A leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, colon cancer is famously resistant to treatment. There are many reasons for this, but one has to do with a group of persisting cancer cells in the colon that cause relapses. Conventional therapies against them are mostly ineffective. EPFL scientists have now identified a biological mechanism that can be exploited to counteract colon cancer relapses. The approach activates a protein that is lost in the persisting cancer cells. The researchers were able to reactivate it using vitamin A, thus eliminating the cancer cells and preventing metastasis. The study is published in Cancer Cell, and introduces a new way to treat colon cancer.

When you think of it, all of the natural gas harvested by hydraulic fracturing is natural but groups that once embraced it as clean energy have now turned on it and have sought to use its biological origins against it, with manufactured videos of flaming tap water and such that have nothing to do with fracking.

Scientists revealed mayor players in the severe muscle damage caused by sepsis, or septicemia, which explains why many patients suffer debilitating muscle impairment long-term after recovery. They propose a therapeutic approach based on mesenchymal stem cell transplantation, which has produced encouraging results and has proved successful in restoring muscle capacity in animals.

Galaxy clusters are massive congregations of galaxies that host huge reservoirs of hot gas -- the temperatures are so high that X-rays are produced. These structures are useful to astronomers because their construction is believed to be influenced by the Universe's notoriously strange components -- dark matter and dark energy. By studying their properties at different stages in the history of the Universe, galaxy clusters can shed light on the Universe's poorly understood dark side.

The amygdala, a small structure at the front end of the brain's temporal lobe, has long been associated with negative behaviors generally, and specifically with fear. But new research shows this collection of nuclei can also influence positive social functions like kindness and what might be called charitable giving in humans. 

  

Marumi Kado started his talk by saying he will only present new results based on the full 2015 13 TeV pp collision dataset.
For Run 2 there have been a large number of improvements to the detector.

Also the trigger has been improved, with a new central trigger processor. Reconstruction software also was improved significantly. 

Marumi spent a long time describing the retuning of the detector and the performance in reconstruction of impact parameters, physics objects, and the like. The physics modellinghas been verified in several control samples of dibosons, top pairs, etcetera.

Marumi shows that the Higgs signals in ATLAS are wanting. 0.7 sigma observed in 4-lepton mode, expected 2.8 sigma. Similar story in diphotons.

Though politicians in Paris cheering a climate accord that 150 out of the 200 countries present have no intention of honoring is getting all of the attention, a more pressing concern is being ignored: a Zombie apocalypse.

Tara Smith, Associate Professor at Kent State University in Ohio says in the Christmas issue of The BMJ(1) that emerging zombie infections have been identified around the globe and, though sporadic, are becoming a source of greater concern to the medical and public health community.

Jim Olsen is giving the CMS talk on 13 TeV results. CMS recorded 90% of the 4 inverse femtobarns delivered by the LHC, but only 2.8/fb were taken with the magnet at 3.8 Tesla (for the rest of the time the magnet was off due to a problem with the helium purity).
A plot of the dimuon invariant mass of 60,000,000 events collected by dimuon triggers was shown, which is a pleasure to watch. I will attach it here later.

CMS has 18 new searches for beyond-the-standard model effects. For objects with masses above 1 TeV the sensitivity of 2.2/fb of analyzed data may be larger than the sensitivity of 2012 data.

The diboson bump at 2 TeV is almost completely ruled out; so is the edge signal of SUSY that was seen in run 1 (a 2.6 sigma excess back then).

The cycling World champion is significantly less successful during the year when he wears the rainbow jersey than in the previous year, and many have said this is due to a curse.

Thomas Perneger at Geneva University Hospital, Switzerland, put his intellectual petal to the metal to find out if this curse is real and details his work in the Christmas issue of The BMJ.(1)

The "rainbow" jersey is worn by the current cycling World champion (it is white, with bands of blue, red, black, yellow and green across the chest) and many cyclists believe that the World champion will be afflicted with all manner of misery while wearing the jersey- injury, disease, family tragedy, doping investigations, even death - but especially a lack of wins.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (DEC. 15, 2015). Researchers have found little or no 'July effect' in the field of neurosurgery.

The 'July effect' is the theory that more medical and surgical errors, and, consequently, greater levels of morbidity and mortality occur during July, the month during which fourth year medical students become interns and residents advance to higher levels of training where they face greater challenges and more responsibility.