Your dad did not just pass his qualities via genes in you. He may have actually passed some stress too!

A research reveals that stress alters the expression of small RNAs in sperms and leads to depressive behaviours in later generations.

In lab research, scientists found that stress in early life altered the production of small RNAs, called microRNAs, in the sperm of mice.

The mice showed depressive behaviours that persisted in their progeny which also show glitches in metabolism.

"Dad is having a much larger role than just delivering his genome," said Isabelle Mansuy, a neuroscientist at University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Mansuy and her colleagues periodically separated mother mice from their young pups and exposed the mothers to stressful situations - either by placing them in cold water or physically restraining them.

These separations occurred every day but at erratic times, so that the mothers could not comfort their pups with extra cuddling before separation.

When raised this way, male offspring showed depressive behaviours and tended to underestimate risk, the study found.

Their sperm also showed abnormally high expression of five microRNAs.

One of these, miR-375, has been linked to stress and regulation of metabolism.

Mansuy and her team are now looking into whether similar microRNA biomarkers occur in people exposed to traumatic events - or in their children.

"If some are altered persistently in blood, then they could be used as markers for susceptibility to stress or for developing psychiatric disorders," she noted in the study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The more green space a neighborhood has, the happier the people are, a new study has revealed.

Dr. Kristen Malecki, assistant professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health said that the results are striking across neighborhoods of Wisconsin, from the North Woods to the cities, and higher levels of green space were associated with lower symptoms of anxiety, depression and stress.

The study, which combines mental-health data from the Survey of the Health of Wisconsin (SHOW) and Landsat 5 satellite data from July 2009 that analyzed how much vegetation was present in each of the SHOW census blocks.

About 2,500 Wisconsin residents from 229 neighborhoods answered an assessment that asked them to rate their symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress, and it was found that across all strata of society, people who lived in a neighborhood with less than 10 percent tree canopy were much more likely to report symptoms of depression, stress and anxiety.

The greening of neighborhoods could be a simple solution to reducing stress, and going outside will make one feel better, said Malecki.

The study was published recently in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

Well there are umpteen number of reasons why you shouldn't smoke. Adding to that, there is another one now which says that smoking totally ruins your taste buds. Your taste buds being affected, you won't be able to completely enjoy the food/drinks that you really like.

It happens so that smokers' ability to taste is impaired by toxic chemicals found in tobacco, even after they have quit smoking. So they do not enjoy their coffee despite the strong, bitter taste of caffeine which can be easily detected.

Scientists tested how well 451 volunteers could recognise the four basic flavours of sweet, sour, bitter and salty, as well as the intensity of each taste as a part of this study.

Researchers found that whether the volunteers smoked or not did not affect whether they could recognise salty, sweet or sour tastes -- but it did have an effect where the bitter taste of caffeine was concerned.

One in five smokers and one in four ex-smokers could not correctly recognise the taste.However, 13 percent of non-smokers also failed the taste test.

According to the researchers ,the build-up of tobacco in the body could stop taste buds renewing themselves and so harm a person's ability to recognise certain tastes, even after they have stopped smoking.

A new study has revealed that consuming a high-fat diet is associated with increased risk of certain types of breast cancer.

According to the researchers, high total and saturated fat intake were associated with greater risk of estrogen receptor- and progesterone receptor-positive (ER+PR+) breast cancer (BC), and human epidermal growth factor 2 receptor-negative (HER2-) disease.

Published data from epidemiological and case-control studies on the association between high fat intake and BC risk have been conflicting, which may be attributable to difficulties obtaining accurate information on fat intake and because of limited heterogeneity of intake within a specific geographic area from which the study cohorts live.

Furthermore, BC is now classified clinically into subtypes by ER, PR, and HER2 expression status and each subtype has its own prognosis and set of risk factors, which may also contribute to the inconsistencies in the published reports on this relationship.

Sabina Sieri, Ph.D., from the Epidemiology and Prevention Unit of the Department of Preventive and Predictive Medicine at Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale Dei Tumori in Milan Italy, and colleagues prospectively analyzed data from 10,062 BC patients from the EPIC study with 11.5 years of follow-up.

The authors report high total and saturated fat intake were associated with greater risk of ER+PR+ BC. High saturated fat intake was also associated with greater risk of HER2- disease.

The authors conclude, "a high-fat diet increases BC risk and, most conspicuously, that high saturated fat intake increases risk of receptor-positive disease, suggesting saturated fat involvement in the etiology of receptor-positive BC."

The study is published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

It could be a groundbreaking treatment option for women with Breast cancer.Scientists have revealed that a new drug can help prevent advanced breast cancer from progressing.

The drug, palbociclib could cut in half the risk that the cancer would worsen.

The principal investigator Dr. Richard S. Finn, remarked that the magnitude of benefit they are seeing is not something commonly seen in cancer medicine studies.

The drug, palbociclib, developed by pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer, appears to prolong survival, though not by a statistically significant amount.

Finn added that a statistically significant survival benefit should not have been expected at this point because only 61 of the 165 patients in the trial had died.