The Y chromosome is an established evolutionary tool and has been used in many evolutionary studies. While easy to use, it has limitations which prevent it from full utilization about the most evolutionary informative DNA segments in the Human genome.

As part of her doctoral studies, Holly Leung in the Department of Genetics at University of Leicesteris has been investigating the potential of the X chromosome as another evolutionary informative segment in the human genome.

The University of Leicester has done many human population studies with the Y chromosome, including the relationship between the male surname and the Y chromosome, as well as a better understanding of the Viking settlement in the Northwest England.

In an effort to reconcile the science stating that power leads to action and lack of power leads to inhibition -- despite constant historical reminders of the powerless rising up and taking action -- new research in the June issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that the legitimacy of the power relationship is an important determinant of whether power leads to action.

The research, led in part by Kellogg School of Management Professor Adam Galinsky, sought to determine at what point the powerless rise up and take action. Galinsky collaborated with psychologist Joris Lammers of Tilburg University and Ernestine Gordijn and Sabine Otten of the University of Groninengen on the study. These findings are the first to clarify when, and lend insight into why, power leads to behavioral approach, or action.

The off-label use of a drug given with RU-486 to terminate a pregnancy may be responsible for a handful of rare, fatal infections seen in women taking the drugs since 2000, a study by University of Michigan scientists suggests. Preliminary U-M studies indicate that oral use of RU-486's companion drug misoprostol is safe, but vaginal use may undermine body's immune responses

The drug misoprostol is FDA-approved to be taken by mouth along with RU-486 to end a pregnancy. But many women have received the drug vaginally as part of the two-drug combination, a method of delivery not evaluated by the FDA.

In animal and cell culture studies, the U-M researchers found that misoprostol, when given directly in the reproductive tract, suppresses key immune responses and can allow a normally non-threatening bacterium, Clostridium sordellii, to gain the upper hand and cause deadly infection. When absorbed through the stomach, however, the drug did not compromise immune defenses or cause illness.

Since the Women's Health Initiative study found that long-term therapy with estrogen or estrogen plus progestin may increase the risk of heart attack and stroke, many women have found it difficult to decide whether to take hormone therapy at menopause.

Subsequently, several researchers have speculated that the timing of estrogen treatment may be important for estrogen's effects.

A group of authors therefore designed an animal study to determine if estrogen would be beneficial for females who are going through menopause (perimenopausal) but not for women who are postmenopausal for many years. Since it is not possible to measure "risk" in animal studies, the authors measured severity of stroke injury.

LONDON, June 16 /PRNewswire/ --

Unite, the UK's largest union, is today, in advance of a Parliamentary Inquiry, calling for the Government to act to safeguard the jobs and skills of up to 1,000 people working on the GBP12.7bn NHS IT contract for the IT services company Fujitsu.

This follows the decisions of Fujitsu to withdraw from contract negotiations and termination of the GBP1.1bn contract share for the south of England announced two weeks ago.

There are currently nearly 1,000 people in Fujitsu working on the NHS IT contract and related activities to modernise IT systems, provide electronic patient records and quick and easy access to information and test results.

Garth Sundem and his 'Foolproof Equations For The Perfect Life' will be on the Science Channel tonight at 6PM.

If it's hosted somewhere online (legally) we'll post a link to it afterward.

Bioengineers at the University of California, Berkeley in a new study published in Nature say they have identified two key regulatory pathways that control how well adult stem cells repair and replace damaged tissue. They then tweaked how those stem cells reacted to those biochemical signals to revive the ability of muscle tissue in old mice to repair itself nearly as well as the muscle in the mice's much younger counterparts.

Because the findings relate to adult stem cells that reside in existing tissue, this approach to rejuvenating degenerating muscle eliminates the ethical and medical complications associated with transplanting tissues grown from embryonic stem cells.

The researchers focused on the interplay of two competing molecular pathways that control the stem cells, which sit next to the mature, differentiated cells that make up our working body parts. When the mature cells are damaged or wear out, the stem cells are called into action to begin the process of rebuilding.

Whether your summer vacation plans involve staying close to home or crossing the globe, you'll want to put as much thought into protecting your health while traveling as you do choosing your destination. A new report, Healthy Travel: A 10-Minute Consult from Harvard Medical School, includes this list of important health-related items to take along:

Lockheed Martin's Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) Weapon System successfully detected, tracked and intercepted a short- range unitary ballistic missile target in the terminal phase of its trajectory during a test at the Pacific Missile Range off the coast of Hawaii.

In the test mission, the SPY-1B radar on the Aegis BMD cruiser USS Lake Erie (CG 70) detected and tracked the ballistic missile target, and computed a targeting solution to guide two SM-2 Block IV missiles to a successful endo-atmospheric (within the atmosphere) intercept. Once the SM-2s were launched from the ship’s Lockheed Martin-developed MK-41 Vertical Launching System (VLS), Aegis guided the missiles through the terminal phase of the intercept. The SM-2 Block IV missiles were recently modified to perform the terminal phase endo-atmospheric intercept of a ballistic missile.

If you are curious about Earth's periodic mass extinction events such as the sudden demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, you might consider crashing asteroids and sky-darkening super volcanoes as culprits.

But a new study suggests that it is the ocean, and in particular the epic ebbs and flows of sea level and sediment over the course of geologic time, that is the primary cause of the world's periodic mass extinctions during the past 500 million years.[1]

"The expansions and contractions of those environments have pretty profound effects on life on Earth," says Shanan Peters, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of geology and geophysics and the author of the new Nature report.