Biosingularity

Just in time for the holidays, here’s a new reason to get children to eat their veggies. Children who eat a lot of fruit and vegetables have healthier, less stiff arteries as young adults compared to children who don’t load up on fruit and veggies, according to a new study. Researchers say arterial stiffness is [...]

In the past 40 years, scientists have learned a great deal about how cells become cancerous. Some of that knowledge has translated to new treatments, but most of the time doctors are forced to rely on standard chemotherapy and radiation, which can do nearly as much damage to the patients as they do the tumors. [...]

By tweaking enzymes that prevent chromosome tips from unraveling, researchers have shown age-related tissue degeneration can be reversed in some mice. Medical breakthroughs involving mice must be taken with rock-sized grains of salt because, despite their genetic similarity, the rodents aren’t humans. The latest findings, published online by the journal Nature on November 28, are [...]

If you’re using the anticlotting drug warfarin, tell your doctor about any herbal or dietary supplements you may be taking. That’s the strong advice of researchers who say that nine of the 10 top-selling supplements can change the effectiveness of warfarin, potentially causing a dangerous bleed, a deadly blood clot, or even a stroke. In [...]

Ellen Goode and her colleagues at the Mayo Clinic found a surprise while studying the human genome: four chromosomal locations with mutations that could lead to an increased risk of ovarian cancer. But the biggest surprise was a number of SNPs on chromosome 8 that seem to act through a different mechanism than other polymorphisms [...]

There’s a chemical that can subtly shift your childhood memories of your own mother. In some people, it paints mum in a more saintly light, making them remember her as closer and more caring. In others, the chemical has a darker influence, casting mum as a less caring and more distant parent. All of this [...]

An international team of immunologists studying the effects of cannabis have discovered how smoking marijuana can trigger a suppression of the body’s immune functions. The research, published in the European Journal of Immunology, reveals why cannabis users are more susceptible to certain types of cancers and infections. The team, led by Dr Prakash Nagarkatti from the [...]

Scientists have tracked the flow of nanoparticles from the lungs to the bloodstream for the first time. The work could lead to the development of new drugs and help researchers understand how pollution can cause respiratory problems Researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Harvard School of Public Health injected fluorescent nanoparticles into [...]

At the end of a day of often emotional testimony, an FDA advisory panel overwhelmingly voted to recommend the approval of a new drug for the treatment of systemic lupus. If the FDA follows the panel’s advice, the drug, belimumab, will be the first drug approved in more than 50 years for the chronic and [...]

Since the early 1980s, cancer researchers have known that a protein called p53 plays a critical role in protecting cells from becoming cancerous. The protein is defective in about half of all human cancers; when it functions correctly, it appears to suppress tumor formation by preventing cells with cancer-promoting mutations from reproducing. Knowing p53’s critical [...]

The appeal of sudoku has spread to the prokaryotic world. A strain of Escherichia coli bacteria can now solve the logic puzzles – with some help from a group of students at the University of Tokyo, Japan. “Because sudoku has simple rules, we felt that maybe bacteria could solve it for us, as long as [...]

A California company has shown how to dramatically lower blood pressure in hard-to-treat patients by destroying tiny nerves in the kidney. The nerves are located inside the main arteries leading to the kidney. They affect blood pressure by controlling the release of sodium and an enzyme called renin, and by managing blood flow from the [...]

An experimental pill that boosts levels of “good” HDL cholesterol has cleared a major safety hurdle, renewing hopes of fighting heart disease in a new way. Although the study of the drug, anacetrapib, was designed to look primarily at its safety, researchers say they were stunned by its dramatic effects on cholesterol levels. “Our jaws [...]

People are happiest when having sex, exercising, or talking to others — in large part because such activities require enough concentration to keep their minds from wandering, new research indicates. In general, people spend almost half their waking hours thinking about something other than what they are doing in the present, and this “mind wandering” [...]

Suppressing cancer cells’ ability to cope with damage to their DNA could enhance dramatically the effectiveness of chemotherapy drugs such as cisplatin, according to a new pair of papers from MIT biologists. In studies of mice, the researchers found that slowing down a specific system for tolerating DNA damage in cancer cells not only prolonged [...]

When the immune system identifies a cell that needs to be eliminated, such as a virus-infected cell or cancer cell, natural killer cells descend and puncture the offending cell, injecting toxic enzymes to spell its doom. At the centre of this immune response is a crucial protein called perforin, which is responsible for forming a pore [...]