thing.
Saddam Hussein, the genocidal former dictator of Iraq, has left a legacy most despots do not; he recorded so many of his private conversations that political scientists can analyze what he said in private and compare those to his public statements. Their conclusion; he believed what he said.
Very bad man, but he believed in his badness. Credit: Mid-East Wire
It is not a "All your base are belong to us" world in video games any more.
Today, if you want to make a mark in the world of computer games you had better have a good English vocabulary, according to a study by the University of Gothenburg and Karlstad University, Sweden. And games do.
The study confirms what many parents and teachers already suspected: young people who play a lot of interactive English computer games gain an advantage in terms of their English vocabulary compared with those who do not play or only play a little.
Why do so many people in Ontario have inflammatory bowel disease? One in every 200 Ontarians has been diagnosed with IBD, an increase by 64 percent between 1999 and 2008, according to a study by researchers at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES), the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO), and the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute.
That puts Ontario in the 90th percentile for IBD prevalence in the world.
The study in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases is the first and largest Canadian study of IBD – including Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis ─ to demonstrate trends in incidence over time, and the first to review the rate of IBD in different age groups.
Here is something counter-intuitive: researchers have developed a new quantum imaging technique in which the image has been obtained without ever detecting the light that was used to illuminate the imaged object, while the light revealing the image never touches the imaged object.
As everyone knows, outside the world of quantum mechanics, to obtain an image of an object one has to illuminate it with a light beam and use a camera to sense the light that is either scattered or transmitted through that object. The type of light used to shine onto the object depends on the properties that one would like to image. Unfortunately, in many practical situations the ideal type of light for the illumination of the object is one for which cameras do not exist.
