Body

When did modern humans settle in Asia and what route did they take from mankind's African homeland? A University of Huddersfield professor has helped to provide answers to both questions. But he has also had to settle a controversy.

One of the most remarkable anatomical differences among vertebrate bodies is the relative size of their neck, trunk and tail. This can be illustrated by comparing the bodies of a typical snake and of a long tailed lizard. They are both very long and superficially similar. However, most of the snake's body is a trunk full with organs of the digestive, excretory and reproductive systems, whereas the largest part of the lizard's body is a muscular tail. These different body plans are genetically determined during embryonic development.

Progesterone, a female hormone that can be used as a therapy for endometrial cancer, eliminates tumor cells indirectly by binding to its receptor in stromal or connective tissue cells residing in the tumor microenvironment, according to a study from the G.O. Discovery Lab team and collaborators at UCLA.

A significant decline in the numbers of native fish in Australia's Murray-Darling Basin may be linked to released dam water being too cold for breeding.

This is just one of the findings from a Griffith University led study which found current water releases back into the Murray-Darling system limit fish reproduction and therefore impact freshwater biodiversity.

A US$12 million investment in rice research has returned more than $70 million in benefits to rice farmers and national economies in four Asian countries, according to a new report.

PORTLAND, Ore. June 10, 2013. A recent government report reveals that the number of houses in dispersed rural settings in western Washington has doubled over the past 30 years, and that 20 percent of nonfederal land is currently developed.

Vancouver, British Columbia – Researchers are kick-starting better diabetic foot care and promoting reduced radiation dose with a new take on a hybrid molecular imaging technique. By targeting both bone cell activity and immune response and improving imaging data interpretation, doctors can better distinguish diabetic foot infection from another common foot condition that often requires an additional bone-marrow scan for definitive diagnosis, say researchers presenting a study at the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging's 2013 Annual Meeting.

Vancouver, British Columbia – Outcomes can be bleak for non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), a cancer that develops in the white blood cells of the immune system. Accurate estimation of radiation absorbed dose in radioimmunotherapy (RIT) based on state-of-the-art 3D imaging could lead to more personalized and effective treatments to improve patients' chances of living longer without progression of their cancer, say researchers at the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging's 2013 Annual Meeting.

Vancouver, British Columbia – External beam radiation treatment has long been manipulated into the unique shape of patients' tumors for personalized cancer care. Technology providing a means of patient-specific radionuclide drug therapies has not been standardized, as it has been limited to software that requires oncologists to manually define the areas of tumors.

Vancouver, British Columbia – Peptide-receptor radionuclide therapy (PRRT) has been a subject of growing research on neuroendocrine tumors, which take up residence in a variety of organs replete with nerve cells that respond to hormone signaling. A countrywide study in Germany deemed PRRT treatment not only safe and effective but life-prolonging, according to a study unveiled during the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging's 2013 Annual Meeting.

Vancouver, British Columbia – No matter where they have hidden, metastatic prostate cancer cells still express some of the same signaling as normal prostate cells; in some cases even more so, as with the PSMA enzyme. Harnessing this enzyme could mean the beginning of a new platform for prostate cancer detection, staging, treatment and post-treatment monitoring, say researchers at the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging's 2013 Annual Meeting.

Vancouver, British Columbia – For patients with advanced breast cancer, positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance (MR) imaging can improve quality of life and survival by providing physicians with information on the effectiveness of chemotherapy prior to surgery, say researchers presenting at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging.

Vancouver, British Columbia – When prostate cancer makes a comeback, it becomes increasingly important to have exceptional imaging available to find all possible regions where cancer has spread to other parts of the body, or metastasized, in order to plan the best possible treatment.

New research analysing breast cancer mortality data spanning almost 40 years concludes that breast cancer screening does not yet show an effect on mortality statistics. The research, published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, analysed mortality trends before and after the introduction of the National Health Service Breast Screening Programme in 1988.

A new study by UBC's Sauder School of Business says retailers should consider admonishing queue jumpers and thoughtless store browsers to ease aggression between shoppers.

"Our study shows that retailers can play a key role in mitigating conflict by calling shoppers on bad shopping etiquette," says Lily Lin, a recent graduate of the Sauder PhD program about her study published in June's Journal of Consumer Research. "This is important because research shows retailers can get part of the blame for their badly behaved customers."