Biosingularity

Following a healthy lifestyle, which means exercising, eating healthfully, keeping the waistline trim, limiting alcohol intake, and avoiding smoking, could reduce the risk of colorectal cancer by 23%, according to a study from Denmark. via Healthy Lifestyle May Cut Colorectal Cancer Risk.

For the first time, human cells have been used to create a lab-grown liver. It’s a milestone on the way to creating a new source of livers for transplant, Wake Forest University (WFU) researchers say. Last June, a different research team reported growing a liver from animal cells. But if the goal is human transplants, [...]

A never-before detected strain of virus that killed more than one-third of a monkey colony at a U.S. lab appears to have ‘jumped’ from the animals to sicken a human scientist, researchers report. Although it’s an unusual move for that type of virus and does warrant further monitoring, the researchers stress there is no cause [...]

At some point in Karen Pihl’s life, one of her lung cells made a potentially fatal misstep. As the cell duplicated its DNA in preparation to divide, part of the gene for one protein became erroneously attached to part of the gene for another. The genetic malfunction bestowed the cell with the ability to grow [...]

After receiving chemotherapy, many cancer patients go into a remission that can last months or years. But in some of those cases, tumors eventually grow back, and when they do, they are frequently resistant to the drugs that initially worked. Now, in a study of mice with lymphoma, MIT biologists have discovered that a small [...]

Periodontitis, a common inflammatory disease in which gum tissue separates from teeth, leads to accumulation of bacteria and potential bone and tooth loss. Although traditional treatments concentrate on the bacterial infection, more recent strategies target the inflammatory response. In an article in the November issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, researchers from Harvard [...]

For decades, medications for depression have acted pretty much the same way–by manipulating levels of serotonin and other chemical messengers in the brain. New drugs have offered only modest changes from the old ones. Now a team of researchers, led by Michael Kaplitt, an associate professor at Weill Cornell Medical College, has proposed a different [...]

Did biology evolve a way to protect offspring from the ravages of aging by creating a physical barrier that separates the parent from its young? The idea that every organism must age was a concept that surprised many biologists. For a long time, aging was thought to be a process occurring only in multicellular organisms. [...]

Parents who research treatments for autism are confronted with a bewildering array of options, almost all of which have never been tested for safety and effectiveness. Organizations like The Cochrane Collaboration, which reviews the quality of evidence for medical treatments, are putting more effort into evaluating popular alternative treatments. via Alternative Biomedical Treatments for Autism: [...]

Hormone treatment after menopause, already known to increase the risk of breast cancer, also makes it more likely that the cancer will be advanced and deadly, a study finds. Women who took hormones and developed breast cancer were more likely to have cancerous lymph nodes, a sign of more advanced disease, and were more likely [...]

You probably know people who get tipsy after a drink or two. Maybe you’re one yourself. Over the past several decades, studies of college students have shown that such individuals are one-third to one-half as likely to develop alcoholism as those who drink and drink and drink before they feel drunk. Now scientists have identified a [...]

When mice are given drinking water laced with a special concoction of amino acids, they live longer than your average mouse, according to a new report in the October issue of Cell Metabolism, a Cell Press publication. The key ingredients in the supplemental mixture are so-called branched-chain amino acids, which account for 3 of the [...]