Warning Label: Big Pharma meets Big History
Why should Big Pharma invest in Big History? My answer is in the form of a warning label I imagined attached to all pharmaceutical products.
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Zapped Malaria Parasite Raises Vaccine Hopes
A malaria vaccine has become the first to provide 100% protection against the disease, confounding critics and far surpassing any other experimental malaria vaccine tested. It will now be tested further in clinical trials in Africa. “The results are important because they demonstrate for the first time the concept that a malaria vaccine can provide…
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Naked Mole Rats Reveal Why They Are Immune to Cancer
IF HUMANS lived as long relative to body size as naked mole rats, we would last for 600 years. These mouse-sized, subterranean African mammals live for over 30 years, and if that wasn’t impressive enough, they don’t get cancer. Now we have a clue why, which could lead to treatments for a variety of human…
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The Robot Will See You Now
Information technology that helps doctors and patients make decisions has been around for a long time. Crude online tools like WebMD get millions of visitors a day. But Watson is a different beast. According to IBM, it can digest information and make recommendations much more quickly, and more intelligently, than perhaps any machine before it—processing…
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Antibiotic-Resistant Diseases Pose Apocalyptic Threat
Britain’s most senior medical adviser has warned MPs that the rise in drug-resistant diseases could trigger a national emergency comparable to a catastrophic terrorist attack, pandemic flu or major coastal flooding. Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer, said the threat from infections that are resistant to frontline antibiotics was so serious that the issue…
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Yoga Has Positive Effects on Major Psychiatric Disorders
Yoga has positive effects on mild depression and sleep complaints, even in the absence of drug treatments, and improves symptoms associated with schizophrenia and ADHD in patients on medication, according to a systematic review of the exercise on major clinical psychiatric disorders. Published in the open-access journal, Frontiers in Psychiatry, the review of more than…
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Scientists Discover ‘Holy Grail’ of Brain Disease Research
It’s been called the “holy grail” of brain research and now, it may have been found. Scientists in the U.S. say they have developed a way to detect the concussion-related brain disease called CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, in living athletes. Until now, the disease, which brings on dementia, depression and personality changes, could only…
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One Form of Neuron Turned into Another in Brain
A new finding by Harvard stem cell biologists turns one of the basics of neurobiology on its head – demonstrating that it is possible to turn one type of already differentiated neuron into another within the brain. The discovery by Paola Arlotta and Caroline Rouaux “tells you that maybe the brain is not as immutable…
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Scientists Find Quadruple Helix DNA in Human Cells
While traditionally we think of only double helix DNA, scientists from Cambridge University in England have made an interesting discovery. According to the researchers, a quadruple helix is also present in some cells and is believed to relate to cancer in some ways. According to the researchers, controlling these quadruple helix structures could provide new…
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Loneliness, Like Chronic Stress, Taxes the Immune System
New research links loneliness to a number of dysfunctional immune responses, suggesting that being lonely has the potential to harm overall health. Researchers, who will present the findings at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology annual meeting in New Orleans, found that people who were more lonely showed signs of elevated latent herpes virus…