Culture
A new roundtable report from the Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee (ISIC) titled 'Coffee, caffeine, mortality and life expectancy' highlights the potential role of coffee consumption on all-cause mortality, examining both published and yet-to-be published research to date.
It is one of the most unusual primates on the planet - famed for its large eyes, big ears and thin, bony finger used for probing.
Often persecuted as a harbinger of evil, the aye-aye has fascinated scientists, in particular how and why it evolved such unusual features.
But now a new study has, for the first time, measured the extent to which the endangered aye-aye has evolved similar features to squirrels, despite being more closely related to monkeys, chimps, and humans.
Since Darwin first laid out the basic principles of evolution by means of natural selection, the role of competition for food as a driving force in shaping and shifting a species' biology to outcompete its adversaries has played center stage. So important is the notion of competition between species, that it is viewed as a key selective force that resulted in the split of the lineage leading to modern humans from that of our early ape ancestors.
Eating high fibre foods may reduce the effects of stress on our gut and behaviour, according to new research published in The Journal of Physiology.
Stress is a significant health concern and can cause major changes in the gut and in the brain, which can cause changes in behaviour. In recent years there has been growing interest in the link between gut bacteria and stress-related disorders including anxiety, depression and irritable bowel syndrome.
A single-payer health care plan could expand coverage for all New York State residents, but would require significant new tax revenue, according to an analysis released today by the RAND Corporation and the New York State Health Foundation.
A plan outlined by the New York Health Act is likely to increase use of health services as more people receive coverage. But overall health care costs would decrease slightly over time if administrative costs are reduced and state officials slow the growth of payments to health care providers, according to the analysis.
Up until quite recently, the animal phylum Placozoa enjoyed a unique position in animal systematics. It was the only phylum to which only a single species had ever been assigned: Trichoplax adhaerens. Now, however, at team led by Professor Gert Wörheide of LMU's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and GeoBio-Center has discovered that placozoan specimens collected from coastal waters off Hong Kong clearly differ from T. adhaerens in their genetic make-up.
Tuesday, July 31, 2018, London, UK: The Biogerontology Research Foundation announces the publication of a new analytical report titled Longevity Industry in UK Landscape Overview 2018.
Scientists recently discovered the aptly named peacock jumping spiders have the color vision needed to appreciate the male's gaudy display.
Now biologists at the University of Cincinnati are studying whether that ability translates to the more humdrum-looking wolf spiders that are muted browns and tans instead of electric blue, fiery orange and stoplight red.
UC biology professor George Uetz and his students presented their work in June at the American Arachnological Society meeting at the University of Michigan.
HAMILTON, ON, July 31, 2018 - Just two weeks without much activity can have a dramatic impact on health from which it is difficult to recover, according to researchers who studied overweight older adults at risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.
Not only did an abrupt, brief period of inactivity hasten the onset of the disease and elevate blood sugar levels among pre-diabetic patients, but researchers reported that some study participants did not fully recover when they returned to normal activity for two weeks.
The strategy used by the Oropouche virus to replicate in human cells has been described for the first time by researchers at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil and international collaborators in an article published in the journal PLOS Pathogens.
Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and their colleagues are a step closer to developing a broadly effective antibody treatment against the three major Ebola viruses that cause lethal disease in humans.
Reporting July 17 in the journal Immunity, they describe the isolation of two potent monoclonal antibodies from human survivors of Ebola virus disease that, in cell culture studies, efficiently neutralized the Zaire, Sudan and Bundibugyo ebolaviruses.
Additive manufacturing, otherwise known as 3-D printing, can be used to manufacture porous electrodes for lithium-ion batteries--but because of the nature of the manufacturing process, the design of these 3-D printed electrodes is limited to just a few possible architectures. Until now, the internal geometry that produced the best porous electrodes through additive manufacturing was what's known as an interdigitated geometry--metal prongs interlocked like the fingers of two clasped hands, with the lithium shuttling between the two sides.
Despite high hopes and high investment in CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, scientists still have a lot to learn about how it works in humans.
In the latest example, University of California, Berkeley, scientists found that people's assumptions about how cells repair the genome after the Cas9 enzyme snips DNA are wrong.
AUGUSTA, Ga. (July 30, 2018) - Using a manmade version of a human antibody to directly deliver a drug that inhibits a powerful driver of inflammation, can reverse a disease course that often leads to kidney failure and dialysis, investigators report.
They have additionally found that it's the powerhouses of kidney cells, called mitochondria, that are particularly impacted by the acute or chronic inflammation called nephritis, and that, at least in their animal model and cell cultures, the treatment restores their function.
ANN ARBOR, MI - Nearly a third of older adults have received a prescription for an opioid pain medicine in the past two years, but many of them didn't get enough counseling about the risks that come with the potent painkillers, how to reduce their use, when to switch to a non-opioid option, or what to do with leftover pills, a new poll finds.