By boosting a protein called oligoadenylate synthetases-like (OASL) that naturally exists in our cells, researchers may have found a way to enhance our ability to inhibit viral infections like the flu. 

OASL appears in increased quantities in people with liver cancer caused by the hepatitis C virus. 

Hepatitis C, influenza, the childhood respiratory illness RSV, and many other viruses are known as ribonucleic acid (RNA) viruses, which use RNA as their genetic material when they replicate. The OASL protein enhances cells' ability to detect virus RNA, activating the immune system to sense the virus and inhibit replication.

It doesn't happen often but there are times when its unclear if a football crosses the goal line for a touchdown. If a quarterback attempts a sneak, for example, and the line pushes forward, he may be under too many players to be seen.

All the referees can do is pull people off and look at where the ball is, though there is no idea if that's where it was when his knee touched the ground. A Disney Research team, in collaboration from NC State and Carnegie-Mellon, developed a system that can track a football in three-dimensional space using low-frequency magnetic fields. 

An imbalance of female sex hormones caused by vegetarian foods like soy may be contributing to high levels of male obesity, according to a recent paper.

In US states that strongly embrace myriad anti-science beliefs, like California, Washington and New York, dangerous preventable diseases like Whooping Cough have come roaring back after a long hiatus, due to a belief by cultural elites that as long as uneducated poor people get vaccines, things will be fine.

It is going to take a lot to combat the entrenched mentality that causes some to distrust science and medicine, because groups have spent a lot of money promoting conspiracy stories about pharmaceutical companies and doctors and selling their 'alternative' medicine. It will take education, awareness and nurses can help, write Emily Peake, APRN, MSN, FNP-C, CLC, and Lisa K. McGuire, MSN, MBA-HCM, RN.

Titan, the most famous moon around Saturn, has an atmosphere that is a brownish-orange haze. The dirty color comes from a mixture of hydrocarbons, molecules that contain hydrogen and carbon, and nitrogen-carrying chemicals called nitriles. The family of hydrocarbons already has hundreds of thousands of members, identified from plants and fossil fuels on Earth, and even more could exist.

The class of drug known as p110δ inhibitors, currently being used to treat leukemia, has the unexpected side-effect of boosting immune responses against many different cancers, according to a study led by pharmaceutical company Genentech in San Francisco

p110δ inhibitors have shown such remarkable efficacy against certain leukemias in recent clinical trials that patients on the placebo were switched to the real drug - but they have not been tested in other types of cancer.  The p110δ enzyme is a member of the PI3-kinase family, and is sometimes called PI3Kδ. p110δ and the other PI3Ks are hot drug targets for the pharmaceutical industry as they are implicated in many cancers and are readily druggable.