Culture
ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Research by investigators at Mayo Clinic Cancer Center suggests that physicians should screen patients with lung cancer for MET amplification/overexpression before determining a treatment strategy. Their findings are published Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.
A key factor in America's prodigious agricultural output turns out to be something farmers can do little to control: clean air. A new Stanford-led study estimates pollution reductions between 1999 and 2019 contributed to about 20 percent of the increase in corn and soybean yield gains during that period - an amount worth about $5 billion per year.
The number of people who live past the age of 100 has been on the rise for decades, up to nearly half a million people worldwide.
There are, however, far fewer “supercentenarians,” people who live to age 110 or even longer. The oldest living person, Jeanne Calment of France, was 122 when she died in 1997; currently, the world’s oldest person is 118-year-old Kane Tanaka of Japan.
In Canada, low-income hospital patients under palliative care are less likely to receive medical assistance in dying compared to those who are high income, according to a study published in British Medical Journal Open (BMJ Open).
Medical assistance in dying (MAID) is legal and free under Medicare, Canada's universal health care system. Patients with low socioeconomic status (SES), however, generally tend to experience less access to medical care compared to their high SES counterparts.
LA JOLLA, CA--Researchers at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) have found that T cells from people who have recovered from COVID-19 or received the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines are still able to recognize several concerning SARS-CoV-2 variants.
Minority-ethnic medical students must have more role-models in senior leadership positions if they are to engage with academia. This is one of the conclusions drawn by a group of medical students writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine about the drivers and barriers to engaging with academia.
In an article appearing in Nature Biomedical Engineering, a team of scientists from the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine and UCLA School of Engineering report real-world results on SwabSeq, a high-throughput testing platform that uses sequencing to test thousands of samples at a time to detect COVID-19. They were able to perform more than 80,000 tests in less than two months, with the test showing extremely high sensitivity and specificity.
Almost twenty years ago, the process of RNA silencing was discovered in plants, whereby small fragments of RNA inactivate a portion of a gene during protein synthesis. These fragments--called microRNAs (abbreviated as miRNAs)--have since been shown to be essential at nearly every stage of growth and development in plants, from the production of flowers, stems, and roots to the ways plants interact with their environment and ward off infection.
There might be fewer bonobos left in the wild than we thought. For the last 40 years, scientists have estimated the abundance of endangered bonobos by counting the numbers of sleeping nests left by the apes in forests of the Congo Basin. Now, researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior report that the rate of sleeping nest "decay" has lengthened by 17 days over the last 15 years as a result of declining rainfall in the Congo Basin.
DALLAS - June 30, 2021 - A relative decline in wealth during midlife increases the likelihood of a cardiac event or heart disease after age 65 while an increase in wealth between ages 50 and 64 is associated with lower cardiovascular risk, according to a new study in JAMA Cardiology.
The cells that make up our bodies are constantly exposed to a wide variety of mechanical stresses. For example, the heart and lungs have to withstand lifelong expansion and contraction, our skin has to be as resistant to tearing as possible whilst retaining its elasticity, and immune cells are very squashy so that they can move through the body. Special protein structures, known as "intermediate filaments", play an important role in these characteristics.
There are certain rules that even the most extreme objects in the universe must obey. A central law for black holes predicts that the area of their event horizons -- the boundary beyond which nothing can ever escape -- should never shrink. This law is Hawking's area theorem, named after physicist Stephen Hawking, who derived the theorem in 1971.
Fifty years later, physicists at MIT and elsewhere have now confirmed Hawking's area theorem for the first time, using observations of gravitational waves. Their results appear in Physical Review Letters.
1 July 2021: Despite only limited evidence that fertility add-ons increase the odds of having a baby, the majority of women (82%) have used one or more of these treatments as part of their IVF.
This is the conclusion of a retrospective study of 1,590 Australian patients which also found more than seven in 10 (72%) had incurred additional costs for these unproven additional therapies and techniques which range from Chinese herbal medicine to endometrial scratching.
Sophia Antipolis - 1 July 2021: Heart failure patients aged 80 and above are less likely to receive recommended therapies and dosages compared to their younger counterparts, according to research presented today at Heart Failure 2021, an online scientific congress of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).1
New research from marine biologists offers answers to a fundamental puzzle that had until now remained unsolved: why are some fish warm-blooded when most are not?
It turns out that while (warm-blooded) fish able to regulate their own body temperatures can swim faster, they do not live in waters spanning a broader range of temperatures.