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From The Times of India: Women who take oral contraceptives regularly are at a higher risk of developing breast cancer compared to others, shows a study by AIIMS doctors. Breast cancer risk was found to be 9.5 times more in women with a history of consuming such pills. Early menstruation cycle, late marriage and lower duration of breastfeeding were the other major factors responsible for the disease amongIndians, according to the study published in the latest issue of the Indian Journal of Cancer.The study was conducted on 640 women, of which 320 were breast cancer patients.“We found long-term use of...

Dr. Dong-Pyou Han spiked a clinical test sample with healthy human blood to make it appear that the rabbit serum produced disease-fighting antibodies, officials said. The bogus findings helped Han’s team obtain $19 million in research grants from the National Institutes of Health, said James Bradac, who oversees the institutes’ AIDS research.

Teenage pot smokers could be damaging brain structures critical to memory and reasoning, according to new research that found changes in the brains of heavy users. Research released Monday in the journal Schizophrenia Bulletin showed the brains of young heavy marijuana users were altered in so-called sub-cortical regions — primitive structures that are part of the memory and reasoning circuits. And young people with such alterations performed worse on memory tests than non-using controls, despite the fact that the heavy users had not indulged for more than two years, on average, before the testing. [Snip] When the groups were given...

High-temperature superconductors exhibit a frustratingly varied catalog of odd behavior, such as electrons that arrange themselves into stripes or refuse to arrange themselves symmetrically around atoms. Now two physicists propose that such behaviors – and superconductivity itself – can all be traced to a single starting point, and they explain why there are so many variations. This theory might be a step toward new, higher-temperature superconductors that would revolutionize electrical engineering with more efficient motors and generators and lossless power transmission. -snip- Most subatomic particles have a tiny magnetic field – a property physicists call "spin" – and electrical resistance...

Contact: Leslie Capo lcapo@lsuhsc.edu 504-568-4806 Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center LSUHSC research finds combo of plant nutrients kills breast cancer cells New Orleans, LA – A study led by Madhwa Raj, PhD, Research Professor in Obstetrics and Gynecology at LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans and its Stanley S. Scott Cancer Center, has found that a super cocktail of six natural compounds in vegetables, fruits, spices and plant roots killed 100% of sample breast cancer cells without toxic side effects on normal cells. The results, which also revealed potential treatment target genes, are published in the November 2013 issue...

Recently, I was the lead author on a paper demonstrating that about 40 years and many millions of dollars of US nutritional surveillance data were fatally flawed. In most research domains, such a finding might be monumental; yet in nutrition epidemiology—the study of the impact of diet on health, hereafter referred to simply as “nutrition”—these results are commonplace. In fact, there is a large body of evidence demonstrating that the systematic misreporting of energy and macronutrient intake renders the results and conclusions of the vast majority of federally funded nutrition studies invalid. So what is going on? Is such research...

A growing body of research suggests that we are a nation divided not only by partisanship or how we view various issues, but also by dramatically different cognitive styles. Sociologists and psychologists are getting a better understanding about the ways that deep seated emotional responses effect our ideological viewpoints. Last week, Moyers & Company caught up with Mother Jones science writer Chris Mooney, host of the Inquiring Minds podcast and author of The Republican Brain: the Science of Why They Deny Science – and Reality, to talk about what this research may tell us about the attitudes of those involved...

Scientists say babies remember lullabies played for them in the womb by Kirsten Andersen Thu Oct 31 11:52 AM EST HELSINKI, Finland, October 31, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – There’s no shortage of products on the market designed to help parents expose their unborn babies to music. Experts and savvy marketers alike have long speculated that prenatal musical exposure might make babies smarter, or at least help them develop similar tastes to Mom and Dad. Others dismiss the “Mozart Effect” as a myth and a sales gimmick. A new study out of Finland, however, may send sales of belly-mounted headphones skyrocketing,...

Adult Stem Cell Research Has Defeated Embryonic Stem Cells for Funding Priorities by Mallory Quigley | LifeNews.com | 10/31/13 11:53 AMA new report released today by the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI) analyzes funding for stem cell research in California and Maryland to conclude that funding trends reflect the scientific community’s  view that the best hope for disease treatment and therapies lies with morally unproblematic, non-embryonic stem cells."For decades, stem cells obtained by destroying unique, living human beings were heralded for their potential ability to cure numerous diseases and conditions.  However, while funding for this morally objectionable research initially boomed, efficacious...

Adult Stem Cells Imitate Human Brain, Are Hope for Neurological Disorders Charlotte Lozier Institute on September 3, 2013 in Science & Medicine - No comments By Nora SullivanA study published last week has shown that adult stem cells derived from ethical sources can be used to create living tissues that imitate the developing human brain.  In their findings, published in the science journal Nature, researchers asserted that, by using human stem cells derived from skin cells, they were able to assemble brain-like pieces of living tissue.  These stem cells could prove to be an invaluable resource for the study and...

For the Baby Boomers, born under the halo of victory in World War II, and into the 1950s, one of the key themes was the promise of Science. Electrical power–courtesy of splitting the atom–would be so plentiful that consumers would simply pay a flat monthly fee, and the discovery of the structure of DNA meant (somehow, although this was never fully explained) that a cure for cancer was just beyond the horizon. The successful rollout of the Salk/Sabin polio vaccines would further demonstrate the great humanitarian power of Science, and its unblemished search for Truth. However, as the 1960s played...

The dream of igniting a self-sustained fusion reaction with high yields of energy, a feat likened to creating a miniature star on Earth, is getting closer to becoming reality, according the authors of a new review article in the journal Physics of Plasmas. Researchers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) engaged in a collaborative project led by the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, report that while there is at least one significant obstacle to overcome before achieving the highly stable, precisely directed implosion required for ignition, they have met many of the demanding challenges leading up to that...

Once again, a study from an organization that you would never accuse of being “gun-loving” or “right-wing” seems to disprove the myth that the availability of handguns increases murder rates. In fact, it doesn’t. The Harvard study attempts to answer the question of whether or not banning firearms would reduce murders and suicides. Researchers looked at crime data from several European countries and found that countries with HIGHER gun ownership often had LOWER murder rates. Russia, for example, enforces very strict gun control on its people, but its murder rate remains quite high. In fact, the murder rate in Russia...

You have no doubt heard of mystery shoppers who visit department stores and secretly evaluate customer service. Now, there is a new wrinkle to this old concept: Pastors are using it to improve people's experiences at their churches. "Even the American Medical Association recommends to their member doctor to have secret patient shoppers," Thomas Harrison said. Harrison is the founder of Secret Church Shopper, a firm that travels to churches across the country to secretly evaluate worship experiences. "I never know when the phone rings if it is New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or some other place," he said. "I...

Virginia E. Johnson, a writer, researcher and sex therapist who with her longtime collaborator, William H. Masters, helped make the frank discussion of sex in postwar America possible if not downright acceptable, died on Wednesday in St. Louis. She was 88. Her son, Scott Johnson, confirmed the death, The Associated Press reported. Dr. Masters was a gynecologist on the faculty of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis when he began his research into human sexuality in the mid-1950s. Ms. Johnson, who joined him in 1957 after answering an advertisement for an assistant, worked alongside him for more...

A newly published study shows that white blood cells and a cancer cells can fuse and initiate a tumor, providing the first proof in humans of a long proposed theory.Yale Cancer Center scientists, together with colleagues at the Denver Police Crime Lab and the University of Colorado, have found evidence that a human metastatic tumor can arise when a leukocyte (white blood cell) and a cancer cell fuse to form a genetic hybrid. Their study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, may answer the question of how cancer cells travel from the primary tumor’s site of origin to distant organs...

“The News Feature ‘The gun fighter’ wrongly implied that blogger David Codrea had ‘outed’ gun researcher Garen Wintemute,” a correction issued in the June issue of the science journal Nature admitted. “Wintemute had in fact publicized his own work before Codrea’s 2007 blog post.” Following in the agenda-driven footsteps of political media, Nature, ostensibly a fact-driven and unbiased scientific journal, has jumped on the “gun control” bandwagon, at least that part of it bemoaning a lack of federally-funded “gun violence” studies, with a profile on anti-gun researcher Dr. Garen Wintemute by correspondent Meredith Wadman in its April issue. That article,...

The National Bureau of Economic Research has come up with a great new idea: let’s tax calories to make people thinner! “Raising the price of a calorie for home consumption by 10 percent may lower the percentage of body fat in youths about 8 or 9 percent, according to new research from the National Bureau of Economic Research,” writes Peter Whoriskey for the Washington Post. This is just another example of how liberals, in an effort to make a better society, abhor, and often actively confute, market forces to promote their own social agendas. “The new research, which focused on...

Parents who read their kids stories about happy, human-like animals like Franklin the Turtle or Arthur at bedtime are exposing their kids to racism, materialism, homophobia and patriarchal norms, according to a paper presented at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Most animals portrayed in children’s books, songs and on clothing send a bad message, according to academics Nora Timmerman and Julia Ostertag: That animals only exist for human use, that humans are better than animals, that animals don’t have their own stories to tell, that it’s fine to “demean” them by cooing over their cuteness. Perhaps...

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that our natural DNA can't be patented, in what the influential SCOTUSBlog called "a significant patent ruling for the biotechnology industry." The high court did stike some middle ground by ruling that synthetic DNA can be patented. "A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated, but cDNA [synthetic DNA] is patent eligible because it is not naturally occurring," according to the court ruling written by Justice Clarence Thomas.