Obese women may be putting themselves at greater risk of breast cancer by not undergoing regular screening. According to new research by Dr. Nisa Maruthur and her team from The John Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, USA, seriously obese women are significantly less likely to say they have undergone a recent mammography than normal weight women, especially if they are white. Maruthur's findings are published online this week in Springer's Journal of General Internal Medicine.
Yesterday morning Venice awoke in the middle of a snowstorm. It is a very rare phenomenon to see snow in sizable amounts in the island, and the times that I have seen four inches build up on the ground are probably no more than a handful.
But the morning was also marked by another phenomenon -less unusual, but still rare: a strong acqua alta. The sea rose to 1.15 meters above its average level, and flooded calli and campi with up to ten inches of water.
Two days ago, there was a
post on backreaction about the naturalness in science, which is considered by many as a fundamental concept. The point of view expressed in the post is quite easy to grasp :
naturalness is not a justified argument in any sense (
edit : see the comment of the autor below).
One of the most common hypotheses that I hear with regard to possible non-coding DNA function is that it serves to protect genes against mutation. Junk DNA, according to this proposal, is there to provide a defensive shield against mutagens (usually this includes UV, ionizing radiation, chemical mutagens, viruses, and/or oxygen radicals). I am very skeptical of this explanation, but I am willing to take it seriously if it is studied seriously. In fact, one of my current graduate students first came to talk with me when he was an undergraduate and asked me about this possible function.
A new study suggests that the increase of MRSA in healthcare settings results from clinicians who prescribe antibiotics more often and more broadly than clinical circumstances and evidence-based guidelines warrant because of medical liability concerns.
So it isn't politicians or insurance companies who are picking your treatment, it is lawyers.
This morning LHC machinists, experimentalists from the LHC experiments, as well as other CERN personnel gathered in the Main Auditorium at CERN to give their end-of-year report. After a LHC status report the spokespersons of ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, LHCB, and TOTEM briefly flashed their first experimental results, obtained from 900 GeV and 2.36 TeV collisions acquired in the course of the last three weeks.
