Most breast cancers are categorized as estrogen-receptor positive, which means they are hormone sensitive and may need estrogen to grow. Patients with this type of cancer often respond favorably to aromatase inhibitors, like tamoxifen, which cause cell death by preventing estrogen from reaching the cancerous cells. Over time, the disease often becomes resistant to estrogen deprivation from the drugs, making treatment options more limited. 

New findings from the AACR Annual Meeting identified a pair of proteins that could play a crucial role in restoring treatment sensitivity to these resistant cancerous cells—possibly leading to more treatment options in the future.

Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis, was not walking around Africa alone three million years ago.  

Biologists knew that, of course, the neatly linear line from critter to modern man does not exist, it happened in fits and starts and sometimes different ways numerous times. But as the study of evolution becomes more multi-discplinary our chances of finding new fossils increases, and ideas of what ancestors looked like go from theoretical to real.

A chemical analysis of lunar soil collected by Apollo astronauts forty years disputes the belief that a giant collision between Earth and a Mars-sized object gave birth to the moon 4.5 billion years ago.

In the giant-collision scenario, computer simulations suggest that the moon had two parents: Earth and a hypothetical planetary body called “Theia” but a comparative analysis of titanium from the moon, Earth and meteorites indicates the moon’s material came from Earth alone.

Women take longer to give birth today than did women 50 years ago, according to an analysis of nearly 140,000 deliveries conducted by researchers at the National Institutes of Health which finds that women take longer to give birth today than did women 50 years ago, despite many technological advances in medicine.

The researchers compared data on deliveries in the early 1960s to data gathered in the early 2000s. They found that the first stage of labor had increased by 2.6 hours for first-time mothers. For women who had previously given birth, this early stage of labor took two hours longer in recent years than for women in the 1960s. The first stage of labor is the stage during which the cervix dilates, before active pushing begins.

Solar tornadoes several times as wide as the Earth can be generated in the solar atmosphere and one such solar tornado was discovered using the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly telescope on board the Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) satellite.

The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly saw superheated gases as hot as 50,000–2,000,000 Kelvin sucked from the root of a dense structure called the prominence, and spiral up into the high atmosphere and travel about 200,000 kilometers along helical paths for a period of at least three hours. The tornadoes were observed on September 25th, 2011. The hot gases in the tornadoes have speeds as high as 300,000 km per hour. Gas speeds of terrestrial tornadoes only reach a comparatively mild 150 km per hour.

How do you know a scientist was right a lot? When an entire cottage industry exists to try and prove him wrong.

Einstein's view of the Universe has gotten some new respect; the most accurate measurement ever made of the distance to the time when the expansion of Universe began to accelerate. It means that the phenomenon can be explained using just Einstein’s general theory of relativity and the cosmological constant - the simplest theoretical explanation for the acceleration of the Universe. The results will be used to understand what is causing the acceleration and why, and could shed new light on 'dark energy' – the adopted name of the little-known fundamental agent driving the acceleration.