In March, when the pandemic was in its earliest days, COVID-19 was spreading like wildfire aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier, a ship home to more than 4,000 Navy sailors. In just a matter of weeks, nearly 1,200 sailors tested positive and one died, after the virus spread silently from sailor to sailor. Could […]
A rare, debilitating condition in pregnancy that causes nausea and vomiting so severe that some women end up terminating their pregnancies can be effectively treated with the seizure drug gabapentin. That is the finding of a new study of 21 women with the condition led by the University at Buffalo and published on Oct. 29 […]
Huntington’s disease is caused by a mutation in the Huntingtin gen. Patients show involuntary movements, cognitive deficits and specific psychiatric disorders resulting from the degeneration and death of medium spiny striatal neurons. A study led by researchers of the Institute of Neurosciences of the UB (UBNeuro) describes the toxic role of the protein RTP801 in […]
Around 550 million people have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), according to two University of Manchester medical students. The figure more than doubles the previous estimate of 251 million people with the illness linked to smoking by the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Burden of Disease Study. University of Manchester students Emily Hammond and Charles […]
To get a better look at the world around them, animals constantly are in motion. Primates and people use complex eye movements to focus their vision (as humans do when reading, for instance); birds, insects, and rodents do the same by moving their heads, and can even estimate distances that way. Yet how these movements […]
An interdisciplinary team of Dutch researchers has discovered that wasting syndrome, a severe byproduct of tuberculosis, is the same for all humans and animals studied. The discovery offers new opportunities to investigate the still insufficiently understood condition. The scientists also developed a promising method for diagnosing and possibly even predicting tuberculosis. Professor of Molecular cell […]
The COVID-19 crisis has had a grave impact on jobs, wellbeing, mental health and the economy worldwide. But it has also prompted public expressions of hope—people have come together to sing on balconies and clap in the streets. Communities have been joining forces, with a surge in people donating to local food banks and looking […]
Yale researchers have found a neural home of the feeling of stress people experience, an insight that may help people deal with the debilitating sense of fear and anxiety that stress can evoke, Yale researchers report May 27 in the journal Nature Communications. Brain scans of people exposed to highly stressful and troubling images—such as […]
Alcohol-related liver disease (ALD) is a deadly condition affecting more than 150 million people worldwide with no treatment available besides transplant. But now, a team led by researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has uncovered key molecular step stones in ALD that may provide targets for drug therapy development. Their work was recently published in […]
To replace aging and worn cells, the body primarily uses a process called mitosis, in which one cell divides into two. When a cell is ready to divide, it duplicates its DNA so a complete copy is available for each of the daughter cells. In this process, the DNA pieces, or chromosomes, must be precisely […]
