One study showed that only 59% of organ transplant patients lived for one year after getting invasive aspergillosis. Only 25% of stem cell transplant patients survived that long.
From 2000 to 2013, US hospital stays for invasive aspergillosis went up about 3% each year. By 2014, there were almost 15,000 hospital stays, costing around $1.2 billion. Autopsies in ICUs show aspergillosis is one of the top four infections that can cause death.
Working long hours may actually change the structure of your brain, according to new research published in Occupational & Environmental Medicine. The study points to alterations in key brain areas responsible for emotional regulation and executive functions like working memory and problem solving.
Researchers believe that chronic overwork could trigger neuroadaptive changes, which might have lasting effects on both cognitive performance and emotional well-being.
The dangers of working too much extend beyond burnout. Long hours have already been linked to higher risks of heart disease, metabolic disorders, and mental health problems. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) reports that overwork contributes to more than 800,000 deaths worldwide each year.
The plasma membrane (PM) of eukaryotic cells is constantly exposed to many challenges that can cause wounds that necessitate rapid and efficient repair mechanisms to ensure cell survival. PM wound repair not only encompasses the immediate resealing of the membrane barrier, which involves exocytosis of internal vesicles to deliver membrane, but also subsequent processes that are essential to restore cellular homeostasis. These include restoration of membrane and cortical cytoskeleton structures, as well as replenishment of intracellular organelles consumed during resealing. Recent evidence suggests that the different steps in PM repair, resealing, restructuring, and restoration, are spatiotemporally correlated and regulated by membrane tension. Recent advances in understanding the different phases of PM repair are reviewed and a time-dependent classification of repair mechanisms is proposed.
The brain is constantly mapping the external world like a GPS, even when we don’t know about it. This activity comes in the form of tiny electrical signals sent between neurons—specialized cells that communicate with one another to help us think, move, remember and feel. These signals often follow rhythmic patterns known as brain waves, such as slower theta waves and faster gamma waves, which help organize how the brain processes information.
Understanding how individual neurons respond to these rhythms is key to unlocking how the brain functions related to navigation in real time—and how it may be affected in disease.
A new study by Florida Atlantic University and collaborators from Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, Netherlands, and the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, has uncovered a surprising ability of brain cells in the hippocampus to process and encode and respond to information from multiple brain rhythms at once.
Huntington’s disease has long defied attempts to rescue suffering neurons. A new study in Cell Reports shows that transplanting healthy human glial progenitor cells into the brains of adult animal models of the disease not only slowed motor and cognitive decline but also extended lifespan. These findings shift our understanding of Huntington’s pathology and open a potential path to cell-based therapies in adults already showing symptoms.
“Glia are essential caretakers of neurons,” said Steve Goldman, MD, Ph.D., co-director of the University of Rochester Center for Translational Neuromedicine and lead author of the study.
“The restoration of healthy glial support—even after symptoms begin—could reset neuronal gene expression, stabilize synaptic function, and meaningfully delay disease progression. This study shifts the perspective on Huntington’s from a neuron-centric view to one that shows a critical role for glial pathology in driving synaptic dysfunction. It also tells us that the adult brain still has the capacity for repair when you target the right cells.”
Researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Lund University in Sweden have identified a new treatment strategy for neuroblastoma, an aggressive form of childhood cancer. By combining two antioxidant enzyme inhibitors, they have converted cancer cells in mice into healthy nerve cells.
The study, “Combined targeting of PRDX6 and GSTP1 as a potential differentiation strategy for neuroblastoma treatment,” is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Neuroblastoma is a type of childhood cancer that affects the nervous system and is the leading cause of cancer-related death in young children. Some patients have a good prognosis, but those with metastatic tumors often cannot be cured despite modern combinations of surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and immunotherapy.
Scientists at UCLA and the University of Toronto have developed an advanced computational tool, called moPepGen, that helps identify previously invisible genetic mutations in proteins, unlocking new possibilities in cancer research and beyond.
The tool, described in Nature Biotechnology, will help understand how changes in our DNA affect proteins and ultimately contribute to cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and other conditions. It provides a new way to create diagnostic tests and to find treatment targets previously invisible to researchers.
Proteogenomics combines the study of genomics and proteomics to provide a comprehensive molecular profile of diseases. However, a major challenge has been the inability to accurately detect variant peptides, limiting the ability to identify genetic mutations at the protein level. Existing proteomic tools often fail to capture the full diversity of protein variations.
Law enforcement authorities from six countries took down the Archetyp Market, an infamous darknet drug marketplace that has been operating since May 2020.
Archetyp Market sellers provided the market’s customers with access to high volumes of drugs, including cocaine, amphetamines, heroin, cannabis, MDMA, and synthetic opioids like fentanyl through more than 3,200 registered vendors and over 17,000 listings.
Over its five years of activity, the marketplace amassed over 612,000 users with a total transaction volume of over €250 million (approximately $289 million) in Monero cryptocurrency transactions.
