Category Health/Medical

Mindfulness meditation is associated with benefits to mental and physical well-being, but a new study suggests that it may also come with a particular downside for memory. The findings show that participants who engaged in a 15-minute mindfulness meditation session were less able to differentiate items they actually encountered from items they only imagined.

Wilson and colleagues wondered whether the very mechanism that seems to underlie the benefits of mindfulness – judgment-free thoughts and feelings – might also affect people’s ability to determine the origin of a given memory...

Using long-lived smokers as their phenotype, the authors of a study identified a network of SNPs (a DNA sequence variation occurring commonly within a population) that allow certain individuals to better withstand environmental damage (like smoking) and mitigate damage. Collectively, these SNPs were strongly associated with high survival rates.

Morgan E. Levine said: “We identified a set of genetic markers that together seem to promote longevity. What’s more, many of these markers are in pathways that were discovered to be important for aging and lifespan in animal models. There is evidence that these genes may facilitate lifespan extension by increasing cellular maintenance and repair...

The smell of electrical discharge after photocopying is a tell-tale sign of ozone in the air. Ozone is a component of ‘smog’ and on hot sunny days, in cities with high traffic volumes, more ozone is formed. New research by scientists at Universities of Melbourne and Wollongong and QUT has provided a 1st glimpse at how free radical damage might be initiated in the human lung upon exposure to the urban air pollutant ozone.

They used a powerful combination of electrospray ionisation coupled with multistage mass spectrometry experiments to shed light on how radicals are formed in the reactions of ozone with models of lung proteins.
The team studied how the deprotonated form of the amino acid cysteine and related amino acids and peptides react with ozone when isolated under idealized near...

Mathematical ‘Gingko trees’ reveal Mutations in single cells that characterize diseases Credit http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.3578

A new interactive analysis program called Gingko has been released that reduces the uncertainty of single-cell analysis and provides a simple way to visualize patterns in copy number mutations across populations of cells. Detailed knowledge of CNVs can point to specific treatment regimens.

The free software will improve scientists’ ability to study this important type of genetic anomaly and could help clinicians better target medications based on cells’ specific mutation profiles.

In copy number variations (CNV), large chunks of DNA are either deleted from or added to the genome...