Trying to think green when buying a car? Whether your new fuel-efficient engine helps or hurts the warming planet depends on where you live and what you're putting in the tank.

New cars aim to deliver high performance with maximum fuel efficiency, making them easier on both the environment and the wallet. To do this, auto manufacturers are adopting a smaller, more fuel-efficient engine type, called gasoline direct-injection (GDI) -- between model years 2009 to 2015, the percentage of new vehicles sold with GDI engines jumped from five to 46 per cent.

Sarcoma is an aggressive form of cancer responsible for up to 20 percent of childhood cancers. Tumors often first appear in the extremities and the abdomen. Surgery is a primary treatment, but it often is combined with chemotherapy. This week in ACS Central Science, researchers propose a scheme to target chemotherapy medications specifically to sarcomas, leading to greater efficacy and fewer side effects.

The days of pork may be coming to a close. The International Agency for Research on Cancer recently declared bacon as carcinogenic as plutonium, and now a group of animal activists say pigs are more like people than we know.

23andMe has launched Genotyping Services for Research (GSR) so that researchers – no matter their level of genetics expertise – can infuse genetics into their studies.

It is commonly perceived that natural chemicals are safe while manmade substances may be harmful.  These perceptions, however, if not supported by scientific evidence, can result in risk perception gaps that can cause us to worry more than warranted by the evidence.

Though the physician wage gap between genders is virtually nonexistent in the private sector, that hasn't carried over to academia yet, where female academic physicians at public medical schools had lower average salaries than their male counterparts. Age, experience, medical specialty, faculty rank and other factors don't really account for it, according to an article published online by JAMA Internal Medicine. 

Gavin Salam's talk at the "Altarelli Memorial" session of the ICNFP 2016 conference, which is presently taking place in Kolimbari (Crete), was very interesting and I wish to report here about it. 

Habitual cycling, whether as transportation to work or as a recreational activity, has been associated with lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes (T2D), according to an epidemiology paper in PLOS Medicine, which affirms that Type 2 diabetes is a lifestyle disease, brought on by too many calories and not enough exercise.

The cohort analysis, conducted by Martin Rasmussen of the University of Southern Denmark, and colleagues, included 24,623 men and 27,890 women from Denmark, recruited between the ages of 50 and 65, and compared the association between self-reported recreational and commuter cycling habits with
type 2 diabetes

Is the expansion of the Universe a natural effect due to the internal dynamical properties of the physical vacuum? Can one rule out the possibility that the vacuum is unstable (or metastable) and naturally expands emitting conventional matter and energy similarly to a form of latent heat? Such a scenario based on new physics would deeply transform Cosmology and, in particular, make useless the notion of dark energy as well as the standard cosmological constant.

The instability (or metastability) considered here concerns the cosmic size of the physical vacuum. It is assumed that the vacuum "likes" to expand, expands permanently and releases matter and energy as it expands. How to check such a possible situation, or the contrary?

Reactive oxygen species (ROS) such as peroxides and superoxides are important signalling molecules in an organism's regulation of metabolism and inflammation. Accumulation of ROS have been linked to neurodegeneration and cancer. Researchers at Umeå University and Hospital of Halland in Sweden now reveal an unexpected function of ROS. They dampen a key inflammatory process and weaken the immune system´s ability to combat pathogens such as those that cause pneumonia. The findings are published in the July 2016 issue of the Cell Press Journal Immunity.