New research conducted by Harvard scientists is laying out a roadmap to one of the holy grails of modern medicine – a cure for cancer. As described paper recently published in eLife, Nowak, a professor of Mathematics and of Biology and director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, and co-author Ivana Bozic, a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics, show that, under certain conditions, using two drugs in a "targeted therapy" – a treatment approach designed to interrupt cancer's ability to grow and spread – nearly all cancers could be effectively cured. Though not ...

By monitoring artists as they sketch human faces, stroke by stroke, scientists at Disney Research, Pittsburgh, have built computer models that learn each artist's drawing style, how they use strokes and how they select features to highlight as they interpret a face into a portrait. A better understanding of this abstraction process, the researchers stated, not only is interesting from an artistic point of view, but also can help in developing artificial drawing tools. "There's something about an artist's interpretation of a subject that people find compelling," said ...

Researchers have long understood that genetics can play a role in how susceptible people are to contracting cholera, but a team of Harvard scientists is now uncovering evidence of genetic changes that might also help protect some people from contracting the deadly disease. Based on genetic data gathered from hundreds of people in Bangladesh, a research team made up of Harvard faculty and scientists from the Broad Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital were able to a number of areas in the genome – some of which are responsible for certain immune system functions, ...

For nearly a century, the only bears known to reside in Missouri were on the state flag or in captivity. Unregulated hunting and habitat loss had wiped out most black bears in Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma by the 1920s. Now, thanks to a reintroduction program in Arkansas during the 50s and 60s, hundreds of bears amble through the forests of southern Missouri, according to a joint study by University of Missouri, Mississippi State University, and Missouri Department of Conservation biologists, who warn that although the bear population is still small, outdoor recreationists ...

Most big data centers, the global backbone of the Internet, could slash their greenhouse gas emissions by 88 percent by switching to efficient, off-the-shelf equipment and improving energy management, according to new research. The carbon emissions generated by a search on Google or a post on Facebook are related mostly to three things: the computing efficiency of IT (information technology) data center equipment, like servers, storage and network switches; the amount of electricity a data center's building uses for things other than computing, primarily cooling; and ...

HOUSTON – (July 19, 2013) – A discovery facilitated by Rice University's contribution to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will impact scientists' search for dark matter in the universe. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced in Switzerland this morning that researchers on two separate LHC experiments have succeeded in measuring "one of the rarest measurable processes in physics," the decay of B-subscript-s mesons into two muons. The evidence, which scientists have been seeking for 25 years, matches predictions made using the Standard Model of ...

NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of California's Mountain Fire on July 18 as the satellite passed overhead in space. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument that flies aboard Aqua captured an image of the smoke and heat from California's Mountain Fire on July 18 at 21:00 UTC (5 p.m. EDT/2 p.m. PDT). MODIS has the ability to detect hot spots or fires and they appear red in the image. At the time of the image, the light brown smoke plume was blowing west-northwest. The Mountain Fire started on July 15 at 1:43 p.m. near the junction ...

INDIANAPOLIS -- Research from the Regenstrief Institute and the Indiana University Center for Aging Research has found that many family caregivers of older adults with dementia are willing to consider stopping cancer screening of the elderly individual; they are also relieved when the older adult's physician brings it up. "This openness of dementia caregivers to considering cancer screening cessation for older adults provides potential to reduce both patient burden and health care costs as well as family caregiver distress, while improving the overall quality of care ...

ARGONNE, Ill. – A protein found in the membranes of ancient microorganisms that live in desert salt flats could offer a new way of using sunlight to generate environmentally friendly hydrogen fuel, according to a new study by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory. Argonne nanoscientist Elena Rozhkova and her colleagues combined a pigment called bacteriorhodopsin with semiconducting nanoparticles to create a system that uses light to spark a catalytic process that creates hydrogen fuel. Scientists have been aware of the potential ...

TORONTO -- Today TRIUMF, a Canadian laboratory for nuclear and particle physics that works in partnership with York University and University of Toronto, announced a new breakthrough in understanding neutrinos -- nature's most elusive particles. The international Tokai to Kamioka (T2K) collaboration designed an experiment to investigate how neutrinos change from one form to another as they travel. TRIUMF researcher Michael Wilking spoke at the prestigious European Physical Society meeting in Stockholm, Sweden, confirming definitive proof of a new type of neutrino oscillation ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — For health professionals, the message from a new study in the American Journal of Public Health is clear: Asking patients about a history of childhood abuse can directly help assess their risk of attempting suicide. The evidence, authors say, shows that childhood abuse can have life-and-death consequences for the rest of a person's life. The longitudinal study of more than 1,600 drug users in Vancouver, Canada, found that "severe-to-extreme" abuse – particularly emotional or sexual – contributed significantly to the risk of future ...

Researchers found a strong, graded association between worse kidney function and the presence of hypertension that is resistant to medications. More than 50% of individuals with moderate CKD had resistant hypertension. Among people with CKD, blacks and those with a larger waist circumference, diabetes, and a history of heart attacks or strokes were more likely to have resistant hypertension. 60 million people globally have chronic kidney disease. Washington, DC (July 18, 2013) — More than 50% of individuals with moderate kidney disease have hypertension that is ...

PITTSBURGH—Despite the lack of any concrete evidence that menu labels encourage consumers to make healthier food choices, they have become a popular tool for policymakers in the fight against obesity. Carnegie Mellon University researchers recently put menu labels to the test by investigating whether providing diners with recommended calorie intake information along with the menu items caloric content would improve their food choices. The study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, showed that recommended calorie intake information did not help consumers ...

Breaking a sweat while working out regularly may reduce your risk of stroke, according to new research in the American Heart Association journal Stroke. In a study of more than 27,000 Americans, 45 years and older who were followed for an average of 5.7 years, researchers found: One-third of participants reported being inactive, exercising less than once a week. Inactive people were 20 percent more likely to experience a stroke or mini-stroke than those who exercised at moderate to vigorous intensity (enough to break a sweat) at least four times a week. Among men, ...

Boston, Mass., July 18, 2013 - Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital have identified a genetic cause of severe obesity that, though rare, raises new questions about weight gain and energy use in the general obese population. The research, published in the journal Science on July 19, involved genetic surveys of several groups of obese humans and experiments in mice. Mice with the genetic mutation gained weight even while eating the same amount of food as their normal counterparts; the affected gene, Mrap2, has a human counterpart (MRAP2) and appears to be involved ...

There has been a "worrying" increase in alcohol related deaths among young women in England and Scotland, since the middle of the last decade, finds research published online in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. This is despite an overall fall in such deaths in both countries since the mid 2000s, say the authors, who describe the trends as a warning signal that must be heeded. The researchers focused on Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester, all of which have similar levels of poor health, deprivation, and industrialisation, to see if there were any factors ...

Missed diagnoses―particularly of cancer, heart attack, and meningitis―and drug errors make up the bulk of malpractice claims brought against doctors in primary care, finds an analysis of published data in the online journal BMJ Open. The risk of litigation has not been given a great deal of attention in primary care, say the authors. But with most healthcare contacts taking place in primary care, it is important to characterise the causes and types of claims arising from these encounters, they add. They carried out an extensive trawl of published research ...

You are not just yourself. You are also the thousands of microbes that you carry. In fact, they represent an invisible majority that may be more you than you realize. These microscopic fellow travelers are collectively called the microbiome. Realization that every species of plant and animal is accompanied by a distinctive microbiome is old news. But evidence of the impact that these microbes have on their hosts continues to grow rapidly in areas ranging from brain development to digestion to defense against infection to producing bodily odors. Now, contrary to current ...

Boys are more likely to receive the quadrivalent human papillomavirus vaccine (HPV4) if their mothers receive flu shots or Pap screenings, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published in the American Journal of Public Health. The study examined the electronic health records of more than 250,000 boys aged 9 to 17 years enrolled in the Kaiser Permanente Southern California health plan and found that a total of 4,055 boys – or 1.6 percent of the membership in this age group – initiated the HPV4 vaccine between October 2009 and December 2010. Researchers found that the ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (July 18, 2013) – Protein production or translation is tightly coupled to a highly conserved stress response that cancer cells rely on for survival and proliferation, according to Whitehead Institute researchers. In mouse models of cancer, targeted therapeutic inhibition of translation disrupts this survival response, dramatically slowing tumor growth and potentially rendering drug-resistant tumors vulnerable to other therapies. From yeast to worms to humans, this stress response and its primary regulator, heat shock factor 1 (HSF1), help normal cells ...

VIDEO: Estrogen therapy has been widely misunderstood, and may offer important benefits to women in their 50s who have had a hysterectomy. Click here for more information. The widespread rejection of estrogen therapy after the 2002 Women's Health Initiative (WHI) study has most likely led to almost 50,000 unnecessary deaths over the last 10 years among women aged 50 to 69 who have had a hysterectomy, Yale School of Medicine researchers reveal in a study published in the July ...

Catalysts are everywhere. They make chemical reactions that normally occur at extremely high temperatures and pressures possible within factories, cars and the comparatively balmy conditions within the human body. Developing better catalysts, however, is mainly a hit-or-miss process. Now, a study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Trieste and Brookhaven National Laboratory has shown a way to precisely design the active elements of a certain class of catalysts, showing which parameters are most critical for improving performance. This ...

UBC astronomers have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to track the orbital motion of 33,000 stars in one of the Galaxy's oldest globular clusters, offering new insights into the formation of the Milky Way. The careful examination of 'cosmic choreography' enabled researchers, for the first time, to link the movement of stars within the cluster to the stars' ages. The study reveals two distinct generations of stars within globular cluster 47 Tucanae, 16,700 light-years from Earth. Photo editors: Images and more information about 47 Tucanae: http://hubblesite.org/news/2013/25 http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/objects-from/pr1997035c/npp/all/ "When ...

A breakdown of the skin barrier and inflammation in the skin that occurs in eczema could play a key role in triggering food sensitivity in babies, a new study reveals. Scientists say this finding indicates that food allergies may develop via immune cells in the skin rather than the gut, highlighting eczema as a potential target for preventing food allergy in children. A link between eczema and food allergy has been known for some time, but researchers from King's College London and the University of Dundee say this study, published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, ...

Here's yet another reason to get off the couch: new research findings suggest that regularly breaking a sweat may lower the risk of having a stroke. A stroke can occur when a blood vessel in the brain gets blocked. As a result, nearby brain cells will die after not getting enough oxygen and other nutrients. A number of risk factors for stroke have been identified, including smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes and being inactive. For this study, published in the journal Stroke, Michelle N. McDonnell, Ph.D., from the University of South Australia, Adelaide and her ...