Tech

Western University researchers are working on a way to use artificial intelligence to predict a patient's response to two common chemotherapy medications used to treat breast cancer - paclitaxel and gemcitabine.

Peter Rogan, PhD, and a team of researchers, including Stephanie Dorman, PhD, and Katherina Baranova, BMSc, at Western's Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, are hoping to one day remove the guesswork from breast cancer treatment with this technique.

People fed β-glucan-enriched pasta for two months showed increased populations of beneficial bacteria in their intestinal tracts, and reduced populations of non-beneficial bacteria. They also showed reduced LDL (bad) cholesterol. This work is part of a broad effort to identify potential prebiotics--foods that could encourage the growth of health-promoting bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract.

Though England, Scotland and Wales hold the top three spots as the most violent countries in the developed world, in America the ability to obtain a gun until after you have committed a crime leads even the ultra-violent UK to claim America needs to change.

Many in America contend guns do not cause crime any more than spoons cause obesity and instead point to the mental health - and drug-use to combat it - relationship. There haven't been any mass shootings that have occurred which did not involve mental health drugs.

Sun Biomedical Limited has announced the first enrollment in a Phase II study of DMX-200, a treatment that combines two drugs to treat chronic kidney disease. DMX-200 combines a drug called irbesartan, an off-patent compound used to treat hypertension and nephropathy in Type II diabetic patients and propagermanium, a dietary supplement. The Company has previously published preclinical data showing that combining the drugs blocks an inflammatory response which prevents the kidneys from functioning properly and releasing protein into the urine, called proteinuria.

They're the latest rage in jewelry and gadgetry, but like all computer devices, smart watches are vulnerable to hackers, say researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Imagine creating artificial plants that make gasoline and natural gas using only sunlight. And imagine using those fuels to heat our homes or run our cars without adding any greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. By combining nanoscience and biology, researchers led by scientists at University of California, Berkeley, have taken a big step in that direction.

Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Princeton University have designed a new online tool that predicts the role of key proteins and genes in diseases of the human immune system. Called "ImmuNet," details of the publically available resource were published online today in the journal Immunity.

Social network Flickr and citizen science website BugGuide have helped scientists to expand the known range of a rarely collected parasitic woodwasp, native to the eastern United States. Partially thanks to the two online photograph platforms, now the species' distribution now stretches hundreds of miles west of previous records. Previously known from only 50 specimens mainly from the Northeast, now the species was discovered in the Ozark Mountains by researchers from the University of Arkansas. Their study is published it in the open access journal Biodiversity Data Journal.

Electronic cigarette use is increasing rapidly among high school students. Of concern, e-cigarettes can be used to vaporize cannabis, although use rates among adolescents are unknown.

Patients with spinal stenosis (SS) experienced good short term benefit, lasting from weeks to months, after receiving epidural steroid injections (ESI).

These findings, which appear in a letter in the journal Pain Medicine, contradict a previously published New England Journal Medicine (NEJM) study that found epidural steroid injections were not helpful in spinal stenosis cases.

The misery of motion sickness could be ended within five to ten years thanks to a new treatment being developed by scientists.

Using an inexpensive drug for every hip or knee replacement since 2013 has helped St. Michael's Hospital reduce its number of red blood cell transfusions performed during these surgeries by more than 40 per cent without negatively affecting patients, according to new research.

The drug tranexamic acid, known as TXA, prevents excessive blood loss during surgeries.

Electrical engineers at the University of California, San Diego demonstrated a new wireless communication technique that works by sending magnetic signals through the human body. The new technology could offer a lower power and more secure way to communicate information between wearable electronic devices, providing an improved alternative to existing wireless communication systems, researchers said. They presented their findings Aug. 26 at the 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society in Milan, Italy.

Despite billions of dollars in outreach programs designed to lure women into computer programming, and companies mandating that more women be hired, most females would rather go into something involving people.

Yet a new survey of 270 high school students concludes that three times as many girls would interested in enrolling in a computer science class if the classroom was redesigned to be less "geeky" and more inviting.

Hospira today announced that Inflectra, (infliximab), the first monoclonal antibody (mAb) biosimilar therapy, has been registered in Australia. This registration paves the way for the Federal Government to reduce the cost of some of the most expensive medicines on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS). A biosimilar is a biologic medicine that has been researched and developed in line with the high quality standards of biologic manufacturing to treat the same diseases as the originator product.