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.
After a series of media stories about the Liverpool Care Pathway being systematic malnutrition, dehydration and premature death in patients across a wide age-range, it was subjected to review by a panel which delivered their findings on 15 July 2013 saying that
the Liverpool Care Pathway
needed to abandon its name, as well as the use of the word "pathway", and that the
the Liverpool Care Pathway
should be replaced within 12 months by an "end of life care plan".
Irradiation using light in the blue spectra has proven to have powerful bacteria-killing ability in laboratory studies using human and animal tissues.
In a Neuron paper,
Institute of Science and Technology Austria
post-doctoral fellow Alejandro Pernía-Andrade and Professor Peter Jonas outline the synaptic mechanisms underlying oscillations at the dentate gyrus, the main entrance of the hippocampus).
Building on that work, the researchers suggest a role for these oscillations in the coding of information by the dentate gyrus principal neurons.
An international team has published a major list of celestial X-ray sources in the Astrophysical Journal - over 150,000 high-energy stars and galaxies.
Using the X-ray telescope on board the US/UK/Italian Swift satellite, the team analyzed eight years' worth of data to make the first Swift X-ray Point Source catalogue. In addition to providing the positions of almost a hundred thousand previously unknown X-ray sources, the team have also analyzed the X-ray variability and X-ray colors of the sources in order to help to understand the origin of their emission, and to help in the classification of rare and exotic objects.
All of the data, including light curves and spectra are available online.
Astronomers recently took precise measurements of the closest pair of failed stars to the Sun, the binary brown dwarf system WISE J104915.57-531906.1, and the results suggest that the system harbors a third, planetary-mass object.
Failed stars are known as brown dwarfs and have a mass below 8% of the mass of the Sun—not massive enough to burn hydrogen in their centers. This particular system, Luhman 16AB, was discovered earlier this year and is only 6.6 light-years away.
Patients in a vegetative state are awake, breathe on their own, and seem to go in and out of sleep, but they don't respond to what is happening around them and exhibit no signs of conscious awareness.
Do they even know if friends and family are even there?
A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study has shown that the brains of patients in a vegetative state emotionally react to photographs of people they know personally as though they recognize them.
Hunters are often regarded as the enemy by animal activists but in reality the opposite is true; legal hunting helps sustain populations, even trophy hunting.
Trophy hunting occurs in 9 of the 28 African countries that have wild populations of lions. Hunting is legal in these countries but quotas are set to restrict the numbers of lions that can be killed.
Neanderthals buried their dead, according to an international team of archaeologists after a 13-year study of remains discovered in southwestern France which seeks to end a long-standing controversy.
They say it confirms that burials took place in western Europe prior to the arrival of modern humans.
Over five-thousand years, cats began living alongside farmers in the ancient Chinese village of Quanhucun, according to a new paper. Probably because of rodents attracted to food.
Cat remains rarely are found in ancient archaeological sites, and little is known about how they were domesticated. Cats were thought to have first been domesticated in ancient Egypt, where they were kept some 4,000 years ago, but more recent research suggests close relations with humans may have occurred much earlier, including the discovery of a wild cat buried with a human nearly 10,000 years ago in Cyprus.
A new hand bone from a human ancestor who roamed the earth in East Africa approximately 1.42 million years ago has been found at the 'Kaitio' site in West Turkana, Kenya.
Humans have a distinctive hand anatomy that allows us to make and use tools. Apes and other non-human primates do not have these distinctive anatomical features in their hands, and the point in time at which these features first appeared in human evolution is unknown.
The researchers suspect the bone belonged to the early human species, Homo erectus, making this bone is the earliest evidence of a modern human-like hand and indicating that this anatomical feature existed more than half a million years earlier than previously known.
There is a national consensus among policy makers and educators that residents should factor the cost of care into decision making - but doctors and those who teach them are not buying in.
In a culture of defensive medicine and unlimited malpractice lawsuits, over-testing is common. And there have been decades of stories and television programs stating that doctors should decide how to treat patients, not insurance companies or hospital management. Of the
nearly $3 trillion a year spent on health care costs, 30 percent - over $750 billion annually - is considered wasted care that could be avoided without affecting quality, reports the Institutes of Medicine.
Low-income, Hispanic and African-American Californians need to have a tax on sodas and other sugary beverages if they are going to have reduced risk of diabetes - which could be a substantial cost for taxpayers in a world of government health care.
Over the course of the next decade, the scholars estimate that lowered incidence of these diseases would save over half a billion dollars in medical costs. 2 or perhaps 3 of each 20,000 people.
