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Meanwhile there is something important going on in the fight against baldness.

As in the majority of tissues, the hair follicle has stem cells. There are two types of stem cells that are responsible for the continuous renewal of the follicles. The first type is called active stem cells and they start dividing quite easily. Stem cells of the second type are called quiescent and in case of the new hair growth they don’t start dividing as easily. At the same time, the new hair is based primarily on quiescent cells, which attracted close attention of researchers to these cells. At first people thought that baldness was due to this type of cells.

However, recent studies showed that bald men did have those quiescent cells in their follicles. The problem was that they didn’t divide at all and didn’t contribute to forming new hairs.

This means that even a bald person still has the potential to grow new hair, but because of lack of some regulatory factors quiescent cells can’t start replicating.

Elaine Fuchs was able to identify these regulatory factors in her study published in Cell. Apparently, it’s all about the transit-amplifying cells that are the progeny of the active stem cells.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced on Oct. 27 that it has approved, for the first time, an oncolytic (cancer-killing) viral therapy in the United States. The drug was approved for use against late-stage melanoma, a deadly skin cancer that can be difficult to treat.

The approval came as the result of a recent Phase III study, which showed that more patients with late-stage melanoma, treated with a herpes cold sore virus designed to kill , had a better response when compared to a different treatment. Robert Andtbacka, M.D., from Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah and Howard L. Kaufman, M.D., from Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, led the multisite study, published May 26 online in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

According to Andtbacka, “The goal of this targeted therapy is to treat late stage patients more effectively and with fewer side effects.”

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These people have got a leg — or an arm — up on the future.

Thanks to the latest advancements in medical science, amputees are becoming part robot, with awe-inspiring artificial limbs that would make Luke Skywalker jealous.

These new limbs come armed with microprocessors and electrodes that sense muscle movement. Others can be controlled by a smartphone app. People missing limbs often tried to hide their prosthetics, but these New Yorkers are showing them off with pride.
Rebekah Marine.

Rebekah Marine had the modeling bug from a young age, playing dress-up as a kid and getting her mom to take her to try out for modeling agencies in New York.

The one problem? She was born without part of her right arm.

“I was just kind of quickly denied from [agencies] based on my quote-unquote disability,” the 28-year-old says.

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