Ten years after cigarettes were banished from all UK pubs, clubs, bars and restaurants, new figures reveal there are 1.9 million fewer smokers in Britain compared to when the smoking ban was introduced in 2007, with smoking rates now the lowest ever recorded.
“Sport is too much like hard work.” For many, that is reason enough to pass when it comes to exercise. But does sport really have to make you break into a sweat? Psychologists have discovered that one’s own expectations have a major influence on just how strenuous one perceives a unit of sport to be.
Professionally active doctors increasingly hesitate to take on the task of tutoring students from undergraduate medical education. Stress and pressure from higher up, and sometimes also from colleagues, contributes to this ambivalence.
The benefits of a “Mediterranean diet” (MD) are well-known when it comes to colorectal protection, but it’s hard to know specifically what elements of the diet are the healthiest.
For the first time, researchers have demonstrated a surprising effect of microglia, the scavenger cells of the brain: If these cells lack the TDP-43 protein, they not only remove Alzheimer’s plaques, but also synapses. This removal of synapses by these cells presumably lead to neurodegeneration observed in Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.
Researchers have further uncovered the secrets of telomeres, the caps that protect the ends of our chromosomes. They discovered that an RNA molecule called TERRA helps to ensure that very short (or broken) telomeres get fixed again. The work provides new insights into cellular processes that regulate cell senescence and survival in aging and cancer.
One of the key reasons for cancer mortality is caused by the highly invasive behavior of cancer cells, which is often due to aggressive metastasis. Metastasis is facilitated by various growth factors and cytokines secreted from cells of the immune system, which operate through various signaling pathways.
