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.
Testosterone, a steroid hormone, contributes to aggressive behavior in males, but the neural circuits through which testosterone exerts these effects have not been clear.
Prior studies found that the administration of a single dose of testosterone influenced brain circuit function. Surprisingly, those studies were conducted exclusively in women.
Researchers, led by Dr. Justin Carré, sought to rectify that gender gap by conducting a study of the effects of testosterone on the brain's response to threat cues in healthy men. They focused their attention on brain structures that mediate threat processing and aggressive behavior, including the amygdala, hypothalamus, and periaqueductal gray.
Asiaticoside is the main saponin constituent of Centella asiatica, a plant long used in the Ayurvedic system of medicine that has become popular for human collagen synthesis applications, like anti-wrinkle treatments.
In the central nervous system, Asiaticoside has been found by some studies to attenuate in vitro neuronal damage caused by exposure to β-amyloid. However, any potential neuroprotective properties in glutamate-induced excitotoxicity have not been fully studied.
Chloroquine is a well-known medicine with a good safety profile that has been in use since World War 2 for the treatment of malaria and certain auto-immune diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis. More recently, chloroquine has been studied as an anti-cancer treatment because chloroquine blocks autophagy, a process that cancer cells use to survive to anti-cancer treatments.
One of the greatest and most dangerous naturalistic fallacies is that if our ancestors used something, it must be as good or even better than modern science.
In An Account of the Foxglove and Some of its Medical Uses, published in 1785, Sir William Withering cautioned readers that extracts from the plant foxglove, also called digitalis, was not a perfect drug. "Time will fix the real value upon this discovery," he wrote.
Weather extremes have been linked to a recently discovered mechanism: the trapping of giant waves in the atmosphere.
A new data analysis now shows that such wave-trapping events are indeed on the rise. One reason could be changes in circulation patterns in the atmosphere. By analyzing large sets of global weather data, the researchers found an intriguing connection.
Rossby Waves: meandering airstreams
Researchers have discovered a highly virulent, multi-drug resistant form of the pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa, in patient samples in Ohio. Their investigation suggests that the particular genetic element involved, still rare in the United States, has been spreading unnoticed and that surveillance is urgently needed.
The P. aeruginosa contained a gene for a drug resistant enzyme called a metallo beta-lactamase. Beta-lactamases enable broad-spectrum resistance to beta-lactam antibiotics, including carbapenems, cephalosporins, and penicillins, because they can break the four atom beta-lactam ring, a critical component of these antibiotics' structure.
It's a trick almost everyone knows: to open a locked door, slide a credit card over the latch.
Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) used a similar strategy when they attempted to disrupt the function of MYC, a cancer regulator thought to be "undruggable." The researchers found that a credit card-like molecule they developed somehow moves in and disrupts the critical interactions between MYC and its binding partner.
MYC is a transcriptional factor, meaning it controls gene expression. When MYC is overexpressed or amplified, the unregulated expression of genes involved in cell proliferation, a key step in cancer growth, follows. MYC is involved in a majority of cancers, including Burkitt's lymphoma, a fast-growing cancer that tends to strike children.
Bioengineers have created three-dimensional brain-like tissue that functions like and has structural features similar to tissue in the rat brain and that can be kept alive in the lab for more than two months.
Given the choice between a great doctor and a nice doctor, most people would choose great, but for those who prefer nice, a new tool evaluates and helps medical residents improve their communication and other soft skills to become better doctors.
The study is the first to look at the medical residents' collaboration, communication and other soft skills, or what are known as CanMEDS competencies, in orthopedic surgical training.
Rangeomorphs were unlike any modern organism, which has made it difficult to determine how they fed, grew or reproduced, and therefore difficult to link them to any particular modern group.
They looked like plants but evidence points to the fact that rangeomorphs were actually some of the earliest animals.
Starting 541 million years ago, the conditions in the oceans changed quickly with the start of the Cambrian Explosion – a period of rapid evolution when most major animal groups first emerge in the fossil record and competition for nutrients increased dramatically.
Recent papers have suggested that women improve small working groups and so adding women to a group is a surefire way to boost team collaboration and creativity.
A new study from Washington University in St. Louis says that is only true when women there is no competition. Force teams to go head to head and the benefits of a female approach evaporate.
"Intergroup competition is a double-edged sword that ultimately provides an advantage to groups and units composed predominantly or exclusively of men, while hurting the creativity of groups composed of women," said Markus Baer, PhD, lead author of the study and associate professor of organizational behavior at Olin Business School.
Researchers have come up with a promising method of treating male infertility; a synthetic version of the sperm-originated protein known as PAWP. PAWP has been shown to be required, they write, and their synthetic version was sufficient to initiate the fertilization process.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2013 Annual Report on Assisted Reproductive Technologies, only about 37 percent of treatment cycles lead to successful pregnancy. This low success rate may be due to a variety of factors in the male and female including the inability of sperm cell to initiate fertilization and trigger embryo development upon egg entry.
