News Articles

For 'credence' services such as auto-repair, health care, and legal services, when more service providers care about the customer's well-being, society as whole may actually be worse off.   
Why? Because the benefit to the customers for the service is difficult to assess before and even after the service. For example, when an auto mechanic tells a customer to make some repairs, the average customer is unable to discern the veracity of the recommendation. The risk of not doing repairs is unknown until a breakdown, if any, occurs. But if repairs are undertaken, their value may never be known.  

Exercising to improve our cardiovascular strength may protect us from cognitive impairment as we age, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Montreal and its affiliated Institut universitaire de gératrie de Montréal Research Centre.
The researchers worked with 31 young people between the ages of 18 and 30 and 54 older participants aged between 55 and 75. This enabled the team to compare the older participants within their peer group and against the younger group who obviously have not begun the aging processes in question. None of the participants had physical or mental health issues that might influence the study outcome.

Researchers have found that a loss of cells in the retina is one of the earliest signs of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in people with a genetic risk for the disorder—even before any changes appear in their behavior.

The American Heart Association has drafted a policy recommendation on the use of e-cigarettes and their impact on tobacco-control efforts and says that because e-cigarettes contain nicotine, they are tobacco products and should be subject to all laws that apply to these products. 
Writing in its in-house publication, Circulation, the association also calls for new regulations to prevent access, sales and marketing of e-cigarettes and for more research into the product's health impact. 

Laboratory-grown replacement organs are the future; since they will be grown from a patient's own cells, there will be no need for immuno-suppressive drugs, and it will eliminate the need for organ donors and waiting lists.
Toward that goal, scientists have grown a fully functional organ from transplanted laboratory-created cells in a living animal for the first time; a thymus, the organ next to the heart that produces immune cells known as T cells that are vital for guarding against disease. 

Long before wheat and sugar, a popular craze against salt swept America. The salt in this case was the popular flavor enhancer monosodium glutamate (MSG), common in Chinese food, soups and meats.  Glutamic acid is also naturally present in our bodies.
It was used as an additive starting in 1908, it gives food  its savory umami flavor, but once it got public attention, anecdotes began to pour in about lots of non-specific symptoms that must be caused by it, despite the fact that hundreds of millions of Chinese people did not report headaches. 

Bacteria growing in near darkness can still harvest energy and produce oxygen from sunlight.

Cancer screening is one of the controversial aspects of health care; America has long had a 'defensive medicine' problem, where in some cases doctors and hospitals run many unnecessary tests to check off the boxes so that if something does go wrong, lawyers won't be shedding tears in court about how the greedy or incompetent medical community ruins lives.Then in other cases doctors may be running tests with little value because the effect on patients is psychological or it won't be meaningful, such as in cancer screening for the elderly. Then there is the issue where it's good business. 

Getting informed consent from desperate people and their families for experimental treatments is quite easy.

Researchers have succeeded in reconstructing the sea ice conditions in the Fram Strait for this critical period at the end of the last glacial and thus in finding a direct connection between changes in sea ice cover and fluctuations in the Gulf Stream.
A nine meter long sediment core served as a window into the past for the geologists. It was drilled on a Fram Strait expedition conducted on the research vessel Maria. S. Merian and has such clearly defined layers that the scientists can read it like a book. 

A new study has found that both type-1 diabetes and type-2 diabetes are the result of the same mechanism - the formation of toxic clumps of a hormone called amylin.
The results, based on 20 years' work in New Zealand, suggest that type-1 and type-2 diabetes could both be slowed down and potentially reversed by medicines that stop amylin forming these toxic clumps.
As well as producing insulin, cells in the pancreas also produce another hormone called amylin. Insulin and amylin normally work together to regulate the body's response to food intake. If they are no longer produced, then levels of sugar in the blood rise resulting in diabetes and causing damage to organs such as the heart, kidneys, eyes and nerves if blood sugar levels aren't properly controlled.

Even the most careful chosen meal can contain surprises and to defend against infectious microbial fifth columnists in the intestines, a dedicated contingent of immune cells keeps watch within the thin layer of tissue that divides the contents of the gut from the body itself. 
New research at Rockefeller University sheds light on the development of a unique class of immune cells known as intraepithelial lymphocytes (IELs) that reside in this critical interface. .