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.
A new chemical messenger that is critical in protecting the brain against Parkinson's disease has been identified by scientists at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit at the University of Dundee.
The research team led by Dr Miratul Muqit had previously discovered that mutations in two genes – called PINK1 and Parkin – lead to Parkinson's.
Now they have made a completely unexpected discovery about the way the two genes interact, which they say could open up exciting new avenues for research around Parkinson's and offer new drug targets. The results of their research are published in Biochemical Journal.
Geneticists and anthropologists previously suspected that ancient Africans domesticated cattle native to the African continent nearly 10,000 years ago. Now, a team of University of Missouri researchers has completed the genetic history of 134 cattle breeds from around the world. In the process of completing this history, they found that ancient domesticated African cattle originated in the "Fertile Crescent," a region that covered modern day Iraq, Jordan, Syria and Israel.
The reason why some animals can regenerate tissues after severe organ loss or amputation while others, such as humans, cannot renew some structures has always intrigued scientists. In a study now published in PLOS ONE*, a research group from Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC, Portugal) led by Joaquín Rodríguez León provided new clues to solve this central question by investigating regeneration in an adult vertebrate model: the zebrafish. It was known that zebrafish is able to regenerate organs, and that electrical currents may play a role in this process, but the exact mechanisms are still unclear.
NJIT Associate Professor of Mathematical Sciences Bruce Bukiet has released his annual Major League Baseball projections and he doesn't say see good things for the Pittsburgh Pirates - the official baseball team of Science 2.0 - but at least his favorite team, the Mets, are going to stink too.
Well, in the world of Bayes projections anyway. They still have to play the games.
Bukiet's model, published in Operations Research, can be used to project the number of games a team should be expected to win, the optimal batting order for a set of 9 batters, and how trading players will likely influence a team's number of wins.
An international team of scientists has synthesized the first functional chromosome in yeast, an important step in the emerging field of synthetic biology, designing microorganisms to produce novel medicines, raw materials for food, and biofuels.
Over the last five years, scientists have built bacterial chromosomes and viral DNA, but this is the first report of an entire eukaryotic chromosome, the threadlike structure that carries genes in the nucleus of all plant and animal cells, built from scratch. Researchers say their team's global effort also marks one of the most significant advances in yeast genetics since 1996, when scientists initially mapped out yeast's entire DNA code, or genetic blueprint.
ANN ARBOR—You've switched to the night shift and your weight skyrockets, or you wake at 7 a.m. on weekdays but sleep until noon on weekends—a social jet lag that can fog your Saturday and Sunday.
Life runs on rhythms driven by circadian clocks, and disruption of these cycles is associated with serious physical and emotional problems, says Orie Shafer, a University of Michigan assistant professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology.
Now, new findings from Shafer and U-M doctoral student Zepeng Yao challenge the prevailing wisdom about how our body clocks are organized, and suggest that interactions among neurons that govern circadian rhythms are more complex than originally thought.
Memories are fragile and dependent on any number of factors, including changes to various types of nerves. In the common fruit fly, these changes take place in multiple parts of the insect brain.
Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have been able to pinpoint a handful of neurons where certain types of memory formation occur, a mapping feat that one day could help scientists predict disease-damaged neurons in humans with the same specificity.
There is a belief that online social behavior related to video gaming replaces real life but scholars found that is not so; instead of making the social circle smaller, it expands the social lives of gamers.
The authors traveled to more than 20 public gaming events in Canada and the United Kingdom, from 2,500-player events held in convention centers to 20-player events held in bars. The researchers observed the behavior of thousands of players, and had 378 players take a survey, with a focus on players of massively multiplayer online role-playing games such as EVE Online and World of Warcraft.
Generations are generally useless, aside from marketing plans. The Baby Boom happened in 1946, after soldiers returned home from war (the occupying soldiers came from a different, supplemental draft so they often already had kids) and it was later that marketing groups changed them into a generation stretching to 1964 and even 1965.
In 2007, members of the Haystack Group in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory released a set of Web development tools called Exhibit, which lets novices quickly put together interactive data visualizations, such as maps with sortable data embedded in them, sortable tables that automatically pull in updated data from other sites, and sortable displays of linked thumbnail images.
Medicine stopped being symptom-based over 50 years ago but psychology still uses it. Little is known about why or how the brain works the way it does, much less personality variation, so if a psychological therapy works, it works.
Heart attack death has declined across all regions of the United States but it remains proportionately higher in the South, according to a paperat the American College of Cardiology's 63rd Annual Scientific Session.
