A little studied chemical compound dubbed BMH-21 targets and shuts down a common cancer process in laboratory-grown human tumor cell lines.  BMH-21  disrupted tumor cell division and prevented growth of advanced cancer cells. 

Johns Hopkins researcher Marikki Laiho, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues focused on the ability ofBMH-21 to sabotage the transcription pathway RNA Polymerase pathway (POL I), shutting down the ability of mutant cancer genes to communicate with cells and replicate. Their research linked the pathway to p53 gene activity. P53 is a tumor suppressor gene, a protein that regulates cell growth, and it is the most frequently mutated suppressor gene in cancer.

The desert locust (a type of grasshopper), much like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, goes from being an innocuous solitary-living individual to become a voracious gregarious animal that destroys everything on its path (and back).

The retina can be bombarded by reactive oxygen species in diabetes, prompting events that destroy healthy blood vessels, form leaky new ones and ruin vision, and now researchers have learned that those chemically reactive molecules must come from both the bone marrow as well as the retinal cells themselves to cause such serious consequences.

Excessive glucose in the blood prompts excessive production of reactive oxygen species, or ROS, and the light-sensitive retina is particularly vulnerable. Caldwell's research team had previously documented that ROS from white blood cells produced by the bone marrow as well as from retinal cells were the major instigators in diabetic retinopathy, a leading cause of blindness worldwide. But they weren't sure which mattered most.

Government can really only do one thing; tax and penalize. The other actions it takes, even positive ones like the police and fire departments and protecting the environment, derive from one of those two.

But when it comes to conservation, activists may be taking the wrong approach. While they pay lobbyists to get more laws and enforcement, when it comes to poaching, it just attracts organized criminals who have the capacity to operate even under increased enforcement effort. Funding is at record levels for enforcement and it isn't doing much good. 

CO2 gets most of the attention these days but it is not the only pollution the Arctic faces.

The environment is complex and the daisy chain of effects is unclear. That's why researchers who measured molecular chlorine levels in the Arctic in the spring of 2009 over a six-week period using chemical ionization mass spectrometry were skeptical of their data. 

Doping advocates are just as likely to do the brain kind if they do the body kind, according to survey results of about 3,000 hobby triathletes at sporting events in Frankfurt, Regensburg, and Wiesbaden.

The work by Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and Eberhard Karls University in Tubingen was carried out using the randomized response technique, which allows for better estimates of unknown cases in response to sensitive questions. It suggested that 13.0 percent of the athletes surveyed had used illegal and banned substances in the twelve months prior to the survey; 15.1 percent were believed to have engaged in brain doping. revealed that people who engage in physical doping often also take drugs for brain doping.

Inventor and AC electricity proponent Nikola Tesla was on a mission to transmit energy through thin air almost a century ago, but, claims about a conspiracy to keep his work quiet aside, experimental attempts at the feat have resulted in cumbersome devices that only work over very small distances.

The Toyota Research Institute of North America and Duke University have demonstrated the feasibility of wireless power transfer using metamaterials to create a "superlens" that focuses low-frequency magnetic fields over distances much larger than the size of the transmitter and receiver. The superlens translates the magnetic field emanating from one power coil onto its twin nearly a foot away, inducing an electric current in the receiving coil.

Want to be a teenage mother on your way to becoming a porn star? Probably not. The Farrah Abraham career arc has helped in significantly reducing births to teens, according to a new paper.

How could that be determined? It's an economics claim so correlation-causation is not all that stringent.  Wellesley College economist Phillip B. Levine and University of Maryland economist Melissa Schettini Kearney just go ahead and declare that MTV's "16 and Pregnant" and "Teen Mom" did the opposite of what social conservatives thought would happen when teen pregnancy was glorified; they say the shows significantly reduced births to teens, which means we could save billions on sex education classes and putting condoms on bananas and just encourage more reality shows.

A double-blind trial has determined that tea and coffee aren't just morning pick-me-ups, they are also a memory enhancer.

That goes for carbonated drinks containing caffeine also.

Members of the public generally have a negative view of climate engineering, the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the environment to counteract climate change, according to a new paper. This makes some sense. If we can't predict the weather a week from now, it's very difficult to say we can predict the far more complicated climate after physical changes are made to the inputs.