The papers appear to feature the same pictures as others, raising doubts about the checks on scientific research, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 1661
Authorities in the northern Chinese region of Inner Mongolia have issued an early epidemic warning after a resident contracted bubonic plague.
Bubonic plague, known as the ‘Black Death’ in the Middle Ages, is one of the most devastating diseases in history, having killed around 100million people in the 14th century.
The confirmed plague case has sparked fears of a new wave of virus outbreak erupting in China when the country is still battling the coronavirus.
Kate Rubins, the first Napa native to go to space, is entering the final three months of preparation for her return trip to the International Space Station where she served four years ago.
Starting Oct. 14 and continuing for about six months, her schedule will be replete with scientific work 250 miles above the Earth, dealing with materials ranging from supercold gases to stem cells. And unlike during her first stay in 2016, Rubins expects to get to work quickly, without the awkward introduction to moving about in microgravity.
“As a rookie you’re not so good at navigating and flying through the space station, so you tend to crawl hand over hand on the handrails,” the biochemist-turned-space traveler quipped during a NASA news conference last week in Houston, while recalling her original 115-day stint aboard the orbiting space platform.
Once an ecosystem is disturbed, restoring it can be difficult. And when the disturbed ecosystem is a patient’s microbiome, restoring the patient to health can be even more difficult. Just one ecosystem element that proliferates or diminishes beyond bounds may throw multiple elements into disarray, creating a dysbiosis that resists simple remedies.
Because a patient’s microbiome consists of interacting elements—including elements that extend beyond the microbiome itself—these elements cannot be seen in isolation. Rather, they are dynamic parts of a systemic whole. Touch any one of them, and the effects of doing so may ripple outward in unpredictable ways—unless the elements and their interactions are thoroughly understood.
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“We are covered by, and protected by, and interacted with by vast microbial ecosystems,” says Julius Goepp, MD, founder of Scaled Microbiomics. Everywhere the body comes into contact with the outside environment, you’ll find a thriving community of microbes. This includes places that are obviously “external”—like skin and hair (including the skin and hair of underarms and nostrils)—as well as places that we consider to be “internal,” like the gastrointestinal tract.
“The surface of our gut is continuous with the outside world,” Goepp points out. The miracle of our gut, he continues, is that it can transport “two pounds of very nasty material [while keeping] it one cell layer away from our precious, sterile, inside tissue.”
As the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic mounts, scientists worldwide continue their push to develop effective treatments and a vaccine for the highly contagious respiratory virus.
University of South Florida Health (USF Health) Morsani College of Medicine scientists recently worked with colleagues at the University of Arizona College of Pharmacy to identify several existing compounds that block replication of the COVID-19 virus (SARS-CoV-2) within human cells grown in the laboratory. The inhibitors all demonstrated potent chemical and structural interactions with a viral protein critical to the virus’s ability to proliferate.
The research team’s drug discovery study appeared June 15 in Cell Research, a high-impact Nature journal.
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Posted in biotech/medical
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Very interesting.
New UCLA research conducted in mice could explain why some people suffer more extensive scarring than others after a heart attack. The study, published in the journal Cell, reveals that a protein known as type 5 collagen plays a critical role in regulating the size of scar tissue in the heart.
Once formed, heart scar tissue remains for life, reducing the heart’s ability to pump blood and adding strain to the remaining heart muscle. People who develop larger scars have a higher risk of heart rhythm problems, heart failure and sudden cardiac death.
“Two individuals with the same degree of heart attack can end up with different amounts of scar tissue,” said Dr. Arjun Deb, the study’s senior author and a member of Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA. “Given the clear correlation between scar size and survival rates, we set out to understand why some hearts scar more than others. If we can reduce this scarring, we can greatly improve survival.”
(Credit: Getty Images)
According to the study in PNAS, the ultra-thin yet strong material acts as a barrier that mosquitoes can’t bite through. The graphene also blocks chemical signals mosquitoes use to sense that a blood meal is near, blunting their urge to bite in the first place.
Infertility is one of the most striking effects of aging. The impact of aging on females’ fertility is more severe and much better understood, but it also affects males. Male reproductive aging is less researched, but of those studies that do address it, most focus on sperm. However, ejaculate contains more than just sperm. Proteins in the seminal fluid are important for fertility, and in many animals, they have a dramatic effect on female physiology and behavior. Little is currently known about the impact of male aging on these proteins, and whether any changes contribute to poorer ejaculates in older males.
To resolve these questions, researchers at the University of Oxford’s Department of Zoology conducted experiments in a model organism, the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. This species typically lives for less than five weeks, which means that researchers can very rapidly measure the impact of age on male fertility, and their sperm and seminal fluid proteins. This species is also highly amenable to genetic studies, which allowed the researchers to genetically manipulate male lifespan, to see how this impacted the decline in fertility with age.
Published this week in PNAS are their results which show that both sperm and seminal fluid protein quality and quantity decline with male age, making distinct contributions to declining reproductive performance in older males. However, the relative impacts on sperm and seminal fluid often differ, leading to mismatches between ejaculate components. Despite these differences, experimental extension of male lifespan improved overall ejaculate performance in later life, suggesting that such interventions can delay both male reproductive aging and death.
Elderly people are more prone to infectious diseases as the function of their immune system continuously declines with progression of age. This becomes especially apparent during seasonal influenza outbreaks or the occurrence of other viral diseases such as COVID-19. As the efficacy of vaccination in the elderly is strongly reduced, this age group is particularly vulnerable to such infectious pathogens and often shows the highest mortality rate. In addition to the age-related immune decline aged individuals are commonly affected by frailty that negatively impacts quality-of-life. Even though the average life-expectancy for humans continuous to rise, living longer is often associated with age-related health issues.
Important role of belly fat in aging processes identified
Researchers from the Department for BioMedical Reserarch (DBMR) and the Institute of Pathology at the University of Bern as well as the University Hospital Bern (Inselspital) have set out to identify new approaches to improve health-span in a fast-growing aging population. For many years scientists speculated that chronic low-grade inflammation accelerates aging processes and the development of age-related disorders. An international team of researchers under Bernese guidance has now demonstrated that visceral adipose tissue, known as belly fat, crucially contributes to the development of chronic low-grade inflammation. Scientist around Dr. Mario Noti, formerly at the Institute of Pathology of the University of Bern and Dr. Alexander Eggel from the Department for BioMedical Research (DBMR) of the Universität of Bern reported that certain immune cells in the belly fat play and an essential role in regulating chronic low-grade inflammation and downstream aging processes.