Anxiety may be a first world problem - and a young female one at that.

A review of reviews (so calibrate your expectations) in Brain and Behavior finds that women are almost twice as likely to experience anxiety as men, and people from Western Europe and North America are more likely to suffer from anxiety than people from other cultures.

Anxiety disorders are a non-specific blanket term for excessive worry, fear and a tendency to avoid potentially stressful situations including social gatherings. Pretend money estimates claim these disorders cost $42.3 million in the U.S. In the European Union, over 60 million people are affected by anxiety disorders in a given year, likely because of all that worry about cell phones, ugly fruit and GMOs.

You don't see a lot of celebrities advertising kale - which is okay, kale is not all that healthy, but at least it has a health halo. Not so for soda and other sugary drinks, fast food and sweets, and those are among the most common food and beverage products endorsed by famous music personalities.

They are directly to blame for obesity, claims lead author Marie Bragg, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Population Health at NYU Langone, in Pediatrics.

Unsurprisingly, Big Lettuce did not hire celebrities to do endorsements, nor did music stars endorse fruits, vegetables, or whole grains. Only one endorsed a natural food deemed healthy -pistachios - over a 14-year period covering dozens of advertisements. Yes, dozens.  

JCU Associate Professor Zoltan Sarnyai said it was the first meta-analysis study to compare the level of cortisol in a waking patient's body with the stage of schizophrenia they are suffering.

Dr Sarnyai said it means doctors may be able to eventually identify those who will develop full-blown psychosis from amongst those who present with early stages of the disease.

"Only some 20 to 30 per cent of individuals who are at high-risk of developing psychosis due to their clinical presentation or family history actually do so. Identifying those people early is where the cortisol measurement comes in.

Up to 25 percent of of lung cancer patients also have autoimmune disease, which may make them unsuitable for increasingly popular immunotherapy treatments.

Astronomers have used Hubble to measure the distances to stars in nineteen galaxies more accurately than previously possible. They found that the Universe is currently expanding faster than the rate derived from measurements of the Universe shortly after the Big Bang. If confirmed, this apparent inconsistency may be an important clue to understanding three of the Universe's most elusive components: dark matter, dark energy and neutrinos.

Dentin is one of the most durable biological materials in the human body. Researchers from Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin were able to show that the reason for this can be traced to its nanostructures and specifically to the interactions between the organic and inorganic components. Measurements performed at BESSYII, the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin's synchrotron radiation source, showed that it is the mechanical coupling between the collagen protein fibers and mineral nanoparticles which renders dentin capable of withstanding extreme forces. Results from this research have been recently published in the journal Chemistry of Materials*.

AN expandable tube that unblocks the bowel before surgery could lead to fewer cancer patients -- diagnosed as emergencies -- needing a colostomy bag.
The Cancer Research UK-funded CReST trial presented at the 2016 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting in Chicago today (Sunday)* found that less than half (45 per cent) of those who had their bowel unblocked by the tube, which uses body heat to expand, needed a colostomy bag.

But more than two-thirds (69 per cent) of those who had emergency surgery to remove the tumour and the blockage were fitted with bags.
Around 41,100 people are diagnosed with bowel cancer each year in the UK with up to 20 per cent diagnosed as emergencies -- with some of these patients having their bowel blocked by the tumour.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Living cells are capable of performing complex computations on the environmental signals they encounter.

These computations can be continuous, or analogue, in nature -- the way eyes adjust to gradual changes in the light levels. They can also be digital, involving simple on or off processes, such as a cell's initiation of its own death.

Synthetic biological systems, in contrast, have tended to focus on either analogue or digital processing, limiting the range of applications for which they can be used.

But now a team of researchers at MIT has developed a technique to integrate both analogue and digital computation in living cells, allowing them to form gene circuits capable of carrying out complex processing operations.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Most people encounter most things by sensing them in multiple ways. As we hear the words people speak, we also see their lips move. We smell, see and hear the onions as we chop them -- and we feel them with teary eyes.

It turns out that the ability to judge such sensory inputs as simultaneous, and therefore likely pertaining to the same thing, is something animal brains must develop through experience. A new study using tadpoles as a model organism shows how that appears to happen.

Heralded on the cover of Time magazine in 2000 as a genetically modified (GMO) crop with the potential to save millions of lives in the Third World, Golden Rice is still years - and millions of dollars in anti-science activism - away from field introduction.  Vitamin A deficiencies leave millions at high risk for infection, diseases and other maladies, such as blindness, and Golden Rice produces  the micronutrient beta carotene, so it is basically fortified, but using a natural process that increases Vitamin A rather than an additive.