I’m generally optimistic about the ability of the world’s farmers to continue to feed the growing population, and also to satisfy the increased food demand of the growing middle class in previously poor countries. That hope is based on the amazing track record of innovation by farmers and their technological supporters that I have witnessed over the past four decades. I do, however, have some significant concerns about trends and factors that may compromise the farming enterprise over the next critical decades.

Melanoma patients with high levels of a protein that controls the expression of pro-growth genes are less likely to survive, according to a study led by researchers at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and published online in the journal Molecular Cell.

The research team found that the protein, called H2A.Z.2, promotes the abnormal growth seen in melanoma cells as they develop into difficult-to-treat tumors. H2A.Z.2 is part of the chromosome structure that packages genes, and has the ability to switch them on off. Having high levels of this protein aberrantly activates growth-promoting genes in melanoma cells.

Gilles-Éric Séralini is a French scientist who has been a professor of molecular biology at the University of Caen since 1991.

When a new type of drug or therapy is discovered, double-blind randomized controlled trials (DBRCTs) are the gold standard for evaluating them. These trials, which have been used for years, were designed to determine the true efficacy of a treatment free from patient or doctor bias, but they do not factor in the effects that patient behaviors, such as diet and lifestyle choices, can have on the tested treatment.

Political partisanship is rooted in affective, physiological processes that cause partisans to toe the party line on policies and issues, regardless of policy content, according to a new paper.

Social psychologists have said that party identifiers are more inclined to agree with policy proposals that are proposed by their own party, independent of the content of the proposal. If the same proposal is issued by a competing party, they will be inclined to respond negatively to it. In other words, liberals and conservatives don't care about what is best for society, it has to be filtered through their beliefs to be legitimate.

In a new study, older women who lived in places with higher air pollution had significantly reduced white matter in the brain. For the study, a research team took brain MRIs of 1403 women who were 71 to 89 years old and used residential histories and air monitoring data to estimate their exposure to air pollution in the previous 6 to 7 years.

The findings suggest that ambient particulate air pollutants may have a deleterious effect on brain aging.

Some of the nation's largest businesses encourage employees to travel to large U.S. medical centers for complex elective surgical procedures. As part of these medical travel programs, companies negotiate lower prices for patients to receive high-quality surgical care at some of the nation's premier hospitals.

But many participants must travel long distances - sometimes hundreds of miles from home - to reach destination hospitals, meaning it can be difficult to return should complications arise.

Following a decade of steady growth, use of bisphosphonates—medications that are effective for treating osteoporosis—declined in the United States by more than 50% from 2008 to 2012.

The sudden drop seemed to occur after media reports highlighted safety concerns, such as the development of certain fractures that occurred rarely in long-term users, despite the fact that the US Food and Drug Administration and the American Society of Bone and Mineral Research did not recommend any specific safety restrictions on bisphosphonates. The findings are published in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research.

Pet dogs may be humans' best friends in a new arena of life: cancer treatment, said University of Illinois veterinary clinical medicine professor Timothy Fan. Physiological similarities between dogs and humans, and conserved genetics between some dog and human cancers, can allow pet dogs to serve as useful models for studying new cancer drugs, he said.

In a meeting sponsored by the National Cancer Policy Forum of the National Academies' Institute of Medicine in Washington, D.C., Fan and 15 other experts in the field described the benefits of using pet dogs with naturally occurring (rather than laboratory-induced) tumors in early cancer drug trials.