Research | featured news

Researchers might have found the Holy Grail in the war against cancer, a miracle drug that has killed every kind of cancer tumor it has come in contact with, the New York Post reported. The drug works by blocking a protein called CD47 that is essentially a "do not eat" signal to the body's immune system, according to Science Magazine.

Figured another way, the 2010 toll meant the loss of 25 million healthy years of life from the population, researchers said.

President Obama on Tuesday will announce a broad new research initiative, starting with $100 million in 2014, to invent and refine new technologies to understand the human brain, senior administration officials said Monday.

Perhaps, like me, you’ve wondered what percentage of retail meat has foodborne pathogens, and of those, which pathogens are antibiotic resistant. Well, you’re in luck. The Food and Drug Administration’s National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System puts out a yearly report looking at the rates of antibiotic resistance of foodborne pathogens in retail meat and poultry samples. A thorough examination, the Retail Meat Report is hefty chunk of research to wade through. Because of this, it’s not easy to make conclusions on the prevalence of antibiotic resistance in the meat case just by reading through the report’s 80-plus pages.

Researchers are reporting success with using cash incentives to help people lose weight. In a yearlong study, people were offered a chance to win or lose $20 a month if they met certain diet goals. They lost an average of 9 pounds compared to just over 2 pounds for other study participants who were not offered the chance to win money if they shed pounds.

San Francisco researchers have come up with a test to predict how likely people 50 and over are to die in the next decade. Ideally, you want to score as low as possible. That typically means being younger and not having certain health conditions (like lung disease, heart failure or most cancers). It also means being at least slightly overweight, according to the new study that detailed the index.

The growing toll of diabetes cost the nation a record high $245 billion in 2012, a 41% increase from $174 billion in 2007, according to new research released today. The study Economic Costs of Diabetes in the U.S. in 2012, commissioned by the American Diabetes Association, estimated the health care and work-related costs of diagnosed diabetes. The full study will be published in the April issue of Diabetes Care.

Researchers at Brown University have succeeded in creating the first wireless, implantable, rechargeable, long-term brain-computer interface. The wireless BCIs have been implanted in pigs and monkeys for over 13 months without issue, and human subjects are next.

Researchers find a majority of children with ADHD have continued symptoms, or symptoms of another psychiatric disorder, in adulthood. Childhood attention deficit hyperactivity disorder frequently persists into adulthood, bringing heightened risks of additional psychiatric issues and nearly five times the risk of suicide, according to a 20-year study that followed children diagnosed with the disorder.

Two rats — one in North Carolina, the other in Brazil — worked together on a task by communicating telepathically, thanks to implants in their brain. Electrical signals from a "leader" rat’s brain were collected, encoded and then zapped into the "follower" rat’s cortex in the form of an electrical signal. The follower rat then pressed one of two levers based on a light visible only to the leader rat. The Duke University experiment is the first time two animals have collaborated through such an artificial link, and shows that the mammal brain can be trained to act on electrical signals from another animal.