News by Subject Biology

A comprehensive program to reduce or prevent childhood obesity in low-income communities led to significant improvements in obesity-related measures among children cared for at a Massachusetts community health center.

Two challenges in treating patients with estrogen-positive breast cancer (ER+) have been an inability to predict who will respond to standard therapies and adverse events leading to therapy discontinuation. A study at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center revealed new information about how the biomarkers retinoblastoma protein (Rb) and cytoplasmic cyclin E could indicate which patients will respond best to current first-line therapies.

A large-scale effort to reduce childhood obesity in two low-income Massachusetts communities resulted in some modest improvements among schoolchildren over a relatively short period of time, suggesting that such a comprehensive approach holds promise for the future, according to a new study from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Thirty-six percent of Hispanic families in the U.S. with a common form of retinitis pigmentosa got the disease because they carry a mutation of the arrestin-1 gene, according to a new study from researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) School of Public Health.

A new analysis shows that septic systems in the United States routinely discharge pharmaceuticals, consumer product chemicals, and other potentially hazardous chemicals into the environment. The study is the most comprehensive assessment to date of septic systems as important sources of emerging contaminants, raising health concerns since many of these chemicals, once discharged, end up in groundwater and drinking water supplies.

A team of MIT and Stanford University researchers has developed a way to label neurons when they become active, essentially providing a snapshot of their activity at a moment in time.

Mount Sinai researchers find this network central to Alzheimer's disease susceptibility.

For years, anecdotes and some studies have suggested that chimpanzees are 'super strong' compared to humans, implying that their muscle fibers are superior to humans'. Now a research team including a UMass Amherst kinesiologist reports that contrary to this belief, chimp muscles' maximum dynamic force and power output is just about 1.35 times higher than human muscle of similar size, a difference they call 'modest' compared with historical, popular accounts of chimp 'super strength,' being many times stronger than humans.

Mounting scientific evidence shows that exercise is good not only for our bodies, but for our brains. Yet, exactly why physical activity benefits the brain is not well understood. In a new article published in the journal Trends in Neurosciences, University of Arizona researchers suggest that the link between exercise and the brain is a product of our evolutionary history and our past as hunter-gatherers.