Boomers

British and Canadian researchers have identified an oncogene that is responsible for a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer. According to the report, the oncogene ZNF703 - onco meaning tumor or mass - becomes active in one out of 12 breast cancers.

Presbycusis, or age-related hearing loss, affects two aspects of hearing; volume and clarity.  Amplification provided by a hearing aid increases the volume of all sounds, but the sounds that benefit most from amplification are vowel sounds.  Consonant sounds also become louder, but not necessarily more clear.

If you have diabetes, or any other disease that requires close monitoring, there's a new development that may keep you from constantly interrupting your routine to conduct self-monitoring or going to a laboratory for regular testing.  It's affectionately called a microworm, and it's capable of not only monitoring, say your glucose levels, but emitting a fluorescent glow, or 'tatoo,' through your skin to show you when you need to be concerned.  Pretty cool...

I feel like I'm writing headlines for one of the shocker tabloids, but the above lead just happens to be very real and very significant to bald humans.  Scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Veterans Administration (VA) did discover a chemical compound that caused hair regrowth in mice with alopecia, but they were testing the compound on the mouse digestive system.

In 2009, Michael Cima, professor of materials science and engineering, and his MIT team created an implantable sensoring device capable of detecting and monitoring cancer. This week, another version of that device was presented that can detect whether a patient has had a heart attack and its severity.  This will help diagnose the 30 percent of heart attack victims for whom there are no symptoms.

Nothing like a diet orange to wash down some barbecue spare ribs, french fries, and buttered biscuits, heh?  Or a Diet Coke with your Mac & Cheese?  If this sounds like your idea of saving calories, you're a lot like millions of Americans, who believe that because diet soda has no calories, it can't be bad for your diet.  You're wrong.

.... If this success is continued in subsequent studies, miR-429 could become the catalyst that literally reverses the fate of an ovarian cancer patient.