Diet and Exercise for Colon Cancer Survivors: What the Latest Science Says - American Cancer Society

When Geraldine Levano, 31, was pregnant with her second son, the acid reflux didn’t alarm her. But it got to a point where “I couldn’t even take the pain,” Levano of Houston, Texas, tells TODAY.com. Working as a medical assistant, she asked her co-workers and OB-GYN if her reflux was normal. “And of course they’re like ... it’s just the baby, you’re fine,” Levano recalls. A few times when the pain became “unbearable,” she went to the hospital. But they just reassured her that her baby looked totally healthy and her symptoms were normal during pregnancy. Medication didn’t do much. “Nothing would help,” she says. “It just felt like like a burning sensation with pain, and I just felt like something was stuck there.” So she toughed it out until early April 2022, about two weeks after her son was born, when she felt a painful lump right under her ribcage on her left side. And he was still having reflux. She ended up seeing the doctor whose office she works in now, who ordered an ultrasound. What should have been a 15-minute appointment quickly turned into an hourslong ordeal as it became clear the doctors needed more imaging. Levano with her husband and new baby.

Mitochondria are the tiny powerpacks that supply most of the energy our cells need. Their ability to generate this energy relies on a distinctive architecture: two membranes, one tucked inside the other, separated by a narrow gap called the intermembrane space (IMS). This tiny space helps sustain the chemistry of energy production, making its organization critical to how these cellular powerpacks function. Now, a new study led by a University of Ottawa Faculty of Medicine investigator reports a potentially transformative discovery: the volume of the IMS is genetically controlled and adjustable. By controlling where this space expands or narrows within each mitochondrion, cells can actively shape the internal architecture of their powerpacks and tune how they function.

Pandemics can arise wherever animal or human populations are sufficiently large, and they are not confined to the modern age. Johan Jakobsson, Professor of Molecular Neurogenetics at Lund University, believes that the findings from the new study are highly relevant: they show that a virus can cause a DNA sequence to change across an entire population. "The virus we investigated specifically affected chimpanzees. Yet humans and chimpanzees have largely the same genetic makeup. That is why it is important to understand the differences in how genes are regulated. Our findings suggest that one gene, LINC00662, plays a significant role in early human brain development," says Johan Jakobsson.

Graphical summary of the project's key results. Credit: Fernández B., Bustos M., Vera T., Palacios M., Hill D. & Astudillo D. Pollution from human-generated waste in marine ecosystems has reached critical levels, with cigarette butts (CBs) among the most persistent and harmful pollutants. Globally, an estimated 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are discarded annually, making them the most common type of litter on beaches over the past three decades.

Every egg cell and sperm cell depends on meiosis, a tightly choreographed process in which chromosomes find their partners, exchange genetic material, and then divide. When meiosis goes awry in humans, the consequences can include infertility, miscarriage, and birth defects. A new study from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, published in Science Advances, shows that the molecular machinery guiding this process is more widely shared across animals than expected, and more flexible. The surprise was that familiar-looking parts were not always doing the same jobs, revealing an unexpected flexibility in how meiosis works across evolution.