2021

Bat species include many that are long-lived for their size. Flying species in general are long lived; one can find many similarities in metabolism between bats and birds. It may be the case that the much higher metabolic rate of flying species requires improved mechanisms of cell resilience and cell […]

Medical researchers from Case Western Reserve University, New York University (NYU), and University Hospitals have been awarded a five-year, $3 million National Cancer Institute grant to develop and apply artificial intelligence (AI) tools for predicting which lung cancer patients will respond to immunotherapy. A unique aspect of the Case Western […]

Alzheimer’s disease is known for its slow attack on neurons crucial to memory and cognition.  But why are these particular neurons in ageing brains so susceptible to the disease’s ravages, while others remain resilient? In a new study published in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia, The Journal of the Alzheimer’s […]

Short pieces of DNA—jumping genes—can bounce from one place to another in our genomes. When too many DNA fragments move around, cancer, infertility, and other problems can arise. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Professor & HHMI Investigator Leemor Joshua-Tor and a research investigator in her lab, Jonathan Ipsaro, study how cells safeguard […]

If you’ve ever worked in a school, you know how sleepy some teens are. Why is that? Why aren’t they sleeping well when they are supposed to be sleeping? Well, there are some factors but one of them is probably social media. Scientists at the University of Glasgow have now […]

Naked mole-rats exhibit an unusually longevity, with a life span something like nine times as long as that of equivalently sized mammals. They are also highly resistant to cancer. This makes them an attractive subject for research into ways to treat aging and age-related disease. No one mechanism will be […]

In the fight against cancers, activating mutations in the RAS family of genes stand in the way of finding viable treatment options. Now, scientists at the University of Missouri and Yale University have discovered that one of these mutations — oncogenic RAS or RASV12 — is also responsible for the […]

A new study finds older adults who received positive airway pressure therapy prescribed for obstructive sleep apnea may be less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease and other kinds of dementia. Researchers from Michigan Medicine’s Sleep Disorders Centers analyzed Medicare claims of more than 50,000 Medicare beneficiaries ages 65 and older who had been […]

Standard drugs remain the best first-line treatments for epilepsy, according to the results of two UK clinical trials led by the University of Liverpool. The Standard and New Antiepileptic Drugs (SANAD II) studies compared a range of antiepileptic drugs for how well they control seizures, their general tolerability and their […]

An analysis of electronic health records for 1.7 million Wisconsin patients revealed a variety of health problems newly associated with fragile X syndrome, the most common inherited cause of intellectual disability and autism, and may help identify cases years in advance of the typical clinical diagnosis. Researchers from the Waisman […]

Skoltech scientists and their colleagues have proposed a new human height inheritance model that accounts for the interaction between various factors that influence adult human height. The research was published in the European Journal of Human Genetics. Human height is a classical quantitative trait that depends on sex, genetics, and […]

Transient ischemia is the loss of blood supply to tissue followed by its restoration, leading to cell death, tissue damage, and harmful cell signaling. While the paper here is focused on connecting the significant ischemia of stroke with the later development of Alzheimer's disease, it is also the case that […]

A new national study will investigate the long-term effects of lung inflammation and scarring from COVID-19. The study, launched with £2 million of funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), aims to develop treatment strategies and prevent disability. Many people recovering from COVID-19 suffer from long-term symptoms of lung damage, including breathlessness, […]

At a cost of $38 billion a year, an estimated 5.3 million people are living with a permanent disability related to traumatic brain injury in the United States today, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The physical, mental and financial toll of a TBI can be enormous, but […]

People admitted to inpatient rehabilitation after hospitalization with COVID-19 showed deficits in mobility, cognition, speech, and swallowing at admission and improved significantly in all of these capabilities by the time they were discharged. However, a considerable number of patients exhibited residual deficits at discharge, highlighting the post-acute care needs of […]

On the surface, Parkinson’s disease — a neurodegenerative disorder — and melanoma — a type of skin cancer — do not appear to have much in common. However, for nearly 50 years, doctors have recognized that Parkinson’s disease patients are more likely to develop melanoma than the general population. Now, […]

In a genetics breakthrough that may help detect and conserve one of North America’s most endangered fish species, researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Columbia Environmental Research Center and Southern Illinois University Carbondale recently produced offspring of endangered pallid sturgeon with DNA from only a single parent. These offspring are not […]

University of Alberta researchers are harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to find a safer, more personalized source of islet cells to treat Type 1 diabetes. The research project, a collaboration between the departments of surgery and computing science, aims to use AI to analyze images to speed up the process and reduce […]

The full assembly of human chromosome 8 is reported this week in Nature.  While on the outside this chromosome looks typical, being neither short nor long or distinctive, its DNA content and arrangement are of interest in primate and human evolution, in several immune and developmental disorders, and in chromosome sequencing […]

Tau is involved in Alzheimer's disease and other tauopathies; it is one of the few proteins in the body capable of becoming naturally altered in ways that encourage aggregation of the protein into solid deposits that are toxic to cells. Tau is highly expressed in nerve cells, and helps in […]

HIV-1 viral capsid simulations on XSEDE-allocated Stampede2, Bridges, Darwin systems uncover nucleotide entry mechanism. Viruses lurk in the grey area between the living and the nonliving, according to scientists. Like living things, they replicate but they don't do it on their own. The HIV-1 virus, like all viruses, needs to […]

The millions of people who have chronic sinusitis deal not only with stuffy noses and headaches, they also commonly struggle to focus, and experience depression and other symptoms that implicate the brain’s involvement in their illness. New research links sinus inflammation with alterations in brain activity, specifically with the neural […]

A new UO study is examining the effects of opioids on an understudied population: developing infants. Human physiology associate professor Adrianne Huxtable is focusing her newest research project on the effects of opioids during pregnancy on essential breathing circuits. It is a research question that hasn’t been well-examined, despite the […]

Caroline Uhler blends machine learning, statistics, and biology to understand how our bodies respond to illness. Caroline Uhler’s research blends machine learning and statistics with biology to better understand gene regulation, health, and disease. Despite this lofty mission, Uhler remains dedicated to her original career passion: teaching. “The students at […]

Everyone faces stress occasionally, whether in school, at work, or during a global pandemic. However, some cannot cope as well as others. In a few cases, the cause is genetic. In humans, mutations in the OPHN1 gene cause a rare X-linked disease that includes poor stress tolerance. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) […]

Myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) is a disease, which can develop into acute leukaemia. It starts in the stem cells in the bone marrow, disturbing the maturing and differentiation process of blood cells. Now scientists at the University of Helsinki have demonstrated that artificial intelligence (AI) can effectively spot  genetic mutations in […]

The biggest advantage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is its ability to analyse large amounts of data and categorize it in a way that is not immediately obvious to people. For example, now AI identified three new subtypes of multiple sclerosis (MS) in a recent UCL research. Scientists believe this will […]

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a tool, which enables people to analyse huge pools of data very quickly and with high degree of accuracy. AI could speed up a lot of our scientific work. For example, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have found that AI is able to generate […]

Humans are born with tens of thousands of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) that collectively ensure lifelong production of blood and immune cells that protect us from infections. HSCs can either duplicate to produce more stem cell progeny or differentiate to produce distinct immune cell lineages, an extremely critical decision that […]

Researchers at Stanford and KU Leuven have identified more than 70 genes that affect variation in both brain and facial structure. The genes don’t influence cognitive ability, further debunking beliefs that intelligence can be assessed by facial features. Even when you assume your best poker face, you reveal something about […]