Health & Science

A breast cancer breakthrough

Breast cancer is actually four distinct diseases with their own genetic makeups, new research reveals—a finding that may lead to more effective treatment. Researchers examining tumors from 825 patients as part of the Cancer Genome Atlas project provided the first detailed analysis of genetic variations in the types of breast cancer, which kills 35,000 American women a year. One particularly deadly type was found to be more similar to ovarian cancer and some lung cancers than to other breast cancers. That “raises the possibility that there may be a common cause” to cancers found in different parts of the body, Mayo Clinic researcher James Ingle tells The New York Times. The study pinpointed what researchers called “the roots’’ of four main types of breast cancer, and suggests that these cancers should be classified—and treated—based on their distinctive genetic makeups, rather than as one disease. Drugs that are effective against cancers elsewhere in the body could quickly be deployed to combat certain breast cancers—possibly within the next five years. “This is the road map,” says Washington University researcher Matthew Ellis, “for how we might cure breast cancer in the future.”

Eunuchs’ health secrets

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New research has uncovered a surefire way to add up to 20 years to men’s lives: castrate them. When Korean researchers analyzed the genealogical records of males who were castrated as boys to serve in the palace of the Chosun Dynasty between the late 14th and early 20th centuries, they found that the eunuchs lived between 14 and 19 years longer, on average, than their non-castrated peers. The records also showed that three of the 81 eunuchs lived to be 100—a rate about 130 times higher than that among people in developed countries today, TheAtlantic.com reports. The findings support “the idea that male sex hormones decrease the life span of men,” the study authors write. In contrast to estrogen, which appears to enhance longevity, testosterone seems to weaken the immune system and increase the risk of cardiovascular disease. Lower levels of the male hormone may be a main reason why women tend to live longer than men and are 10 times as likely to reach the age of 110.

The oldest galaxy

Astronomers have spotted the oldest and most distant galaxy yet found. The star system, named MACS 1149-JD, is 13.2 billion light-years from Earth, and since it likely formed just 500 million years after the big bang, it could offer new insight into the universe’s origins. “We feel like archaeologists with a pre-Neanderthal fossil in hand,” Johns Hopkins University astronomer Wei Zheng tells Space.com. Astronomers were only able to identify the tiny galaxy—which is just a hundredth the size of our galaxy, the Milky Way—because the gravity of galaxy clusters between it and our planet magnified its faint light, a phenomenon called “gravitational lensing.” The find supports the theory that an army of small galaxies helped transform the hydrogen gas cloud that made up the early universe in the wake of the big bang into the cosmos as we know it. So far, researchers have only been able to find one other galaxy that formed within 500 million years of the big bang, but the MACS 1149-JD sighting suggests that a wider search for small, ancient galaxies would yield many more examples. “We are likely just seeing the tip of the iceberg,” says University of Arizona astronomer Daniel Stark.

Help for nervous athletes

Want to improve your tennis game or your free-throw percentage? It may be as simple as making a fist. German researchers have discovered that right-handed soccer players were far more likely to score a high-pressure penalty kick if they clenched their left hand just before their shot. It also improved the performance of judo experts and badminton players. That’s likely because clenching the left hand activates the right side of the brain, which governs rote movements, and dampens the activity of the brain’s left hemisphere, which tends to initiate over-thinking. “Athletes usually perform better when they trust their bodies rather than thinking too much about their own actions or what their coaches told them during practice,” sports psychologist Jürgen Beckmann of the Technical University of Munich tells ScienceDaily.com. By clenching their left hand, right-handed athletes were more likely to let their physical training take over, instead of falling prey to performance anxiety generated in the brain’s left hemisphere. (Lefties weren’t tested.) Researchers say clenching a left hand—or foot—could also help calm surgeons, musicians, and others who need to perform “highly automated tasks” under stress.