Culture
Not everyone who catches Ebola dies of the hemorrhagic virus infection. Some people mount a robust immune defense and recover fully. Yet risk factors for susceptibility to infection and disease severity remain poorly understood.
A team at the Center for Infection and Immunity (CII) at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health has used a specially bred population of laboratory mice that mimics human patterns of tolerance and susceptibility to the Ebola virus to identify human immune factors that predict outcomes among people infected with the disease.
As if recovering from surgery wasn't hard enough, a new study shows that one in five operations could result in an unwelcome surprise: a bill for hundreds or thousands of dollars that the patient didn't know they might owe.
LA JOLLA, CALIF. - Feb. 11, 2020 - Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute have shown that two prebiotics, mucin and inulin, slowed the growth of melanoma in mice by boosting the immune system's ability to fight cancer. In contrast to probiotics, which are live bacterial strains, prebiotics are "food" for bacteria and stimulate the growth of diverse beneficial populations.
Bottom Line: Claims data from a large health insurer were used to examine how often patients unexpectedly receive out-of-network bills after having in-network elective surgery. These "surprise bills" typically occur when a patient receives care from a clinician, such as an anesthesiologist or surgical assistant, who doesn't participate in that patient's insurance network. This analysis included nearly 350,000 commercially insured patients who underwent elective surgery at in-network facilities with in-network primary surgeons between 2012 and 2017.
What The Study Did: Survey responses from a nationally representative group of 800,000 U.S. adults were used to examine changes in heroin use, heroin injection and heroin use disorder from 2002 to 2018.
To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/
Authors: Beth Han, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in Rockville, Maryland, is the corresponding author.
Some people are annoyingly good at "reading between the lines". They seem to know, well before anyone else, who is the killer in a movie, or the meaning of an abstract poem. What these people are endowed with is a strong inference capability - using indirect evidence to figure out hidden information.
WASHINGTON, February 11, 2020 -- Duchenne muscular dystrophy is the most common type of muscular dystrophy, affecting more than 10,000 males at birth per year in the United States with severe physical disability, chronic wasting and muscle deterioration.
Testing through MRIs, gene testing or muscle biopsy requires specialized equipment, invasive procedures and high expense, but measuring changes in muscle function and identifying compensatory walking gait in young boys could lead to earlier detection.
Florida has experienced numerous harmful algal blooms in recent years, including blue-green algae and their toxins in 2016 and 2018. Despite their intensity and frequency, there is scant data on human exposure to these blooms and concentrations of the toxins they produce in tissues of exposed individuals. The most common routes of human exposure to these toxins include direct contact, ingestion and inhalation. Little is known about airborne exposure to these toxins in recreationally and occupationally exposed humans.
Many popular guitar amplifiers and distortion effects are based on analogue circuitry. To achieve the desired distortion of the guitar signal, these circuits use nonlinear components, such as vacuum tubes, diodes, or transistors. As music production becomes increasingly digitised, the demand for faithful digital emulations of analogue audio effects is increasing.
New research has found that bush-crickets' ear canals have evolved to work in the same way as mammals' ears to amplify sound and modulate sound pressure - and the findings could help scientists make better acoustic sensors for human use.
Bush-crickets are insects that depend on acoustic communication for survival, with the males singing to attract distant females. They have very small 'ears' in their forelegs, which work in a similar way to humans with an outer, middle and inner ear, and many species have transparent 'skins', enabling scientists to measuring ear processes.
People age in different ways. Biological age is a metric that scientists use to predict health risks, the relevance of which can be enhanced by combining different markers. Particularly important markers are frailty and the epigenetic clock, write researchers from Karolinska Institutet in a study published in eLife.
Biological age can differ from chronological age, and the idea of measuring biological age is that it can indicate health risks or the risk of early death - and thus hopefully provide new opportunities for preventative healthcare.
Therapeutic cancer vaccines were first developed 100 years ago and have remained broadly ineffective to date. Before tangible results can be achieved, two major obstacles must be overcome. Firstly, since tumor mutations are unique to each patient, cancer cell antigens must be targeted extremely precisely, which is very hard to achieve. Secondly, a safe system is needed to deliver the vaccine to the right location and achieve a strong and specific immune response.
Researchers at EPFL and MARVEL have developed a novel formulation that describes how heat spreads within crystalline materials. This can explain why and under which conditions heat propagation becomes fluid-like rather than diffusive. Their equations will make it easier to design next-generation electronic devices at the nanoscale, in which these phenomena can become prevalent.
When it comes to memory, immune cells are known as the "bad cops" of the brain. But new research shows they could also be turned into "good cops" to power memory and learning.
Inflammation can send the brain's immune cells into damaging hyperdrive, and this has been linked to neurodegenerative diseases that affect memory, like dementia.
In the new study, researchers at RMIT University found that these same immune cells - known as microglia - can also be activated to have the reverse effect.
The round goby, one of the most common invasive freshwater fish in the world, boasts a particularly robust immune system, which could be one of the reasons for its excellent adaptability. This is the result of genome research by an international team of biologists, coordinated at the University of Basel and published in the journal BMC Biology.