Obesity is a major public-health problem in the United States and around the world, with an estimated 650 million people suffering from the condition. One of the biggest challenges of this ever-worsening condition is figuring out why people become obese in the first place, and why some people are more vulnerable to obesity than others.…
Looking at your cell phone, you realize the battery is low, which means you have to make another long walk into town to pay money to charge the device. By the time you get home, it’s getting dark. You light the kerosene lamp that casts a dim glow across the room. A significant amount of…
Researchers at Saint Louis University have found that eating a Mediterranean diet can improve athletes’ endurance exercise performance after just four days. In a small study published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, investigators found that participants ran a 5K six percent faster after eating a Mediterranean diet than after eating a…
Woodland caribou populations have been dwindling towards local extinction across much of their range and scientists believe that predators, and specifically wolves, are a leading cause of the decline. Wolf populations are thought to have increased and expanded into caribou range due to the expansion of linear features, such as pipelines and roads, resulting from…
Translocation is an important management tool that has been used for more than 50 years to increase bighorn sheep population numbers in Arizona and to restore herds to suitable habitat throughout their historical range. Yet, translocation also can alter the underlying genetic diversity and spatial structure of managed wildlife species in both beneficial and detrimental…
An estimated 15 to 20 percent of all breast cancer patients are “triple negative.” These unfortunate women lack three crucial treatment targets — the estrogen receptor, the progesterone receptor and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2. Because they lack these targets, most triple negative patients are treated with standard chemotherapy, rather than the preferred targeted…
UT Southwestern researchers used cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) to determine the near-atomic structure of the smallest membrane protein solved to date. Their work could lead to better immunotherapies in cancer and improved treatments for autoimmune diseases like lupus. Cryo-EM — the technology credited with the “resolution revolution” underway in structural biology — uses a massive microscope…
When cancer spreads to another organ, it most commonly moves to the liver, and now researchers at the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania say they know why. A new study, published today in Nature, shows hepatocytes — the chief functional cells of the liver — are at the center of a chain…
The researchers behind the study believe that regular screening and improved access to new treatments have contributed to greatly reducing the transmission of the infection. They also believe that if this progress can be maintained London will be on track to achieve the targets set out by the British HIV Association to eliminate Hepatitis C…
They say you only find what you’re looking for, and that applies in population genetics as well as in life. Population genetic studies rely on scoring known, characterized variation in DNA in order to decipher the history of different populations. However, this known variation may not be sufficient to give a properly resolved picture in…