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Boy or girl? For those who want to influence their baby’s sex, superstition and folk wisdom offer no shortage of advice whose effectiveness is questionable at best — from what to eat to when to make love. But some animals have a technique backed by scientific proof:  In turtles and […]

One in 50,000 Canadian men suffer from a rare genetic disorder that results in progressive vision loss that robs them of their sight by the age of 40. There is no cure, but an extraordinarily expensive, unproven gene therapy is emerging that holds the promise of at least delaying the […]

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Purdue University researchers have developed a minimally invasive technique that may help doctors better explore and treat cancerous cells, tissues and tumors without affecting nearby healthy cells. The method, called PLASMAT – Plasma Technologies for a Healthier Tomorrow – combines three emerging techniques that appear promising in the […]

The human body develops most tissue types during fetal development, in a mother’s uterus. Yet one only tissue develops after birth: the mammary gland. This milk-producing organ, a defining characteristic of mammals, is also the site of one of the most common cancers, breast cancer, which affects roughly one in eight women […]

The study published online this week in the journal Science found that macrophages play an important role in maintaining the mammary gland’s stem cell niche, a sort of nursery for the precursors of milk-producing cells in the breast. “Learning more about the factors that keep mammary stem cells alive and […]

COLLEGE PARK, Md.– One of the most prevalent health conditions among older adults, age-related hearing loss, can lead to cognitive decline, social isolation and depression. However, new research from the University of Maryland Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences (HESP) shows that the use of hearing aids not only restores […]

The methods developed show how immune cells in pigs, called CD8 (killer) T cells, are recruited in large numbers in the lung after infection with influenza or aerosol vaccination. The tools can also be used to identify virus proteins that are recognised by the immune system, offering the potential to […]

SC researchers have pinpointed a remedy to prevent the spread of triple-negative breast cancer. Metastatic breast cancer is a leading cause of death for women. The findings appeared in Nature Communications. The study comes from the lab of USC Stem Cell researchers at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and […]

Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and their collaborators have developed a technique that allows them to speed up or slow down human heart cells growing in a dish on command — simply by shining a light on them and varying its intensity. The cells are […]

Getting old is no fun at all. Not only you are reaching the final stages of your life, but your quality of life degrades dramatically. This, of course, is related to poor physical health, faintness and declining cognitive ability. However, dementia does not affect all people equally. Scientists from UCL […]

QUT researchers have developed a new drug that has the potential to dramatically slow the ageing process and delay, or even prevent, major diseases in humans, including cancer, Alzheimer’s, Type 2 Diabetes and arthritis. The Scientific Director of the Cancer and Ageing Research Program (CARP), Associate Professor Derek Richard from QUT’s Institute of Health and Biomedical […]

Pancreatic cancer is expected to become the second deadliest cancer in the United States by 2030. It is tough to cure because it is usually not discovered until it has reached an advanced stage. But a new diagnostic test developed by researchers at UC San Diego shows promise for detecting […]

Moderate to high intensity exercise does not slow cognitive (mental) impairment in older people with dementia, finds a trial led by a University of Warwick researcher. The study DAPA: Dementia and Physical Activity has been published by The BMJ and was led by Sarah Lamb, Professor of Rehabilitation at Warwick […]

University of Minnesota researchers in the Institute for Molecular Virology (IMV) have made a key discovery that could have important implications for developing a strategy to stop the spread of a highly infectious virus currently spreading among remote areas of central Australia. Called human T-cell leukemia virus type 1 (HTLV-1), infection rates […]

This is the first step towards developing a brain-controlled hearing aid. A hearing aid basically enhances all the sounds in our surroundings. This means, for example, that during a restaurant visit, background noise is increased just as much by a hearing aid as the speech from the person sitting opposite. […]

Interfering with the motion of a kinase enzyme might be a new approach for the development of anti-cancer drugs, new UA-led research suggests. Revealing all the steps required to activate an enzyme called a protein kinase may identify new ways to target cancer, according to new University of Arizona-led research. […]

Jean-François Côté, a researcher at the Montreal Clinical Research Institute (IRCM) and professor at Université de Montréal’s Faculty of Medicine, studies metastasis, the leading cause of cancer-related death. Recently, his team uncovered a protein that, once deactivated, could prevent the development of metastases in an aggressive type of cancer, HER2-positive […]

In a 10-patient cohort study led by Dr. Jean Roy, hematologist and professor at the Faculty of Medicine of Université de Montréal, that aims to understand how to mitigate the risks associated with the treatment of multiple myeloma, a malignant cancer, researchers have adopted an innovative approach based on the unique immunological […]

Dementia should join the expanding list of possible complications following concussion, even if the patient did not lose consciousness, say researchers from UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences and the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Health Care System. In their study, which tracked more than one-third of a million veterans, the likelihood of dementia was […]

The big question As an embryo develops from a little glob of primitive cells, it patterns itself into precise, spatially organized regions and tissues. This requires that individual cells coordinate with one another over long distances by releasing and detecting specialized signaling molecules. How can cells, communicating only in this […]

Mutations in genes that help repair damage to DNA may aid in predicting the prognosis of patients with bladder and other related cancers, according to researchers. The researchers found that bladder cancer patients who had mutations in their ATM or RB1 genes — proteins that help repair DNA damage when […]

Device could help advance regenerative medicine A UCLA bioengineer has developed a technique that uses a specially adapted 3D printer to build therapeutic biomaterials from multiple materials. The advance could be a step toward on-demand printing of complex artificial tissues for use in transplants and other surgeries. “Tissues are wonderfully […]

For years, researchers have known that a gene called EAK-7 plays an important role in determining how long worms will live. But it remained unclear whether the gene had a counterpart in humans and – if it did – how that human version would work. Now, researchers led by UCLA’s […]

A new study identifies a molecule that may be critical to the repair of white matter, the fatty tissue wrapped around parts of brain cells that helps speed up communication. Damage to white matter is associated with several conditions, including multiple sclerosis and cerebral palsy, and can occur in the […]

Men who take once-daily aspirin have nearly double the risk of melanoma compared to men who are not exposed to daily aspirin, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study. Women, however, do not have an increased risk in this large patient population. “Given the widespread use of aspirin and the potential […]

Personalized therapies are the future, but they do pose a challenge. If every therapy will be different, how do you test them? Obviously, doctors would have the best test subject available – the patient, but you can only do so much with him. Now a team if scientists lead by […]

A team of medical researchers have taken a step in investigating whether a type of RNA found to be linked to cancers — called microRNAs — could one day be used as a more accurate screening test for prostate cancer. The researchers said that out of the 733 microRNAs analyzed […]

A Western-style diet triggers changes in the brain that may predispose patients to Alzheimer’s disease decades before they show any sign of cognitive decline, according to new research by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators. In two studies, published in BMJ Open and in Neurology, the investigators showed that diet and insulin […]

Graphene enables structural analysis of naturally occurring amyloids. A new experimental method permits the X-ray analysis of amyloids, a class of large, filamentous biomolecules which are an important hallmark of diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. An international team of researchers headed by DESY scientists has used a powerful X-ray […]

Cancer drops sparse chemical hints of its presence early on, but unfortunately, many of them are in a class of biochemicals that could not be detected thoroughly, until now. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have engineered a chemical trap that exhaustively catches what are called glycoproteins, including minuscule traces that have previously […]