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Neglect, calamitous events or even abuse: traumatic childhood experiences increase the risk of mental and physical illness and can lead to psychiatric disorders later in life. But how do stressful events early in life persistently affect brain functions? What happens in a child’s nerve cells when fear and stress overwhelm […]

Sleep is very important for us and you know it. If you don’t get a good night’s sleep, you definitely feel it. Duration of sleep is important, but other factors play a huge role as well. For example, interruptions. A new study from the University of Adelaide has revealed that […]

Is there any hope for people who are suffering from incurable diseases? Modern medicine shed light in the darkness in the form of a novel therapy, gene therapy. Gene therapy is a relatively new experimental technique, which uses the gene to treat, prevent or limit illness development. It is based […]

Simultaneous measurement of neural rhythms and spikes across five brain areas reveals how propofol induces unconsciousness. In a uniquely deep and detailed look at how the commonly used anesthetic propofol causes unconsciousness, a collaboration of labs at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT shows that as the […]

Ask Paul Guenard how he’s doing and he’ll tell you, “Not bad for a guy who’s supposed to be dead!” While he laughs as he says it, Guenard did indeed face death six years ago when he underwent a stem cell transplant to treat mantle cell lymphoma. Afterwards, he said, […]

Investigational gene therapy can safely restore the immune systems of infants and children who have a rare, life-threatening inherited immunodeficiency disorder, according to research supported in part by the National Institutes of Health. The researchers found that 48 of 50 children who received the gene therapy retained their replenished immune […]

Americans are in chronic pain, and a comprehensive new study exploring trends in this major public health concern reveals that what has been a long-standing and under-acknowledged problem is getting substantially worse. The findings, published in the latest issue of the journal Demography, suggest blanket increases across multiple measures, with pain rising […]

Scientists at UC San Francisco are learning how immune cells naturally clear the body of defunct – or senescent – cells that contribute to aging and many chronic diseases. Understanding this process may open new ways of treating age-related chronic diseases with immunotherapy. In a healthy state, these immune cells […]

In 2015, researchers at UC San Francisco found a structure inside of tumor cells that biologists had never seen before. Even more surprising, a closer examination of the structure revealed that it contained signaling proteins known as receptor tyrosine kinases, or RTKs, which were thought to reside exclusively on the cell’s […]

Using a technique that could point to a new way to help people with severe anxiety and other treatment-resistant psychiatric illnesses, researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison successfully dialed down anxious monkeys’ overactive response to a potential threat by installing a custom chemical switch in their brain cells. About 30 […]

Researchers looking to help people suffering from addiction, depression, and pain are studying how certain brain neurons operate to see if they can be controlled. In a paper published in Neuron, researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine and Washington University in St. Louis, along with several other […]

Imagine if you could get vaccinated for cancer. You would just get a shot or a couple of shots and your immune system would learn how to recognize and kill cancer. This sci-fi-sounding idea is not that far from reality. Especially now that scientists at the University of Waterloo have […]

DNA is basically a software code for the living organisms. It is constantly read and various processes are performed according to that encoded information. It is a good system and we’ve known about it for quite some time, but there is still a lot about it that we don’t know.  […]

Scientists at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have determined the structure of protein “fibrils” linked to Lou Gehrig’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders—findings that provide clues to how toxic proteins clump and spread between nerve cells in the brain. Their results may also lead to developing drugs to […]

KRAS is one of the most common drivers of cancer and is involved in one-third of non-small cell lung cancers. It’s proved an elusive target thanks to its smooth structure and biochemistry. And although new inhibitors are demonstrating some success against one type of KRAS, new paths are needed. A […]

Rice University neurobiologist Rosa Uribe will be hitting the books for her latest study of the digestive system, but some of the pages in her books are a billion years old. Uribe, an assistant professor of biosciences, has won a five-year, $2 million R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health to […]

Say you get a CT scan to confirm whether your chest pain is from a fractured rib. You learn a few days later that no bone break was detected – yay! – but joy gives way to anxiety as you read the radiologist’s note, from the same scan, of a […]

A team of Oregon State University scientists has discovered a new class of anti-cancer compounds that effectively kill liver and breast cancer cells. The findings, recently published in the journal Apoptosis, describe the discovery and characterization of compounds, designated as Select Modulators of AhR-regulated Transcription (SMAhRTs). Edmond Francis O’Donnell III […]

COVID-19 can cause significant health problems. At one point it was reported that it can even cause lasting heart damage. And it is true. However, now scientists from UCL found that mild Covid-19 infection is very unlikely to cause lasting damage to the heart. This is good to hear because […]

A comprehensive review into what we know about COVID-19 and the way it functions suggests the virus has a unique infectious profile, which explains why it can be so hard to treat and why some people experience so-called “long-COVID”, struggling with significant health issues months after infection. There is growing […]

Researchers have been able to reduce scarring by blocking part of the healing process in research that could make a significant difference for burns and other trauma patients. University of Queensland Professor Kiarash Khosrotehrani said scars had been reduced by targeting the gene that instructs stem cells to form them in an […]

New Cornell-led research finds “little to no evidence” of a link between a person’s normal blood levels of vitamin D and risk of getting COVID-19, or the severity of an infection, in the most comprehensive study of its kind to date. Multiple studies had suggested an association between vitamin D […]

The Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (VICTR) has been awarded a major federal grant to lead a national trial of treatments targeting the Renin Angiotensin Aldosterone System (RAAS) in patients hospitalized with COVID-19. Comprised of the hormones renin, angiotensin and aldosterone, RAAS is essential for the regulation of […]

Chimpanzees and bonobos diverged comparatively recently in great ape evolutionary history. They split into different species about 1.7 million years ago. Some of the distinctions between chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and bonobo (Pan paniscus) lineages have been made clearer by a recent achievement in hominid genomics. A new bonobo genome assembly […]

For the first time, researchers have found a way to predict when a pregnant woman will go into labor by analyzing immune and other biological signals in a blood sample, according to a study from the Stanford University School of Medicine. The study, which was published online in Science Translational Medicine, […]

Colorectal cancer diagnoses have increased among people under age 50 in recent years and researchers are seeking reasons why. A new study led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has found a link between drinking sugar-sweetened beverages and an increased risk of developing colorectal cancer in women […]

Pioneering neural recordings in patients with Parkinson’s disease by UC San Francisco scientists are providing the groundwork for personalized brain stimulation to treat Parkinson’s and other neurological disorders. In a study published in Nature Biotechnology, UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences researchers implanted novel neurostimulation devices that monitor brain activity for many months, […]

University of Alberta researchers have uncovered a link between the expression of the protein galectin-9 (gal-9) and whether a cancer patient will benefit from immunotherapy. The discovery could help inform physicians about which patients will likely respond to immunotherapy, and lead to better treatment options. Shokrollah Elahi, a member of […]

Researchers report that one kind of perceptual learning can occur in memory-impaired persons who do not actually remember what they learned. There are many types of memory, but fundamentally, humans remember in two ways. Declarative memory consists of ordinary recollections consciously summoned from the brain. It is dependent on the […]

When someone is diagnosed with cancer, the epicenter of the tumor is easily identifiable, but in 1 to 2 percent of cases, the primary site of tumor origin cannot be determined. Because many modern cancer therapies target primary tumors, the prognosis for a cancer of unknown primary origin is poor, […]