Category Health/Medical

Playing basketball outside. Credit: © Kar Tr / Fotolia

A father-son research partnership has found that athletic prowess could be related to the length of your fingers.Grant Tomkinson, a professor of kinesiology and public health education department at the University of North Dakota, conducted research with his son Jordan, a junior at Sacred Heart School. They found that the ratio of the length of the second (“pointer”) finger and the length of the fourth (“ring”) finger – called the “digit ratio” – is favorably related to muscular strength in boys.

“Examine the fingers of your hand,” said Grant Tomkinson...

In order to achieve better brain signal transmission quality, the researchers apply contact gel. Credit: Michael Veit

Several groups from the Freiburg excellence cluster BrainLinks-BrainTools led by neuroscientist Dr. Tonio Ball are showing how ideas from computer science could revolutionize brain research. They illustrate how a self-learning algorithm decodes human brain signals that were measured by an electroencephalogram (EEG). It included performed movements, but also hand and foot movements that were merely thought of, or an imaginary rotation of objects...

Schematic overview of the Human Pathology Atlas.
A systems-level approach enables analysis of the protein-coding genes of 17 different cancer types from ~8000 patients. Results are available in an interactive open-access database.

A new Pathology Atlas is launched today with an analysis of all human genes in all major cancers showing the consequence of their corresponding protein levels for overall patient survival. The difference in expression patterns of individual cancers observed in the study strongly reinforces the need for personalized cancer treatment based on precision medicine.

Published in Science1, the Atlas is based on the analysis of 17 main cancer types using data from 8,000 patients...

Adult C. elegans worms can be seen with embryos inside them. Credit: Adam Klosin, CRG.

Scientists reveal that a fault in the process that copies DNA during cell division can cause epigenetic changes that may be inherited for up-to 5 generations. They also identified the cause of these epigenetic changes, which is related to the loss of a molecular mechanism in charge of silencing genes. Their results, which will be published in Science Advances on 16 August, will change the way we think about the impact of replication stress in cancer and during embryonic development, as well as its inter-generational inheritance.

There are two particular processes in which cell division is crucial: embryonic development and tumorigenesis...