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.
It's no longer a certainty that American mothers will get custody over their children during a divorce. In fact, if Wisconsin Court Records of the past 20 years are anything to go by, joint custody is becoming the norm. So says Maria Cancian and colleagues from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the US, whose findings are published in Springer's journal Demography.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- Researchers at MIT have discovered a new way of harnessing temperature gradients in fluids to propel objects. In the natural world, the mechanism may influence the motion of icebergs floating on the sea and rocks moving through subterranean magma chambers.
The discovery is reported this week in the journal Physical Review Letters by associate professor of mechanical engineering Thomas Peacock and four others. The finding was an unexpected outcome of research on other effects of temperature differences, such as the way winds form over glaciers in a valley, Peacock says.
Scientists from the California Academy of Sciences and more than 60 other international research institutions spanning six continents have responded to a recent paper in Science, which questioned current methods of scientific collecting and advocated the use of non-lethal alternatives. The response, led by Luiz Rocha, Ph.D., the Academy's Assistant Curator and Follett Chair of Ichthyology, and co-authored by such science luminaries as Harvard's E. O. Wilson and the Academy's Chief of Science and Sustainability, Margaret (Meg) Lowman, describes in detail the value that scientific collections provide across a wide range of disciplines, including conservation biology, and stresses the minimal impact that collecting has on populations.
There are growing inequalities in health and wealth among Americans, a gap between "haves" and "have-nots" that has become obvious as the American middle class has been decimated in the ongoing recession, but that gap is no different in academic science. More and more academic scientists are competing for a pool of money that is not growing as fast as the pool of PhDs who want to stay in academia is.
While scientists in academia are overwhelmingly liberal, when it comes to science funding they are fans of capitalism - the best researchers should receive the most money and if universities acquire those best people, and that means $1 billion per year in NIH funding for Johns Hopkins, they have earned it.
PHILADELPHIA— In the largest group of results to date, researchers from Penn Medicine's Abramson Cancer Center and other institutions have shown in clinical trials that the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) blocked autophagy in a host of aggressive cancers—glioblastoma, melanoma, lymphoma and myeloma, renal and colon cancers—and in some cases helped stabilize disease. Autophagy—an essential process cancer cells need to fuel their growth—is a key troublemaker spurring tumor growth. Block this pathway, many preclinical studies suggest, and anti-cancer agents such as chemotherapy and radiation therapy will be able to do their job better.
But why have previous studies not reached these same results if they are so obvious?
"It is difficult to conduct reliable epidemiological research in brain aneurysms. The past 10 years have seen a distortion in the field due to a very limited group of researchers determining the direction for research. Now the situation is clearly changing, and clinically reasonable, population-based studies using non-selected data are on the rise again," states Docent Miikka Korja of the HUCS neurosurgery clinic.
Despite worsening economic conditions for those at the bottom, infant health has steadily improved among the most disadvantaged Americans, according to a review published in Science by Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
The researchers cite programs and policies like Medicaid, the Supplemental Feeding Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and the Food Stamp program – now known as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) – as the driving forces behind such marked improvements.
NEW YORK, NY (May 22, 2014) — Researchers have discovered how a gene commonly linked to obesity—FTO—contributes to weight gain. The study shows that variations in FTO indirectly affect the function of the primary cilium, a little-understood hair-like appendage on brain and other cells. Specific abnormalities of cilium molecules, in turn, increase body weight, in some instances, by affecting the function of receptors for leptin, a hormone that suppresses appetite. The findings, made in mice, suggest that it might be possible to modify obesity through interventions that alter the function of the cilium, according to scientists at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC).
LA JOLLA, CA—May 21, 2014—In surprise findings, scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have discovered that a protein with a propensity to form harmful aggregates in the body when produced in the liver protects against Alzheimer's disease aggregates when it is produced in the brain. The results suggest that drugs that can boost the protein's production specifically in neurons could one day help ward off Alzheimer's disease.
"This result was completely unexpected when we started this research," said TSRI Professor Joel N. Buxbaum, MD. "But now we realize that it could indicate a new approach for Alzheimer's prevention and therapy."
RAPID RESISTANCE to vemurafenib – a treatment for a type of advanced melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer – could be prevented by blocking a druggable family of proteins, according to research* published in Nature Communications today (Thursday).
Scientists at the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute, based at the University of Manchester, have revealed the MLK family of four enzymes 'undoes' the tumour-shrinking effects of vemurafenib**.
Around half of metastatic melanomas – aggressive skin cancer that has spread to other parts of the body – are caused by a fault in the cell-growth gene BRAF, causing the signal telling cells to multiply to be permanently switched on.
The so-called symbiotic relationship between trees and the fungus that grow on their roots may actually work more like a capitalist market relationship between buyers and sellers, according to the new study published in the journal New Phytologist.
