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A fossil that has been in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History since it was discovered in 1951 is today helping scientists piece together the evolutionary history of whales and dolphins, including the origins of the endangered South Asian river dolphin.

Researchers are on a real-life search for what one calls "the ultimate Pokémon": Zenkerella, an elusive scaly-tailed squirrel that has never been spotted alive by scientists. However, biologists recently found three newly dead specimens that hint at how the "living fossil" has evolved over the past 49 million years.

Philadelphia, August 16, 2016 - Psoriasis in America 2016, a new national survey by Health Union of nearly 600 individuals with psoriasis, reveals that although patients have numerous treatment options, they have difficulty finding treatment plans that work. In addition, respondents reported a heavy emotional toll, with many feeling isolated and stigmatized due to the condition.

People receiving personalised nutrition advice develop healthier eating habits including consuming less red meat and reducing their salt intake, a study has found.

A website has also been shown to be effective at helping people make important changes to their eating patterns.

Publishing in the International Journal of Epidemiology, the pan-European study, led by Newcastle University, UK, surprisingly found there was no evidence that personalisation based on more complex information made any difference to the outcome.

Plants, bacteria and fungi react to light with light-sensitive proteins. Scientists from the University of Gothenburg and their Finnish colleagues from University of Jyväskylä have now determined the inner workings of one of these proteins. The results have been published in the most recent issue of Science Advances.

A UCLA study is the first to show that Latinos age at a slower rate than other ethnic groups. The findings, published in the current issue of Genome Biology, may one day help scientists understand how to slow the aging process for everyone.

Annually about 2000 Danish patients with colorectal cancer are treated with chemotherapy. Today, a range of different chemotherapeutic regimens are available. However, deciding which regimen to use is not easy. Unfortunately, it is currently impossible to predict which regimen will be most beneficial for the individual patient and for a large number of patients their cancer cells are actually resistant to the chosen treatment.

Prostate cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's...these three diseases are associated with proteins that share a common feature, namely disordered regions that have no apparent rigid three-dimensional structure. In spite of the potential of these regions as therapeutic targets, it was believed that drugs could not be directed to them. But now scientists at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) have rediscovered their utility as drug targets.

(Boston)-- Findings from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM), which appear in eLife, provide a possible explanation as to why most people who are obese develop insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. A minority of obese individuals, the so-called healthy obese, have normal insulin sensitivity and are not diabetic.

Maintaining appropriate levels of proteins within cells largely relies on a cellular component called the proteasome, which degrades unneeded or defective proteins to recycle the components for the eventual assembly of new proteins. Deficient proteasome function can lead to a buildup of unneeded and potentially toxic proteins, so cells usually respond to proteasome dysfunction by increasing production of its component parts. Now two Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators have identified key molecules in the pathway by which cells in the C.

Scientists at Karolinska Institutet in collaboration with Estonian Competence Centre on Health Technologies have developed a new gene expression analysis method to widen the usage of blood in biomarker discovery and analysis. Their paper is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

AURORA, Colo. (Aug. 16, 2016) - A University of Colorado School of Medicine researcher and colleagues have conducted the first-ever survey of physicians on the validity of "abusive head trauma" as a medical diagnosis.

San Francisco, CA, August 16, 2016 - Because of the beneficial effect of corticosteroids on lung function, especially in infants who are ventilator dependent, corticosteroids are, at times, administered to very low birth weight neonates to treat established or evolving lung disease. However, it has long been suspected that steroids may have negative neurodevelopmental effects on very premature infants.

Circulating viral infections may help explain the temporal and geographical patterns associated with the risk of developing childhood coeliac disease, conclude Swedish researchers in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.

But the role of vitamin D during pregnancy may also have a part to play, they suggest.

They base their findings on a long term study of almost 2 million children up to the age of 15 who had been born in Sweden between 1991 and 2009.

Female physicians are reimbursed significantly less than their male counterparts, even after adjusting for how hard a physician works, their productivity and years of experience, finds a new study--one of the largest carried out in recent times--published in the online edition of Postgraduate Medical Journal.

Female physicians were reimbursed around US $18,677.23 less than their male colleagues in 2012, and were paid less across 13 specialities, especially nephrology, rheumatology, and pulmonary medicine.