Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) and Soroka University Medical Center researchers have determined that it is as safe to give birth after age 50 as age 40 without endangering the mother or the baby. The paper was recently presented at the Society for Maternal and Fetal Medicine 39th Annual Pregnancy Meeting in Las Vegas.…
University at Buffalo physicists are using innovative tools to study the properties of a bizarre class of molecules that may play a role in disease: proteins that cluster together to form spherical droplets inside human cells. The scientists’ latest research sheds light on the conditions that drive such droplets to switch from a fluid, liquidy…
Researchers have developed a new imaging method that can capture images at speeds of up to 1.5 million frames per second using standard imaging sensors typically limited to 100 frames per second. This new technology will make it possible to capture extremely fast events for applications such as biomedical research or slow-motion scenes in a…
Academic learning is about gaining new knowledge and skill, but only recently has it been possible to see new knowledge appear in a human brain. A new study from Carnegie Mellon University researchers using multiple imaging modalities shows that learning scientific information results in changes in the actual structure of memory-related areas of the brain,…
Oxytocin has been the focus of intense research around autism spectrum disorder (ASD) due to the hormone’s reported positive effects on anxiety, empathy, social interaction, and maternal behavior. ASD is characterized by early onset of behavioral and cognitive alterations, and by low plasma levels of oxytocin. The enzyme CD38 was recently demonstrated to be critical…
Seemingly overnight, healthy children develop mysterious, potentially disabling symptoms. When children finally receive a diagnosis, often after weeks of tests and office and hospital visits, the parents may be shocked to learn that they have multiple sclerosis — a potentially disabling autoimmune disease once believed to affect only adults. “For many years, the tagline for…
As bacteria continue to demonstrate powerful resilience to antibiotic treatments — posing a rising public health crisis involving a variety of infections — scientists continue to seek a better understanding of bacterial defenses against antibiotics in an effort to develop new treatments. Now, researchers at the University of California San Diego who combine experiments and…
In diffuse cutaneous leishmanisis (DCL), a rare form of leishmaniasis, parasites grow uncontrolled in skin lesions across the body. For the first time, researchers reporting in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases have now profiled how the human immune system responds to a DCL infection and, in turn, how Leishmania amazonensis adapts to the human host. American…
Yo-yo dieting may make it harder for women to control a variety of heart disease risk factors, according to preliminary research presented at the American Heart Association’s Epidemiology and Prevention | Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health Scientific Sessions 2019, a premier global exchange of the latest advances in population-based cardiovascular science for researchers and clinicians. “Achieving…
Researchers have harnessed the latest nanofabrication techniques to create bug-shaped robots that are wirelessly powered, able to walk, able to survive harsh environments and tiny enough to be injected through an ordinary hypodermic needle. “When I was a kid, I remember looking in a microscope, and seeing all this crazy stuff going on. Now we’re…