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Doctors at University College London claims that menstrual pain can be as painful as heart attacks and cause a great degree of discomfort.

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Theoretically, it should be possible to turn light into matter. In practice, well — “easier said than done” is an understatement.

Now, 84 years after the process was first theorised, some researchers reckon they’re going to be able to do it — and they’re about to start the experiment.

It’s called the Breit-Wheeler process, and it all has to do with E=mc.

Continue reading “Physicists Are About to Attempt The ‘Impossible’ — Turning Light Into Matter” »

China’s Tiangong-1space station will de-orbit between the end of March and the first week of April, according to estimates.

On Tuesday, a 13-year-old boy from New Jersey was at the center of medical history as he became the first person in the US to receive an FDA-approved gene therapy for an inherited disease. The event marks the beginning of a new era of medicine, one in which devastating genetic conditions that we are born with can be simply edited out of our DNA with the help of modern biomedical technologies.

The therapy, Luxturna, from Spark Therepeutics, was approved by the FDA in December to treat a rare, inherited form of blindness. Its price tag, set at $850,000—or $425,000 per eye—made it the most expensive drug in the US and sparked mass sticker-shock. But the therapy, which in high-profile clinical trials has allowed patients to see the stars for the first times, also offered the almost miraculous possibility of giving sight to the blind.

The therapy is intended to treat retinal diseases, including leber congenital amaurosis or retinitis pigmentosa, caused by mutations in the RPE65 gene. The RPE65 gene produces an enzyme that helps the eye process light. In these disorders, severe visual impairment begins often in infancy, and sometimes degrades over time. Some people with a mutated copy of the gene can see during the day; others are legally blind. The drug works by delivering a correct copy of the RP65 gene to retinal cells, allowing the patient to produce the deficient enzyme—and, hopefully, restoring their vision. (Luxturna is considered by some to be the first “true gene therapy” approved by the FDA, since other approved therapies, like those for blood cancers, involve removing a patient’s cells from their body, modifying them externally, and then infusing them back into the body.)

Continue reading “13-Year-Old Boy Is First Person in US to Receive Newly Approved Gene Therapy for Blindness” »

Today’s (March 21) Google Doodle honors the Mexican astronomer Guillermo Haro, who would have been 105 today.

His signature discovery was the Herbig-Haro object, a celestial phenomenon named after Haro and the American astronomer George Herbig, who was researching the same occurrences at around the same time.

Herbig-Haro objects are jets of gas and other matter erupting from newly formed stars which collide with the gas and dust around them at the speed of several hundreds of kilometers a second.

Continue reading “Photos: The violent beauty of Herbig-Haro objects, the eruptions of newly-formed stars” »

Scientists propose reflecting sun’s rays with salt.

Breast and ovarian cancers are scary, anxiety-provoking diseases, and with good reason. Although breast cancer isn’t the cancer that kills the most women (lung cancer holds that distinction), it is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in women. And ovarian cancer is difficult to find in its early stages. But anyone willing to spit in a tube and pay $199 will soon be able to find out if they have a particular genetic predisposition to either of these cancers.

This month, the FDA granted the genetics company 23andMe permission to offer direct-to-consumer testing for three of the more than 1,000 known variants of the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2The variants may also boost the risk of prostate cancer and melanoma.