Body

After 13 years of meticulous excavation of the nearly complete skeleton of the Australopithecus fossil named Little Foot, South African and French scientists have now convincingly shown that it is probably around 3 million years old.

New UCLA research suggests that the more muscle mass older Americans have, the less likely they are to die prematurely. The findings add to the growing evidence that overall body composition — and not the widely used body mass index, or BMI — is a better predictor of all-cause mortality.

Researchers at the University of Washington have successfully created a line of human embryonic stem cells that have the ability to develop into a far broader range of tissues than most existing cell lines.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Animals "do the locomotion" every day, whether it's walking down the hall to get some coffee or darting up a tree to avoid a predator. And until now, scientists believed the inner workings of movement were pretty much the same — the nerves send a message to the muscles and there is motion.

But in a first-of-its-kind study on wild green anole lizards, biologists at the University of California, Riverside have discovered that the link between muscle function and movement is a lot more complicated than anyone realized.

NEW ORLEANS─A new study presented today at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) found no link between neurocognitive function and years of football play in adolescent athletes.

NEW ORLEANS—A new study presented today at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) found that the thrill of extreme sports comes at a price: a higher risk for severe neck and head injuries.

Extreme sports are gaining in popularity: skateboarding has surged 49 percent to 14 million U.S. participants, and snowboarding now claims 7.2 million enthusiasts, up 51 percent since 1999.

"Very low-energy radiation also damages DNA: how safe are "eye-safe" lasers?"

CLEVELAND – Despite the benefits of surgery for early stage pancreatic cancer, it remains under-utilized for patients with this deadly disease, according to a new national analysis of trends and outcomes. Physician-scientists at University Hospitals Case Medical Center and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine presented their findings and strategies to increase rates at the Society of Surgical Oncology Cancer Symposium in Phoenix.

This news release is available in French.

People exposed to takeaway food outlets around their home, at work and on their way to work are more likely to consume more of these foods, as well as being more likely to be obese, suggest a paper published on bmj.com today.

During the past decade in the UK, consumption of food away from home has risen by 29% while the number of takeaways has increased dramatically. This, the researchers say, could be contributing to rising levels of overweight and obesity.

People who have diabetes at the time they are diagnosed with cancer are more likely to die early than those without diabetes, concludes research published in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes). The research is by Kristina Ranc, University of Copenhagen and Steno Diabetes Center, Gentofte, Denmark, and colleagues. The researchers conclude that patients with both diabetes and cancer constitute a particularly vulnerable group, and efforts are needed to reduce cancer-related mortality among these patients.

Human mouths contain a balanced mix of microbes which, when disrupted, can lead to oral diseases. A study published on March 13th in PLOS Pathogens compares the bacteria and fungi present in the mouths of healthy individuals with those from patients infected with HIV, and illustrates why oral candidiasis (aka "thrush") is a common complication of HIV infection.

An analysis of 100 million US medical records reveals that autism and intellectual disability (ID) rates are correlated at the county level with incidence of genital malformations in newborn males, an indicator of possible congenital exposure to harmful environmental factors such as pesticides.

Scientists at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine and University Hospitals (UH) Case Medical Center have discovered how the beneficial fungal yeast, Pichia, holds at bay a harmful fungal yeast, Candida. The hope for this finding is that components in Pichia could one day become therapeutic agents to stave off not only thrush, but also other life-threatening systemic fungal infections. Research findings about the effect of oral Pichia on Candida appear in the March 13 edition of PLOS Pathogens.

Researchers at Virginia Tech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have used a computer-aided design tool to create genetic languages to guide the design of biological systems.

Known as GenoCAD, the open-source software was developed by researchers at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech to help synthetic biologists capture biological rules to engineer organisms that produce useful products or health-care solutions from inexpensive, renewable materials.