Related Science News

The first signs of insufficient sleep are universally familiar. There are tiredness and fatigue, difficulty concentrating, perhaps irritability, or even tired giggles. Far fewer people have experienced the effects of prolonged sleep deprivation, including disorientation, paranoia, and hallucinations. Total, prolonged sleep deprivation, however, can be fatal. While it has been […]

Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are often accompanied by amyloid proteins in the brain that have become clumped or misfolded. At Washington University in St. Louis, a newly developed technique that measures the orientation of single molecules is enabling, for the first time, optical microscopy to reveal nanoscale […]

Disrupted nightly sleep and clogged arteries tend to sneak up on us as we age. And while both disorders may seem unrelated, a new UC Berkeley study helps explain why they are, in fact, pathologically intertwined. UC Berkeley sleep scientists have begun to reveal what it is about fragmented nightly […]

A protein-coding gene associated with autoimmune diseases such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, collectively referred to as inflammatory bowel disease, or IBD, will be the focus of new research in the School of Medicine at the University of California, Riverside. The work is made possible by a National Institutes of […]

Systems biologist Paola Picotti receives this year’s Rössler Prize for her groundbreaking work in the field of proteomics. She has developed a method of measuring structural changes in thousands of proteins at the same time, paving the way for personalised therapy. The announcement in March 2003 that a human genome […]

New studies show how DNA crossovers can drive healthy, abnormal sperm, egg cell division. In the famous words of movie character Forrest Gump, “Life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you're gonna get.” The same principle applies to human genetics. When the body forms sperm or […]

NIH funded study supports link between high levels of gram-negative bacteria and a stroke- seizure- and headache-inducing vascular malformation. In a nationwide study, NIH funded researchers found that the presence of abnormal bundles of brittle blood vessels in the brain or spinal cord, called cavernous angiomas (CA), are linked to […]

Checkpoint inhibitors, a type of immunotherapy, that target myeloid immune cells and slow tumor growth were discovered by a team from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and other institutions. Reporting in Nature Cancer, the researchers showed for the first time in human cells and a mouse model that inhibiting the […]

Canadian scientists have achieved a first in the study of telomerase, an essential enzyme implicated in aging and cancer. In today’s edition of the prestigious journal Molecular Cell, scientists from Université de Montréal used advanced microscopy techniques to see single molecules of telomerase in living cells. A flaw in the replication […]

Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers have discovered a better way to separate actinium-227, a rare isotope essential for an FDA-approved cancer treatment. To produce Ac-227, researchers recover radium-226 from obsolete medical devices and fabricate it into targets that are irradiated in the High Flux Isotope Reactor. Ac-227 is then separated from […]

A team of scientists from Japan recently achieved more efficient degradation of the human serum albumin protein―an important protein in the blood―via high-intensity infrared irradiation, by attaching a zinc metal complex to the protein. Their findings indicate the potential for future application of certain metal complexes to therapeutic interventions for […]

What we eat can affect the outcome of chemotherapy – and likely many other medical treatments – because of ripple effects that begin in our gut, new research from the University of Virginia suggests. Scientists found that diet can cause microbes in the gut to trigger changes in the host’s […]