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.
An 'organic cage molecule' called CC3 has been found to separate krypton, radon and xenon from air at concentrations of only a few parts per million.
Gases such as radon, xenon and krypton all occur naturally in the air but in minute quantities – typically less than one part per million. As a result they are expensive to extract for use in industries such as lighting or medicine and, in the case of radon, the gas can accumulate in buildings.
In the US, radon accounts for around 21,000 lung cancer deaths a year.
A new paper in Nature Genetics finds that nearly 60 percent of the risk of developing autism is genetic and most of that risk is caused by inherited variant genes that are common in the population and present in individuals without the disorder.
Although autism is thought to be caused by an interplay of genetic and other factors, there has been no consensus on their relative contributions and the nature of its genetic architecture. Recently, evidence has been mounting that genomes of people with autism are prone to harboring de novo mutations - rare, spontaneous mutations that exert strong effects and can largely account for particular cases of the disorder.
A site called Social Predictor (sociadictor.com) predicts future trends based on the number of tweets, sentiment of tweets, number of news stories and sentiment of the news stories about celebrities and culture. It can also try and predict stock prices or daily sales of a product, based on the chatter related to user-input keywords, such as a stock ticker or the name.The creators said trading strategy based on their model outperformed other baseline strategies by between 1.4 percent and nearly 11 percent and did better than the Dow Jones Industrial Average during a four-month simulation.
A new global geologic map of Mars is the most thorough representation of the "Red Planet's" surface, bringing together observations and scientific findings from four orbiting spacecraft that have been acquiring data for more than 16 years.
An MIT robotic device is worn around the wrist and basically works like two extra fingers adjacent to the pinky and thumb.
A novel control algorithm enables it to move in sync with the wearer's fingers to grasp objects of various shapes and sizes. Wearing the robot, a user could use one hand to, for instance, hold the base of a bottle while twisting off its cap. The robot, which the MIT researchers have dubbed "supernumerary robotic fingers," consists of actuators linked together to exert forces as strong as those of human fingers during a grasping motion.
Ultra-short X-ray flashes have enabled scientists to watch electrons jumping between the fragments of exploding molecules. The study reveals up to what distance a charge transfer between the two molecular fragments can occur, marking the limit of the molecular regime.
The technique used can show the dynamics of charge transfer in a wide range of molecular systems. Such mechanisms play a role in numerous chemical processes, including photosynthesis.
A multicenter team of researchers report that in a phase III clinical trial, a combination drug therapy cures chronic hepatitis C in the majority of patients co-infected with both HIV and hepatitis C.
"In many settings, hepatitis C is now a leading cause of death among HIV co-infected patients," says Mark Sulkowski, M.D., medical director of the Johns Hopkins Infectious Disease Center for Viral Hepatitis and professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Approximately one-third of HIV patients in the United States have hepatitis C, with an estimated 7 million co-infected patients worldwide.
Researchers have successfully used a new and potentially safer method to stimulate ovulation in women undergoing IVF treatment. One in six couples in the UK experiences infertility, and 48,147 women underwent IVF treatment in 2011.
The Appalachian mountain chain runs along a nearly straight line from Alabama to Newfoundland— 1,500 miles - except for a curious bend in Pennsylvania and New York.
Why it bends has been a mystery. When the North American and African continental plates collided more than 300 million years ago, the North American plate began folding and thrusting upwards as it was pushed westward into the dense underground rock structure—in what is now the northeastern United States. The dense rock created a barricade, forcing the Appalachian mountain range to spring up. Yet the bend was cause for speculation.
Though there is a deluge of new information about the diversity and distribution of plants and animals around the globe, conservation efforts outside government science remain very firmly trapped in a 1980s world of fundraising and brochures and cultural name-calling.
But Big Data in a Science 2.0 environment could dramatically boost conservation efforts and biodiversity if it catches on.
The human papilloma virus (HPV) is common in humans but it can lead to infection and even cancer so there have been calls to get people vaccinated. 4,000 women will die each year from cervical cancer, which is linked to HPV, and HPV can also cause genital warts and more rare forms of cancer. The two vaccines in use, made by GlaxoSmithKline and Merck, prevent about 70 percent of cervical cancer cases and the CDC estimates that 7,000 HPV-associated cancers might be prevented each year with HPV vaccines but uptake has been limited because medical professionals don't like that there have been tens of thousands of adverse reaction reports.
A new study finds that the HPV test alone may be valuable. A study
They say money can't buy happiness. Can genetics?
Some people seem to be happy no matter what. If you visit many places in Africa, even when the existence may seem hard to Europeans or Americans, a lot of people are quite happy.
The key could be genetics say....economists.
Why not economists? We let sociologists and anthropologists make all kinds of claims and they don't understand statistics anywhere near as well as the economists from the University of Warwick Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy.
