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 Oldest evidence of breast cancer found in Egyptian skeleton A team from a Spanish university has discovered what Egyptian authorities are calling the world's oldest evidence of breast cancer in the 4,200-year-old skeleton of an adult woman. Antiquities Minister Mamdouh el-Damaty said the bones of the woman, who lived at the end of the 6th Pharaonic Dynasty, showed "an extraordinary deterioration". "The study of her remains shows the typical destructive damage provoked by the extension of a breast cancer as a metastasis," he said in a statement on Tuesday. Despite being one of the world's leading causes of death today, cancer is virtually absent in archaeological records compared to other diseases - which has given rise to the idea that cancers are mainly attributable to modern lifestyles and to people living for longer. Read More »Angelina Jolie Pitt's Surgery: Why She Had Her Ovaries Removed Angelina Jolie Pitt underwent preventative surgery to remove her ovaries and fallopian tubes, according to the Op-Ed in the New York Times today that the actress, director and United Nations envoy wrote. Two years ago, Jolie Pitt elected to have a preventative double mastectomy after learning that she had a mutation in the BRCA1 gene, a gene that codes for tumor-suppressing proteins, which normally repair damaged DNA. "When someone has a harmful mutation in that gene, it no longer allows the cell to repair itself, and then the cells can go awry and become cancerous," said Dr. Marleen Meyers, the director of the Survivorship Program at the New York University Perlmutter Cancer Center, who was not involved with Jolie Pitt's medical care. Breast and ovarian cancer are more prevalent among women with the harmful BRCA1 mutation. Read More »Thirty new bean varieties bred to beat baking climate By Chris Arsenault ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Scientists have bred 30 new varieties of "heat-beating" beans designed to provide protein for the world's poor in the face of global warming, researchers announced on Wednesday. Described as "meat of the poor", beans are a key food source for more than 400 million people across the developing world, but the area suitable for growing them could drop 50 percent by 2050 because of global warming, endangering tens of millions of lives, scientists said. "Small farmers around the world are living on the edge even during the best situation," Steve Beebe, a senior bean researcher told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "Climate change will force many to go hungry, or throw in the towel, sell their land and move into urban slums if they don't get support." Many of the new varieties, bred to resist droughts and higher temperatures, put traits from less popular strains, such as the tepary bean, into pinto, black, white and kidney beans. Read More »Shape-Shifting Frog Can Change Its Skin Texture Read More » Sci-Fi Cloaking Device Could Protect Soldiers from Shock Waves Read More » Smartphone use changing our brain and thumb interaction, say researchers Dr Arko Ghosh, of the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, led the research which involved using electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the cortical brain activity in 37 right-handed people, 26 of whom were touchscreen Smartphone users and 11 users of old-fashioned cellphones. Brain activity was then compared with the individual commands recorded by each individuals' phone logs. "We measured people's brain activity using a bunch of electrodes on the scalp and what these maps indicate is essentially how much of the variance between people we could explain by just looking at the phone logs, so how much brain activity can be explained by looking at people's history of use on the phones alone," said Ghosh. Read More »How Real-Life AI Rivals 'Ultron': Computers Learn to Learn Read More » Puzzling Layer of 'Stiff' Rock May Lurk Deep Inside Earth Read More » Repeated Use of Antibiotics May Raise Diabetes Risk People who have taken certain antibiotics repeatedly may be at an increased risk of type 2 diabetes, according to a new study. Researchers found that people in the study who had ever been prescribed two or more courses of specific types of antibiotics were more likely to be diagnosed with type 2 diabetes than people who had never been prescribed these antibiotics, or had taken just one course. The antibiotics in the study came from one of four categories: penicillins, cephalosporins, quinolones and macrolides. The study "raises a red flag about the overuse of antibiotics, and it should make us much more concerned about this overuse," said Dr. Raphael Kellman, a New York City internist who was not involved in the study. Read More »Angelina Jolie Pitt's Decision: What Are the Options? Angelina Jolie Pitt has revealed she underwent surgery to prevent ovarian cancer, and is encouraging women to explore their options. In a New York Times Op-Ed article, Jolie Pitt said today that she had surgery to remove her ovaries and fallopian tubes to prevent ovarian cancer. Last year, the actress disclosed that she carries a genetic mutation in the BRCA1 gene, which significantly increases her risk of breast and ovarian cancer, and she had undergone a double mastectomy to prevent breast cancer. But in this latest Op-Ed, Jolie Pitt writes that "a positive BRCA test does not mean a leap to surgery. Read More »'MIND' Your Diet, and Protect Against Alzheimer's In a decade-long study of about 1,000 people, those who followed this diet reduced their risk of Alzheimer's disease by 53 percent, compared with people who did not follow it, according to the researchers. Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia, affects more than 40 million people globally, according to Alzheimer's Disease International. Doctors believe that Alzheimer's disease is caused by a mix of genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors. Previous studies have found that Alzheimer's disease is associated with obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Read More »A Year in Space: The Science Behind the Epic Space Station Voyage Read More » Hubble Space Telescope Successor on Track for 2018 Launch, NASA Tells Congress Read More » Supermassive backhole detector ready for business By Ben Gruber The Sierra Negra volcano in the central Mexican state of Puebla is the site of an ambitious astrophysical project which houses the largest gamma ray observatory ever built on the planet. After five years of construction, scientists in Mexico say the High Altitude Water Cherenkov Experiment or HAWC, is operating at full capacity. Funded by both public and private money from Mexico and the United States, HAWC hopes to trap gamma ray particles coming from space. The observatory is made up of 300 tanks each holding 50,000 gallons (190,000 liters) of pure water, as well as detectors capable of sensing and recording Chernakov radiation, a flash of light made up of charged particles produced when they impact the tanks after coming through Earth atmosphere slightly faster than the speed of light. Read More »Black Hole Winds Quench Star Formation in Entire Galaxies Read More » | ||||
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Wednesday, March 25, 2015
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