Lifeboat Foundation

The best way to avoid baldness is to stop hair from falling out in the first place. Now, researchers say a new hair growth discovery might help men keep their locks for a lifetime.

The new insight involves a structure lying within the hair follicle.

“Our major discovery is a previously unknown smooth muscle that surrounds hair follicles and is called the dermal sheath,” explained lead researcher Dr. Michael Rendl. He’s associate director of the Black Family Stem Cell Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in New York City.

There are many different types of probiotic and many brands to choose from. For this reason, it can be difficult to know which probiotic is best for different situations.

The best probiotics for a person can depend on the strain of bacteria, how many bacteria the supplement contains, and whether or not the product also includes prebiotics.

Some research suggests that probiotics can help keep the gut healthy and may help relieve the symptoms of some health conditions.

Cosmologists have predicted the existence of an oscillating signal that could distinguish between cosmic inflation and alternative theories of the universe’s birth.

A major issue with operating ring-shaped fusion facilities known as tokamaks is keeping the plasma that fuels fusion reactions free of impurities that could reduce the efficiency of the reactions. Now, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory ( PPPL ) have found that sprinkling a type of powder into the plasma could aid in harnessing the ultra-hot gas within a tokamak facility to produce heat to create electricity without producing greenhouse gases or long-term radioactive waste.

Fusion, the power that drives the sun and stars, combines light elements in the form of plasma — the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei — that generates massive amounts of energy. Scientists are seeking to replicate fusion on Earth for a virtually inexhaustible supply of power to generate electricity.

Nearly a quarter of patients, 23.7%, treated with adoptive cell transfer tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes for metastatic melanoma have experienced complete and durable responses, according to data presented at ASCO Annual Meeting.

The trial (NCT01174121), conducted by the NCI, has been enrolling patients since 2010, and the subset of patients with metastatic melanoma have shown impressive responses to the therapy over time, with only two complete responders experiencing disease recurrence that resulted in death.

“We have a group of 44 patients with melanoma that are likely cured. They have had no other treatment since their TIL and have been free of disease for more than 5 years,” Stephanie L. Goff, MD, FACS, an associate research physician with the surgery branch at the NCI, told Cell Therapy Next.

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#28 in our top science stories of 2019.

More details to come at CES 2020.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Supriya Chakrabarti, Professor of Physics, University of Massachusetts Lowell

Perhaps you remember the opening scene of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” that took place on Privet Drive. A bearded man pulled a mysterious device, called a deluminator, from his dark robe and one by one the lights from the street lamps flew into it.