Philadelphia, PA, September 9, 2016 - Many acute and chronic liver diseases, including alcoholic hepatitis, result from apoptotic (programmed) cell death mediated by the enzyme caspase. Caspase inhibitors have therapeutic potential to treat and prevent apoptosis-mediated liver injury, and some are currently in clinical trials. However, a new study published in The American Journal of Pathology raises serious safety concerns regarding the clinical use of caspase inhibitors by demonstrating the occurrence of delayed-onset necrotic, non-caspase-dependent liver cell injury.

PHILADELPHIA-- For patients with advanced lung cancer, a non-invasive liquid biopsy may be a more effective and suitable alternative to the gold standard tissue biopsy to detect clinically relevant mutations and help guide their course of treatment, suggests a new study published this week in the journal Clinical Cancer Research from researchers at the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania (ACC).

Particle physics conferences are a place where you can listen to many different topics - not just news about the latest precision tests of the standard model or searches for new particles at the energy frontier. If we exclude the very small, workshop-like events where people gather to focus on a very precise topic, all other events do allow for the contamination from reports of parallel fields of research. The reason is of course that there is a significant cross-fertilization between these fields. 

Thanks to public shaming of wealthy progressive elites on the coast, and even pressuring the Governor of California to accept science the way he long claimed he does and ban the arbitrary exemptions that led to some schools with only 25 percent of kids - the ones with Republican parents - vaccinated, America's anti-vaccine movement is in decline.

That leaves France, where over 40 percent of its citizens believe vaccines are unsafe, as the world leader of the anti-science movement in general, and vaccines in particular, show results published in EBioMedicine.

Here is one more reason American taxpayers should not continue to spend over $100 million a year on complementary, alternative and integrative techniques; after a six-day Ayurvedic-based well-being program that featured a vegetarian diet, meditation, yoga and massages they determined that their program led to measurable decreases in a set of blood-based metabolites associated with inflammation, cardiovascular disease risk and cholesterol regulation. 

Six days.

Community characteristics play an important role in perpetuating teen suicide clusters and thwarting prevention efforts, according to a new study by sociologists at the University of Chicago and University of Memphis who examined clusters in a single town.

The study, published in the American Sociological Review, illustrates how the homogeneous culture and high degree of social connectedness of a community can increase suicide risk, particularly among teenagers. Such conditions contribute to clusters in which a series of suicides happen around the same time and in close proximity.

Men's hidden fears about body fat are fuelling gym attendance motivated by feelings of guilt and shame rather than a desire to build muscle, new research has shown.

Psychology researchers from the UK and Australia discovered that while male attitudes towards muscle or body mass index (BMI) did not predict how frequently they would attend the gym, their perceptions of body fat did.

The researchers found that men worried about body fat were more likely than others to undertake spontaneous, unplanned work-outs - and warned that these 'sporadic' exercise patterns tend to be difficult to sustain over time.

A University of Vermont-led team has successfully used social media images to measure the use and value of outdoor recreation on public lands.

The study analyzed more than 7,000 geotagged photos on Flickr to calculate that conserved lands contributed $1.8 billion to Vermont's tourism industry between 2007-2014.

The research is the first to measure of the value of outdoor recreation in Vermont public parks and other conserved lands during these years. The findings were published September 9 in the journal PLOS ONE.

This is an intriguing paper which has hit the news, see  Planet Nine Could Doom Our Solar System - If It Exists. If our solar system has a planet in a distant orbit, way beyond Neptune, such as the planet X candidates, it could lead to instability of our solar system far into the future. That's a rather unintuitive result - how could such a distant planet make any difference to our solar system's stability? It's not only intriguing, it might also provide the solution to a major puzzle about white dwarf stars.

Bacteria transfer to candy that has fallen on the floor no matter how fast you pick it up.  

Rutgers researchers have disproven the widely accepted notion that it's OK to scoop up food and eat it within a "safe" five-second window. Donald Schaffner, professor and extension specialist in food science, found that moisture, type of surface and contact time all contribute to cross-contamination. In some instances, the transfer begins in less than one second. Their findings appear online in the American Society for Microbiology's journal, Applied and Environmental Microbiology.