An in vivo study reveals how a protein in the brain, alpha2/delta-1, helps regulate food intake and body weight and may help explain why medications that are prescribed for epilepsy and other conditions that interfere with this protein, such as gabapentin and pregabalin, can cause weight gain.

The alpha2/delta-1 protein has not been linked previously to obesity but the team led by Maribel Rios, Ph.D., associate professor in the department of neuroscience at Tufts University School of Medicine, found that alpha2/delta-1 facilitates the function of another protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF).  

African-Americans having a shorter life expectancy and a greater likelihood of suffering from aging-related illnesses at younger ages compared to European-Americans. 

A new paper claims that it may be racism impacting aging - at the cellular level. The correlation is that the epidemiologists, doing their part to turn their field into sociology, found signs of accelerated aging in African-American men who who had internalized anti-African-American attitudes or reported high levels of racial discrimination.

There are lots of female scientists in America, women get more Ph.D.s than men, yet in academia they also tend to leave more often because, the claim goes, academia lacks the potential for advancement and the family-friendly policies that the corporate world has.

Astronomers using NASA's Fermi observatory have made the first-ever gamma-ray measurements of a gravitational lens, thanks to B0218+357, located 4.35 billion light-years from Earth in the direction of a constellation Triangulum.  

It's not really what it was designed to do.  While radio and optical telescopes can resolve and monitor individual blazar images, Fermi's LAT cannot. Instead, the Fermi team exploited a "delayed playback" effect, which
opens new avenues for research, including a novel way to probe emission regions near supermassive black holes. It may even be possible to find other gravitational lenses with data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.
 

A Johns Hopkins University of research suggests that about 30 minutes of meditation daily may improve symptoms of anxiety and depression, without medication.

The scholars evaluated the degree to which self-reported symptoms changed in people who had a variety of conditions, such as insomnia or fibromyalgia. A minority had been diagnosed with a mental illness.

They were studying so-called "mindfulness meditation", a form of Buddhist self-awareness designed to focus precise attention on the moment at hand, and say it shows promise in alleviating some pain symptoms as well as stress. The researchers controlled for the possibility of the placebo effect but it should be noted that reviews of self-reported claims makes statistical reliability difficult.

No one wants to work for free; doctors have to pay for insurance and employees and their medical school loans, drug companies spend billions on each drug and 95 percent of the time the drugs will never make it to market.

And that chain of money flows to cancer patients as well. Cutting-edge pharmaceuticals are expensive and for poorer people, unless they get a cost waiver from the company, even the co-payment for insurance may be too much.

It's no surprise that when the patient's share of prescription costs becomes too high, many patients skip doses or stop taking medication entirely, according to research conducted at the University of North Carolina.