Culture
Scientists have revealed how the typhoid toxin works to hijack DNA repair machines and accelerate the aging of cells, a breakthrough that could pave the way for new strategies to combat the killer disease.
As part of the study, experts from the Department of Biomedical Science with support from the new Healthy Lifespan Institute at the University of Sheffield, infected human cells in a lab with the bacterial pathogen for typhoid - Salmonella typhi.
ANN ARBOR--When fruit flies are exposed to a high sugar diet, key metabolites associated with brain health become depleted, according to a University of Michigan study.
This finding could tell researchers why behaviors that change with the internal energy state, such as food intake, learning and memory, and sleep, change on high-nutrient diets.
Our sound environment is extremely dense, which is why the brain has to adapt and implement filtering mechanisms that allow it to hold its attention on the most important elements and save energy. When two identical sounds are repeated quickly, one of these filters - called auditory sensory gating - drastically reduces the attention that the brain directs to the second sound it hears. In people with schizophrenia, this ability to reduce the brain's response to identical sounds does not function properly.
The European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) 5th Vaccine Conference will hear that the risks of failing to vaccinate children may extend far beyond one specific vaccine, although currently the most urgent problem to address is the resurgence of measles.
In a paper in Science this week, Penn researchers report the first detailed molecular characterization of how every cell changes during animal embryonic development. The work, led by the laboratories of Perelman School of Medicine's John I. Murray, the School of Arts and Sciences' Junhyong Kim, and Robert Waterston of the University of Washington (UW), used the latest technology in the emergent field of single cell biology to profile more than 80,000 cells in the embryo of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans.
HOUSTON -- (Sept. 5, 2019) -- When physicians integrate with hospitals, the cost of health care rises even though there's no evidence patients get better treatment, according to a new paper by experts at Rice University and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas (BCBSTX).
As hospitals gain more control over physicians, they may incentivize delivery of more services but not necessarily higher quality care, the researchers said in the paper, which appears in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
NEW ORLEANS, September 5, 2019 -- High blood pressure appears to accelerate cognitive decline among middle-aged and older adults and treating high blood pressure may slow down the process, according to a preliminary research presented at the American Heart Association's Hypertension 2019 Scientific Sessions.
The findings are important because high blood pressure and cognitive decline are two of the most common conditions associated with aging, and more people are living longer worldwide.
The global health community is working to eliminate trachoma, a bacterial disease that causes blindness. Researchers reporting in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases have analyzed the costs of surveys that must track trachoma levels as part of these elimination efforts.
Infection with parasitic helminths can reduce the susceptibility of T-cells to HIV-1 infection, according to a study published September 5 in the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens by Esther de Jong of the University of Amsterdam and William Paxton of the University of Liverpool, and colleagues.
Bioengineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a method to significantly extend the life of gene circuits used to instruct microbes to do things such as produce and deliver drugs, break down chemicals and serve as environmental sensors.
Taxing sugar-sweetened beverages by the amount of sugar they contain, rather than by the liquid volume of these drinks, as several U.S. cities currently do, could produce even greater health benefits and economic gains, a team of researchers has concluded.
The analysis, by researchers at New York University, Harvard's TH Chan School of Public Health, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California, Berkeley, appears in the journal Science.
Coral reefs are among the most diverse and productive ecosystems on our planet. But due to climate change and other human stressors, reef-building corals that reproduce by means of broadcast-spawning -- the simultaneous release of eggs and sperm into open water -- may now be under threat of extinction.
For some, it is written in artifacts. For others, truth can be found in cool, hard genetic code.
Both kinds of data factor into an ambitious new study that reports genome-wide DNA information from 523 ancient humans collected at archaeological sites across the Near East and Central and South Asia. Washington University in St. Louis brought key partners to an international collaboration of more than 100 scholars who gathered archaeological skeletal samples -- and pooled their expertise -- to generate the largest study of ancient DNA published to date.
After having issued an Editorial Expression of Concern on a 2016 Science study by Siddappa N. Byrareddy et al. in March of this year, to flag that the journal had learned the study had used a virus variant that could have affected results, Science is now issuing an official Correction to this study – to denote the virus used was not the wild-type.
A genome-wide analysis of ancient DNA from more than 500 individuals from across South and Central Asia sheds light on the complex genetic ancestry of the region's modern people. "The scale of this data set enables [the authors] to compare genomes across more space and time points than ever before, allowing them to hone in on increasingly specific questions that would have been unanswerable even a few years ago," write Nathan Shaefer and Beth Shapiro in a related Perspective.