Culture
Scientists have developed an animal model that may provide a path toward improving the diagnosis and treatment of the devastating brain disease chronicled in the bestselling autobiography "Brain on Fire." The book, along with a 2017 movie by the same name, traces newspaper reporter Susannah Cahalan's harrowing descent into the throes of the disease.
Bottom Line: The 1978 novel "The House of God" is a fictional account of the internship experience of Samuel Shem, the pen name of Stephen Bergman, at Beth Israel Hospital in 1973-1974. Funny, angry, honest, and absurd, the book spotlighted the injustices of medical training and the patient care of that era and was pilloried by establishment medicine for years after publication for its razor-sharp version of the truth. This short documentary, produced on the 40th anniversary of the novel's debut, details the book's origins and the people and events that inspired its stories.
What The Study Did: This randomized clinical trial of 143 men tested a short-term treatment for internet and computer game addiction.
Authors: Klaus Wölfling, Ph.D., of the University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz in Germany, is the corresponding author
(doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2019.1676)
Editor's Note: The article contains funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, financial disclosures, funding and support, etc.
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What The Study Did: This observational study of nearly 5,700 hospital employees who used the workplace cafeteria reports on whether food placement and traffic light labeling (green for healthy, yellow for less healthy and red for least healthy) was associated with a reduction in calories in the food purchased by employees.
Authors: Anne N. Thorndike, M.D., M.P.H., of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, is the corresponding author.
(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.6789)
What The Study Did: Veterans Affairs data for 355,121 patients undergoing ambulatory, elective, noncardiac surgery were used to compare the risk of death and complications in patients with and without heart failure.
Authors: Sherry M. Wren, M.D., of the Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California, is the corresponding author.
(doi:10.1001/jamasurg.2019.2110)
A multifunctional device that captures the heat shed by photovoltaic solar panels has been developed by KAUST and used to generate clean drinking water as a way to simultaneously generate electricity and water using only renewable energy.
Nearly 10 years ago, a group of Israeli clinical researchers emailed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) geneticist Len Pennacchio to ask for his team's help in solving the mystery of a rare inherited disease that caused extreme, and sometimes fatal, chronic diarrhea in children.
Now, following an arduous investigative odyssey that expanded our understanding of regulatory sequences in the human genome, the multinational scientific group has announced the discovery of the genetic explanation for this disease. Their findings are published in Nature.
Antibodies are the biomolecules our immune systems deploy to find, tag, and destroy invading pathogens. They work by binding to specific targets, called epitopes, on the surfaces of antigens - like locks to keys.
A kit made from everyday objects is bringing the blockchain into the physical world.
The 'BlocKit', which includes items such as plastic tubs, clay discs, padlocks, envelopes, sticky notes and battery-powered candles, is aimed to help people understand how digital blockchains work and can also be used by innovators designing new systems and services around blockchain.
Astronomers have spotted a distant pair of titanic black holes headed for a collision.
Each black hole's mass is more than 800 million times that of our sun. As the two gradually draw closer together in a death spiral, they will begin sending gravitational waves rippling through space-time. Those cosmic ripples will join the as-yet-undetected background noise of gravitational waves from other supermassive black holes.
Researchers at the University of Helsinki have discovered how regenerative capacity of intestinal epithelium declines when we age. Targeting of an enzyme that inhibits stem cell maintaining signaling rejuvenates the regenerative potential of an aged intestine. This finding may open ways to alleviate age-related gastrointestinal problems, reduce side-effects of cancer treatments, and reduce healthcare costs in the ageing society by promoting recovery.
A study led by scientists of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and the National Centre for Genomic Analysis (CNAG-CRG) from the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) reveals the three-dimensional genomic structure of male germ cells and how this structure determines their function.
There are currently no drugs that stop or inhibit Alzheimer's disease. Despite drug trials showing plaque reduction in the brain, the patients' cognitive function did not improve. Would the results be different if it were possible to design studies that intervene much earlier on in the disease, before cognition is affected? This is what an international study, led by Lund University in Sweden, has attempted to facilitate. The findings have now been published in Neurology.
A wild group of endangered Barbary macaques have been observed, for the first time, "consoling" and adopting an injured juvenile from a neighbouring group. The observations by a scientist from Oxford University and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (ifaw) are published today in the journal Primates.
'Pipo', a nearly three-year-old juvenile, was seriously injured and became separated from his group following a road traffic accident.
Regions of the Universe containing very few or no galaxies - known as voids - can help measure cosmic expansion with much greater precision than before, according to new research.
The study looked at the shapes of voids found in data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) collaboration. Voids come in a variety shapes, but because they have no preferred direction of alignment, a large enough sample of them can on average be used as "standard spheres" - objects which should appear perfectly symmetric in the absence of any distortions.