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 wildfire started by three vagrants with drugs in their possession spread quickly in the foothills northeast of Los Angeles on January 16th, 2014. The plume of ash and smoke blanketed much of the metropolitan area and prompted air quality warnings, along with concerns about long-term effects to the climate.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites captured these images of the Colby fire just before (top) and just after noon on January 16. The morning image is clearer because the scene was centered under the satellite, while the afternoon image is fuzzy because the satellite was observing from an angle.
U.S. President Barack Obama has been explaining the value of spying on the American public throughout history, as a way of deflecting concern about his administration and government overreach. Critics will dismiss his claims along the lines of 'why it was wrong when Bush did what I do but it is right for me to do it now' rationalization, so he should instead leverage the value spying has in public health.
Traditional surveillance methods for detecting infectious diseases such Dengue Fever and Influenza take weeks because it relies on doctors reporting cases. Today, people tend to Google for an online diagnosis before visiting a GP and a paper in Lancet Infectious Diseases says Internet-based surveillance can be a big help.
A new slave-making ant species from the eastern USA quite literally means 'to pillage'. The listing in Zookeys tell us of the new ant Temnothorax pilagens – pilere is plunder in Latin.Temnothorax pilagens is different from other slave-making ants, like the famous slave-hunting Amazon Ants whose campaigns may include up to 3000 warriors, the new slave-maker is minimalistic in expense, but most effective in result. The length of a “Pillage Ant” is only two and a half millimeters and the range of action of these slave-hunters restricts to a few square meters of forest floor.
Researchers have decoded the whole genome sequence of one widespread species and it turns out to be remarkably big - 6.5 gigabytes, largest animal genome sequenced so far.
The honor goes to Locusta migratoria, the most widespread locust species. We all know about locusts: a single locust can eat its own bodyweight in food in a single day which is, proportionately, 60 times a human's daily consumption. They are capable of inflicting famine and wiping out livelihoods when they swarms, which can cost countries billions of dollars in lost harvests and eradication efforts.
By observing a high-speed component of the massive galaxy cluster MACS J0717.5+3745, an extraordinarily dynamic cluster with a total mass greater than 1015 (a million billion) times the mass of the sun or more than 1,000 times the mass of our own galaxy, researchers have detected for the first time in an individual object the kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, a change in the cosmic microwave background caused by its interaction with massive moving objects. \
Even "minimally buzzed" drinkers and drivers are more often to blame for fatal car crashes than the sober drivers they collide with, reports a University of California, San Diego study of accidents in the United States .
UC San Diego sociologist David Phillips and colleagues examined 570,731 fatal collisions, from 1994 to 2011, using the official U.S. Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) database because it is nationally comprehensive and because it reports on blood alcohol content (BAC) in increments of 0.01 percent.
They focused on "buzzed drivers," with
blood alcohol content
of 0.01 to 0.07 percent, and, within this group, the "minimally buzzed", a blood alcohol content
of 0.01 percent.
If you tried the martini diet, the tapeworm diet and going gluten-free, science has bad news; the popular blood type diet isn't going to work any better for you.
The 'blood-type' diet was popularized in the book "Eat Right for Your Type", written by 'naturopath' Peter D'Adamo. The hypothesis behind the diet is that the ABO blood type should match the dietary habits of our ancestors and people with different blood types process food differently. According to that, individuals adhering to a diet specific to one's blood type can improve health and decrease risk of chronic illness such as cardiovascular disease. The book was unsurprisingly a New York Times best-seller and has been translated into 52 languages and sold over 7 million copies.
Managers of fantasy sports teams - where people draft rosters filled with players of their own choosing - spend countless hours and sometimes thousands of dollars on analysis to develop a sophisticated method of getting the best roster.
And sometimes, just like real sports, some superstition is involved.
But most fantasy sport players overestimate the role of skill and knowledge in building a winning team, and underestimate the role of luck, according to a paper in the Journal of Sports Management.
If we want to protect the health of women, government policies should require that both parents take maternity leave, says social epidemiologist Dr. Patricia O'Campo, director of the Centre for Research on Inner City Health of St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, senior author of a new paper.
The conclusion was based on a literature review that looked at the influence of public policies on women's overall health and found that parental leave policies tended to reduce the physical and mental stress levels in women who, historically, held the majority of the burden of childcare and household responsibilities, but that making both parents share leave means those duties would be shared also.
If you buy extra virgin olive oil, caveat emptor. Olive oil has been an avenue for corruption for hundreds and perhaps even thousands of years. Some extra virgin olive oil in studies was found to not only not be extra virgin, it wasn't even olive oil.
'Premium' chocolate has the same issue. Anyone can put Premium on a label and the only way to really know was to buy it and taste it - and if you bought it, you compounded the problem.
Sex is like pizza. Even when it's bad, it's still pretty good.
And people like all kinds of pizza. It's entirely subjective so if you ask people about their sexual satisfaction, you might as well take the answers at face value. Rich, Spanish women have better sex lives than poor ones. There you have it, according to the first Spanish National Sexual Health Survey carried out in 2009. But that doesn't mean anyone feels like their sex life is particularly bad. Spanish people are apparently having a great time.
Researchers have determined the isotope composition of the rare trace elements Hafnium and Neodymium in 2.7 billion year-old seawater using high purity chemical sediments from Temagami Banded Iron Formation (Canada) and concluded that large landmasses must have existed then.
The Temagami Banded Iron Formation was formed 2.7 billion years ago during the Neoarchean period and can be used as an archive because the isotopic composition of many chemical elements such as Hafnium and Neodymium directly mirrors the composition of Neoarchean seawater. These two very rare elements allow many valuable conclusions about weathering processes to be drawn. Earlier work has shown that these Canadian rocks only contain chemical elements that directly precipitated from ocean water.
