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 small, wireless self-contained pacemaker appears safe and feasible for use in patients, according to a small study in the American Heart Association journal Circulation.
Although traditional pacemakers pose minimal risk, patients are still vulnerable to some short- or long-term complications, said Vivek Y. Reddy, M.D., lead author of the study and director of the Cardiac Arrhythmia Service at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.
Those complications can stem from the pulse generator implanted under the skin of the chest, where infections or skin breakdown can occur, and particularly from the leads, or wires, that run from the generator through a vein to the heart. Leads can break, dislodge or contribute to a vein blockage.
Bottom Line: Habitually playing violent video games appears to increase aggression in children, regardless of parental involvement and other factors.
Author: Douglas A. Gentile, Ph.D., of Iowa State University, Ames, and colleagues.
Background: More than 90 percent of American youths play video games, and many of these games depict violence, which is often portrayed as fun, justified and without negative consequences.
As a child, you may have been fascinated to learn that draining the water from a bathtub causes a spinning tornado to appear.
That or gravity may have been your first introduction to classical mechanics. As the water rotated faster, a vortex appeared.
Yet if the water is extremely cold liquid helium, the fluid will swirl around an invisible line to form a vortex that obeys the laws of quantum mechanics. Sometimes, two of these quantum tornadoes flex into curved lines, cross over one another to form a letter X shape, swap ends, and then violently retract from one another—a process called reconnection.
Can you explain what a deductible is?
If you can, you are in the majority - but not by much. Instead, survey results have found that the people most likely to benefit from the Affordable Care Act, those earning near the Federal Poverty Level, remain the most clueless about health care policies.
There is a week to go before enrollment in mandatory health care closes and to-date most of the discussion has revolved around technical glitches, exaggerated enrollment, doctors and health plans throwing out patients and alarming costs for most of the public.
Bosses who are most conscientious about the fairness of workplace decisions make their workers happier and their companies more productive, but they may be burning themselves out.
A new paper found the act of carefully monitoring the fairness of workplace decisions wears down supervisors mentally and emotionally. The researchers surveyed 82 bosses twice a day for a few weeks. Managers who reported mental fatigue from situations involving procedural fairness were less cooperative and socially engaging with other workers the next day.
(Millbrook, NY) People living in northern and central parts of the U.S. are more likely to contract Lyme disease and other tick-borne ailments when white-footed mice are abundant. Mice are effective at transferring disease-causing pathogens to feeding ticks. And, according to an in-press paper in the journal Ecology, these "super hosts" appear indifferent to larval tick infestations.
Drawing on 16 years of field research performed at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, the paper found that white-footed mice with hundreds of larval ticks survived just as long as those with only a few ticks. Even more surprising, male mice with large tick loads were more likely to survive during a given season.
The researchers found that p53 limits invasion by initiating a chain of events that ultimately prevents the formation of lamellipodia, cell membrane protrusions that spur cell movement and invasion. p53 activates a mitochondrial protease called Omi, which is then released into the cytosol of the cell when Ras causes mitochondria to fragment. Omi cleaves actin filaments in the cytoskeleton, and the decrease in actin suppresses the activity of p130Cas, a focal adhesion signaling protein that promotes the formation of lamellipodia. With low levels of active p130Cas, cells don't form lamellipodia and are therefore less able to invade.
Researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) in Boston have estimated that around one million children suffer from tuberculosis (TB) annually— twice the number previously thought to have tuberculosis and three times the number that are diagnosed every year. The researchers also estimated that around 32,000 children suffer from multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) annually. These findings are published in The Lancet on March 23, 2014.
Potsdam: Rift valleys are large depressions formed by tectonic stretching forces. Volcanoes often occur in rift valleys, within the rift itself or on the rift flanks as e.g. in East Africa. The magma responsible for this volcanism is formed in the upper mantle and ponds at the boundary between crust and mantle. For many years, the question of why volcanoes develop outside the rift zone in an apparently unexpected location offset by tens of kilometers from the source of molten magma directly beneath the rift has remained unanswered.
Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have discovered that a substance called Vacquinol-1 makes cells from glioblastoma, the most aggressive type of brain tumour, literally explode. When mice were given the substance, which can be given in tablet form, tumour growth was reversed and survival was prolonged. The findings are published in the journal Cell.
The established treatments that are available for glioblastoma include surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. But even if this treatment is given the average survival is just 15 months. It is therefore critical to find better treatments for malignant brain tumours.
The shortage of oxygen, or hypoxia, created when rapidly multiplying kidney cancer cells outgrow their local blood supply can accelerate tumor growth by causing a nuclear protein called SPOP—which normally suppresses tumor growth—to move out of the nucleus to the cytoplasm, where it has the opposite effect, promoting rapid proliferation.
In the March 20, 2014, issue of the journal Cancer Cell, researchers from Chicago and Beijing describe the mechanisms that enable hypoxia to cause the overexpression of SPOP. They show that hypoxia also stimulates the shuttling of SPOP out of the nucleus, where it normally prevents tumor growth, to the cytoplasm, where it shuts down protective pathways that should restrict tumor growth.
We carry numerous bacteria on our skin, in our mouth, gut, and other tissues, and localized bacterial infections are common and mostly not harmful. Occasionally, however, a localized infection turns into dangerous systemic disease (sepsis), and scientists have new clues as to how that happens. A study published on March 20th in PLOS Pathogens shows that after intravenous injection of a million bacteria into a mouse, the resulting systemic disease is often started by only a single one of them.
