(Garrison, NY) Many of the legal and ethical options for refusing unwanted interventions are not available to people with dementia because they lack decision-making capacity. But one way for these people to ensure that they do not live for years with severe dementia is to use an advance directive to instruct caregivers to stop giving them food and water by mouth. This is an ethical and legal gray area explored in commentaries and a case study in the Hastings Center Report.

People with decision-making capacity have the legal right to refuse treatment of any kind and to voluntarily stop eating and drinking.

A molecular pathway called mTORC1 controls the conversion of unhealthy white fat into beige fat, an appealing target for increasing energy expenditure and reducing obesity, according to a new study. The team also found that a protein, Grb10, serves as the on-off switch for mTORC1 signaling and the "beigeing" of fat.

Phytoplankton are tiny, photosynthetic organisms and essential to life on Earth, supplying us with roughly half the oxygen we breathe.

Phytoplankton have their own requirements to carry out critical cellular activity
- the element phosphorus. But in some parts of the world's ocean, P is in limited supply. How do phytoplankton survive when phosphorus is difficult to find?

Why, as we age, are we more vulnerable to cancer? 

You don't think of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - one of the atomic bomb testing facilities - when you think of breast cancer research, but they know cell mutations.

A new paper in Cell Reports by LBL researchers found that, as women age, the cells responsible for maintaining healthy breast tissue stop responding to their immediate surroundings, including mechanical cues that should prompt them to suppress nearby tumors. The disease is most frequently diagnosed among women aged 55 to 64, according to the National Cancer Institute.

June 5, 2014 – So-called silent DNA mutations earned their title because, according to the fundamental rules of biology, they should be inconsequential. Reported on June 5 in PLOS Genetics online, University of Utah researchers experimentally proved there are frequent exceptions to the rule. The work was conducted in the bacteria, Salmonella enterica, used to study basic biological mechanisms that are often conserved in humans.

Every spring, as the weather warms, trees in forests up and down the east coast explode in a bright green display of life as leaves fill their branches, and every fall, those same leaves provide one of nature's great color displays of vivid yellow, orange and red.

Over the last two decades, spurred by higher temperatures caused by climate change, Harvard scientists say, forests throughout the Eastern U.S. have experienced earlier springs and later autumns than ever before.