ScienceDaily: Top News

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• Zombie cancer cells eat themselves to live
• Does a junk food diet make you lazy? Psychology study offers answer
• The long and the short of telomeres: Loneliness impacts DNA repair, parrot study shows
• Synthetic genetic clock keeps accurate time across a range of temperatures
• New algorithm aids in both robot navigation and scene understanding
• In mice, obese dads produce heavier daughters with epigenetically altered breast tissue

Zombie cancer cells eat themselves to live Posted: 05 Apr 2014 08:38 PM PDT A new study shows that the cellular process of autophagy in which cells 'eat' parts of themselves in times of stress may allow cancer cells to recover and divide rather than die when faced with chemotherapies.

Does a junk food diet make you lazy? Psychology study offers answer Posted: 04 Apr 2014 07:19 PM PDT A new psychology study provides evidence that being overweight makes people tired and sedentary, rather than vice versa. Life scientists placed 32 female rats on one of two diets for six months. The first, a standard rat's diet, consisted of relatively unprocessed foods like ground corn and fish meal. The ingredients in the second were highly processed, of lower quality and included substantially more sugar -- a proxy for a junk food diet.

The long and the short of telomeres: Loneliness impacts DNA repair, parrot study shows Posted: 04 Apr 2014 07:17 PM PDT Scientists examined the telomere length of captive African grey parrots. They found that the telomere lengths of single parrots were shorter than those housed with a companion parrot, which supports the hypothesis that social stress can interfere with cellular aging and a particular type of DNA repair. It suggests that telomeres may provide a biomarker for assessing exposure to social stress.

Synthetic genetic clock keeps accurate time across a range of temperatures Posted: 04 Apr 2014 11:04 AM PDT A long-standing challenge in synthetic biology has been to create gene circuits that behave in predictable and robust ways. Mathematical modeling experts and experimental biologists have now created a synthetic genetic clock that keeps accurate time across a range of temperatures.

New algorithm aids in both robot navigation and scene understanding Posted: 04 Apr 2014 11:03 AM PDT Suppose you're trying to navigate an unfamiliar section of a big city, and you're using a particular cluster of skyscrapers as a reference point. Traffic and one-way streets force you to take some odd turns, and for a while you lose sight of your landmarks. When they reappear, in order to use them for navigation, you have to be able to identify them as the same buildings you were tracking before -- as well as your orientation relative to them. A new algorithm for determining the orientation of objects could aid robots in navigation, scene understanding.

In mice, obese dads produce heavier daughters with epigenetically altered breast tissue Posted: 04 Apr 2014 11:02 AM PDT Obese male mice and normal weight female mice produce female pups that are overweight at birth and in childhood, and have increased number of 'terminal end buds' in their breast tissue -- the site where breast cancer often develops in rodents. 'Researchers traditionally study the maternal link to weight and cancer risk. This unusual study demonstrates a potential paternal link as well,' says the study author.

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