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.
There are about 9,700 known species of grasshoppers in the world. Now there is one more, and it has beeen named Grammy-award winning singer and Mexican activist Ana Lila Downs Sanchez.
Locals called the creature the friar grasshopper because its head looks a bit like what a monk with his hood pulled back might look like and so the scientific name of the new grasshopper is Liladownsia fraile. In Spanish, "friale" means friar.
The new species was discovered on the side of a mountain road near Oaxaca, Mexico.
The men were doing fieldwork for another grasshopper study in a pine-oak forest of the Sierra Madre del Sur Mountain Range in Oaxaca, Mexico, when they came across their discovery in 2011.
Pollution is bad, right? To some animals, it's home.
Thousands of shipping containers are lost from cargo vessels each year and many of them sink, never to be found again.
In February 2004, the cargo vessel Med Taipei was traveling southward along the California coast when severe winds and seas dislodged 24 shipping containers, 15 of which were lost within the boundaries of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Four months later, during a routine research dive using the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Ventana, MBARI scientists discovered one of these containers on the seafloor 4,200 feet below the surface.
Would reducing smog lead to higher earnings?
Yes, say Columbia University professor of Environmental Health Science
Frederica Perera
and colleagues. They correlate reduced air pollution to higher IQ. When two curves need to match to create causation and correlation arrows, it's easy to do. What started going up in the early 1960s? American Nobel prizes. What went down? Air pollution. You can make the same argument with organic food. Kids of organic farmers have lower IQs than kids in Manhattan.
The PRIORI project at University of Michigan says they have created a smartphone app that monitors subtle qualities of a person's voice during everyday phone conversations - and can detect early signs of mood changes in people with bipolar disorder.
The app still needs a lot of testing before it can be used outside controlled conditions, but the creators say early results from a small group of patients show its potential to monitor moods while protecting privacy.
The project is
led by computer scientists Zahi Karam, Ph.D. and Emily Mower Provost, Ph.D., and psychiatrist Melvin McInnis, M.D. They presented first findings on PRIORI
at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing in Italy.
Gluten-free fads are all the rage and a preliminary result by reseachers at the University of Copenhagen want to see if there are health benefits for people who don't have celiac disease.
Their experiments on found that mouse mothers on a gluten-free diet led to pups less likely to develop type 1 diabetes. There's no reason to start paying 242% more for your food just yet.
Researchers have reported a unique discovery; the marine dinoflagellate Dapsilidinium pastielsii in Southeast Asia, notably the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool. This unicellular species, with planktonic and benthic stages, was previously thought to have become extinct within the early Pleistocene. It evolved more than 50 million years ago and is the last survivor of a major early Cenozoic lineage. The discovery of living D. pastielsii in the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool suggests that this stable environment served as an important refuge for thermophilic dinoflagellates, and its disappearance from the Atlantic following the early Pleistocene implicates cooling.
Homemade, inexpensive stink bug traps crafted from simple household items outshine pricier models designed to kill the invasive, annoying bugs.
Media has always been partisan but when it was only partisan one way, that was the norm. It was considered objective and impartial. In the US, there were social conservative Democrats who believed in national defense and liberal Republicans who supported labor. Who can really remember whether Thomas Dewey or Harry Truman was a Democrat or a Republican? They weren't very different, really. The media were conservative.
A new study looked into the modulatory effects that musical training could have on the use of the different sides of the brain when performing music and language tasks.
It found that brief musical training can increase the blood flow in the left hemisphere of our brain, which suggests that the areas responsible for music and language share common brain pathways.
Two separate studies which looked at brain activity patterns in musicians and non-musicians.
The first study looked for patterns of brain activity of 14 musicians and 9 non-musicians while they participated in music and word generation tasks. The results showed that patterns in the musician's brains were similar in both tasks but this was not the case for the non-musicians.
A new study finds that anxiety about a competitive situation makes even the most physically active of us more likely to slip-up.
If you examine all of the high-profile crimes that have happened any time recently, they share one thing; psychiatric medication. It was once common to ask someone who was acting bizarrely if they were 'off their meds' but it became more common to worry they are on them.
A new paper in The Lancet took a retrospective look at population data and think the fears about medication may be misplaced. The psychiatrists, led by Dr. Seena Fazel of Oxford University, used Swedish national health registries to study the psychiatric diagnoses, and any subsequent criminal convictions, in over 80,000 patients (40,937 men and 41,710 women) who were prescribed anti-psychotic or mood stabilizing medication from 2006 to 2009.
What can a handshake tell about you? Culturally, different things. In some places, it indicates confidence, in others, aggression or weakness.
Demographers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis say it can show the rates of aging among different population groups.
