Culture
Cancer took more than 8.7 million years of life and $94.4 billion in lost earnings among people ages 16 to 84 in the United States in 2015. The calculation comes from a new report by American Cancer Society researchers that appears early online in JAMA Oncology.
Scientists at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital have used a novel gene-editing approach to salvage the hearing of mice with genetic hearing loss and succeeded in doing so without any apparent off-target effects as a result of the treatment.
The animals--known as Beethoven mice--were treated for the same genetic mutation that causes progressive hearing loss in humans, culminating in profound deafness by their mid-20s.
As antibiotic resistance is growing and posing a threat on public health, developing new antibiotics has become more urgent than ever. Researchers at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) have recently revealed the virulence regulatory mechanism in Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a superbug which is common in patients with a weak immune system and is resistant to many antibiotics. The findings pave ways for identifying good antibiotic targets for new drug development.
DALLAS (SMU) - Researchers from Southern Methodist University (SMU) could help determine if Saturn's icy moon - Titan - has ever been home to life long before NASA completes an exploratory visit to its surface by a drone helicopter.
NASA announced in late June that its "Dragonfly" mission would launch toward Saturn's largest moon in 2026, expecting to arrive in 2034. The goal of the mission is to use a rotorcraft to visit dozens of promising locations on Titan to investigate the chemistry, atmospheric and surface properties that could lead to life.
New research on the autoimmune disease systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) provides hints to the origins of the puzzling disorder. The results were published in Nature Immunology.
In people with SLE, their B cells - part of the immune system - are abnormally activated. That makes them produce antibodies that react against their own tissues, causing a variety of symptoms, such as fatigue, joint pain, skin rashes and kidney problems.
July 3, 2019 - There are two kinds of age: chronological age, which is the number of years one has lived, and biological age, which is influenced by our genes, lifestyle, behaviour, the environment and other factors. Biological age is the superior measure of true age and is the most biologically relevant feature, as it closely correlates with mortality and health status. The search for reliable predictors of biological age has been ongoing for several decades, and until recently, largely without success.
For the first time, a team of neuroscientists from Columbia University have controlled a visual behavior of a mouse by activating a few neurons in its visual cortex.
Rearing its head in infancy, Christianson Syndrome is a rare disorder whose symptoms include intellectual disability, seizures and difficulty standing or walking. Although it is becoming increasingly diagnosed, with little being known about the neural mechanism behind the disease, therapeutic options for patients remain limited.
Treatment for individuals who experience psychosis, such as hallucinations and delusions as a result of a psychiatric illness, can be targeted to a specific structural mutation, according to a study published by researchers from McLean Hospital and other institutions in the journal Biological Psychiatry.
In the near future, we will be able to mass-produce meat directly from animal cells.
This cultured meat could change the world - or it could falter like GM 'frankenfoods'.
Writing in Frontiers in Nutrition, researchers warn that the most common media framing of cultured meat - as a 'high-tech' innovation - may be the least effective in garnering consumer acceptance.
The revolution will be televised
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.
New research published in Respirology suggests that some respiratory symptoms may predict an earlier death in older adults. Also, such predictions differ by smoking status.
In the study of 2087 older Australians with 22 years of follow-up, shortness of breath predicted a shorter life expectancy irrespective of smoking status. Cough in former smokers and wheeze in current smokers predicted shorter life expectancy.
In a study of 375 adults who have successfully maintained weight loss and who engage in moderate-to-vigorous intensity physical activity, most reported consistency in the time of day that they exercised, with early morning being the most common time.
Depression is common in people with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), but the actual causes of depression in this group are unknown. In a Neurogastroenterology & Motility study, depression was linked with more severe IBD symptoms, and a less positive cognitive bias in emotional recognition (a reduced ability to recognize basic emotions in others) was involved in this association.
In a Cancer Medicine study of 298,434 patients diagnosed with breast cancer between 2004 and 2012, married patients had a better prognosis than patients who were single, who in turn had a better prognosis than those who were divorced, separated, or widowed.
When considering race and tumor characteristics, the better prognosis of single patients was only observed in white patients and in patients with tumors expressing estrogen receptors and progesterone receptors.