Oxford University researchers funded by Parkinson's UK have developed a simple and quick MRI technique that offers promise for early diagnosis of Parkinson's disease.

The team demonstrated that their new MRI approach can detect people who have early-stage Parkinson's disease with 85% accuracy, according to research published in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

'At the moment we have no way to predict who is at risk of Parkinson's disease in the vast majority of cases,' says Dr Clare Mackay of the Department of Psychiatry at Oxford University, one of the joint lead researchers. 'We are excited that this MRI technique might prove to be a good marker for the earliest signs of Parkinson's. The results are very promising.'

One of the hazards of summer is picking up an itchy poison ivy rash but researchers say they have found a natural and effective way to kill it - a fungus named
olletotrichum fioriniae
that grows on the fleshy tissue surrounding the plant's seed. 

For being so annoying, poison ivy has had surprisingly little research done on it. John Jelesko, an associate professor of plant pathology at Virgina Tech, began studying the plant after experiencing a nasty poison ivy rash himself while doing some yard work. He found that most of the work was focused on urushiol, the rash-causing chemical found in the plant's oils. Urushiol is extremely potent. Only one nanogram is needed to cause a rash, and the oil can remain active on dead plants up to five years. 

When proteins are produced in cells based on the "genetic code" of codons, there is a precise process under which molecules called transfer RNA (tRNA) bind to specific amino acids and then transport them to cellular factories called ribosomes where the amino acids are placed together, step by step, to form a protein. Mistakes in this process, which is mediated by enzymes called synthetases, can be disastrous, as they can lead to improperly formed proteins. Thankfully, the tRNA molecules are matched to the proper amino acids with great precision, but we still lack a fundamental understanding of how this selection takes place.

A class of drug currently being used to treat leukaemia has the unexpected side-effect of boosting immune responses against many different cancers, reports a new study led by scientists at UCL (University College London) and the Babraham Institute, Cambridge.

The drugs, called p110δ inhibitors, have shown such remarkable efficacy against certain leukaemias in recent clinical trials that patients on the placebo were switched to the real drug. Until now, however, they have not been tested in other types of cancer.

Which do you think gets more pageviews, sites with exaggerated titles like Upworthy or Buzzfeed, or an accurate title like this one?

We know the answer. The reason is that smart sites interested in achieving an Internet critical mass don't think about content, they think about creating "irrational herding" behaviors. 

Its a smart business strategy. On YouTube alone, there is 100 new hours of content every 1 minute of every day. Expecting that 'content is king' is naively simplistic. Gaming the mentality of Internet viewers leads to pageviews and that leads to advertising revenue.

How effective has the war on science by Greenpeace, Union of Concerned Scientists and their progressive donor base been?

Very effective. Effective enough that even when reading about the Irish Potato Famine of 1850, which caused millions to suffer and die, an alarming number would let many perish if it meant using science to prevent it.