Culture
After a prolonged decline, global hunger is on the rise--affecting more than 820 million individuals in 2017. Additionally, more than 2 billion people suffer from "hidden hunger," which occurs when individuals eat foods that don't provide the nutrients they need to lead healthy, productive lives. Children who suffer from hidden hunger have more difficulty developing to their full mental and physical potential.
A team of researchers from McMaster University has mapped at atomic resolution a toxic protein linked to Alzheimer's disease, allowing them to better understand what is happening deep within the brain during the earliest stages of the disease.
Researchers at the University of Tokyo conducted a census of the Japanese population around 2,500 years ago using the Y chromosomes of men living on the main islands of modern-day Japan. This is the first time analysis of modern genomes has estimated the size of an ancient human population before they were met by a separate ancient population.
A team of University of Copenhagen researchers has compiled the first and only evidence that narwhals and beluga whales can breed successfully. DNA and stable isotope analysis of an anomalous skull from the Natural History Museum of Denmark has allowed researchers to confirm the existence of a narwhal-beluga hybrid.
For nearly thirty years, a strange-looking whale skull has gathered dust in the collections of the Natural History Museum of Denmark. Now, a team of researchers has determined the reason for the skull's unique characteristics: it belongs to a narwhal-beluga hybrid.
New insights into how people first arrived in Australia have been revealed by a group of experts brought together to investigate the continent's deep history.
They used sophisticated modelling to determine not only the likely routes travelled by Aboriginal people tens of thousands of years ago, but also the sizes of groups required for the population to survive in harsh conditions.
Certain cancer cells depend on exporting the metabolite lactate, which accumulates during the generation on energy. Lactate plays an important role in many biochemical and cellular processes. In healthy cells it is produced if our body is not supplied with enough oxygen during intensive exercise. During this anaerobic energy production, lactate accumulates in cells and acidifies them. In certain cancer cells, metabolic processes are disturbed and large amounts of lactate are produced even if the supply with oxygen is sufficient to cover the energy demand.
A total of 174 chicken breeds are described in a publicly accessible database which scientists from the University of Göttingen and the Friedrich Loeffler Institute in Neustadt-Mariensee have built up in recent years with numerous international partners. This database, the Synbreed Chicken Diversity Panel (SCDP), includes information about a large proportion of the available chicken species and their diversity. In the accompanying scientific study, the researchers genotyped 3,235 animals for nearly 600,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs).
All living things - from the simplest animal and plant organisms to the human body - live closely together with an enormous abundance of microbial symbionts, which colonise the insides and outsides of their tissues. The functional collaboration of host and microorganisms, which scientists refer to as a metaorganism, has only recently come into the focus of life science research. Today we know that we can only understand many of life's processes in connection with the interactions between organism and symbionts.
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Despite improvements in median and short-term survival rates for patients with glioblastoma, the most common brain tumor in adults, the percentage of patients achieving five-year survival remains low, according to new Mayo Clinic research.
A study to be published next month in Mayo Clinic Proceedings finds that little has changed in terms of five-year survival -- only 5.5% of patients live for five years after diagnosis -- and calls for more aggressive treatments to be considered for all glioblastoma patients.
When it comes to keeping track of prescribed medications between clinic visits, many patients rely on printed medication lists automatically generated from electronic health records (EHRs).
An examination of the EHRs of a cohort of ophthalmology patients revealed that one-third had at least one discrepancy between the medications discussed in the clinician's notes and those on the medication list.
These findings raise concerns about patient safety and continuity of care.
New UC Riverside-led research settles a longstanding debate about whether the most ancient animal communities were deliberately mobile. It turns out they were, because they were hungry.
"This is the first time in the fossil record we see an animal moving to get food," said study lead Scott Evans, a UCR paleontology doctoral candidate.
Older smartphone users tend to rely more on their phones' auto lock feature compared to younger users, a new UBC study has found. They also prefer using PINs over fingerprints to unlock their phones.
Researchers also found that older users are more likely to unlock their phones when they're stationary, such as when working at a desk or sitting at home.
The study is the first to explore the link between age and smartphone use, says Konstantin Beznosov, an electrical and computer engineering professor at UBC who supervised the research.
People who are obese from childhood through to middle age are more than twice as likely to have difficulty with daily tasks such as lifting, climbing stairs and carrying shopping by the time they are 50, a new UCL study has found.
The study, published today in the International Journal of Epidemiology, found that those who became obese in early life had more than double the risk of difficulties with such tasks than those who were never obese.
A genomic strategy implemented by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine can efficiently increase the molecular diagnostic rate of undiagnosed diseases. The researchers report in the New England Journal of Medicine that reanalysis of preexisting molecular data, taking into consideration new disease-causing genes and other genetic knowledge that have been identified since the original analysis, resulted in an increase in the diagnostic yield of cases, nearly doubling it in one of the reanalysis cohorts.
Five- and six-year-old boys and girls who are inattentive in kindergarten are more likely to report lower incomes than other children when they reach 33 to 35 years of age, a new Université de Montréal study has found.
On the other hand, the most "pro-social" boys (those who help others, are considerate and willing to participate in educational projects) are overwhelmingly headed for careers that pay more than the average, the researchers discovered.