Before life emerged on earth, either a primitive kind of metabolism or an RNA-like duplicating machinery must have set the stage – so experts believe. But what preceded these pre-life steps?

A pair of UCSF scientists has developed a model explaining how simple chemical and physical processes may have laid the foundation for life. Like all useful models, theirs can be tested, and they describe how this can be done. Their model is based on simple, well-known chemical and physical laws.

Key milk nutrients, calcium and vitamin D, may do more than just help keep your bones strong. Increasing intake of calcium and vitamin D could reduce the risk for cancer in women by at least 60 percent, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. (1)

A new novel about Sherlock Holmes or, my favorite, The Saint?

No, this really happened in an operating room in St Paul’s Hospital, British Columbia. Dr. Alana Flexman, Dr. Stephan Schwarz and Dr. Giuseppe Del Vicario wrote the case report.

The patient, a 42-year-old white Canadian, had developed nerve damage due to restricted blood flow in his lower legs after falling asleep in a sitting position. He was a smoker and his medical history included chronic shoulder pain and migraine headaches.

Recent events and news stories have had a familiar feel to me.  It is because many of them had been part of my predictions for 2007 that I published here in January.  When something I can see happening in the future actually happens, in a way it has already occurred for me.  For example, I have been on the record, and telling anyone that asks since January that not only would gasoline climb over $3 a gallon this year, it would also set the all time record, set in 1981 of $3.11 in inflation adjusted dollars, and that is many cities the price would climb over $4 a gallon.  Well

Johns Hopkins researchers have found a way to directly observe cell migration -- in real time and in living tissue. The scientists say their advance could lead to strategies for controlling both normal growth and the spread of cancer, processes that depend on the programmed, organized movement of cells across space.

PG-13 films have lots of “happy violence,” say UCLA researchers. Borrowing from the late communications theorist George Gerbner, happy violence is that which is “cool, swift, and painless.” PG-13 films don’t consider the consequences of violent acts, such as injury, death, and the shattered lives of the people involved.

Any why this matters, says Theresa Webb, a researcher in the department of epidemiology and the Southern California Injury Prevention Research Center at UCLA's School of Public Health, is simple: youth violence is a commonplace occurrence in American society. Homicide is the second leading cause of death among 15- to 24-year-olds overall.

By uncovering how one breast cancer drug protects the heart and another does not, Duke University Medical Center researchers believe they may have opened up a new way to screen drugs for possible heart-related side effects and to develop new drugs.

The Duke researches compared the actions of two breast cancer drugs in experiments involving human cells and rats. The drugs in question were the older drug trastuzumab, whose trade name is Herceptin, and the newer drug lapatinib, whose trade name is Tykerb.

Breast cancer survivors who eat a healthy diet and exercise moderately can reduce their risk of dying from breast cancer by half, regardless of their weight, suggests a new longitudinal study from the Moores Cancer Center at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

Previous studies have looked at the impact of diet or physical activity on breast cancer survival, with mixed results. This study is the first to look at a combination of both in breast cancer.

It's long been thought that humans hunted woolly mammoths to extinction. Anthropogenic global hunting, as it were. Or that a cataclysmic event did the trick.

It may be neither of those and just simple genetics.

DNA lifted from the bones, teeth, and tusks of the extinct mammoths revealed a “genetic signature” of a range expansion after the last interglacial period. After the mammoths’ migration, the population apparently leveled off, and one of two lineages died out.

A year-long clinical trial by Penn State researchers shows that diets focusing on foods that are low in calorie density - high in water and low in fat, like fruits, vegetables, soup, lean meat, and low-fat dairy products - can promote healthy weight loss while helping people to control hunger.