To many we might seem to be losing the war against bacteria. They keep evolving and getting more virulent while we struggle to catch up and create new antibiotic drugs while misusing the ones we already have.
Still, according to Dr. Bonnie Bassler, there is a bit of a bright side. The recent salmonella scare, for […]
I’ve had overweight friends who seemed pretty active, physically coordinated and generally healthy, and now science has accepted that fact, too.
Recent reports show that about half of over weight people and about a third of obese people in the US have normal cholesterol, blood pressure and other criteria for physical health.
On the other hand, about […]
This German patient is sure to be clasping double armfuls of happiness to his painkiller-saturated breast right now, after being the first person in history to receive transplants of two complete arms.
A team of 40 medics labored for 15 hours in a hospital near Munich, Germany to give the unidentified patient back the appendages he […]
Here’s something all those Beijing-bound Olympic athletes would love to have in their duffel bags: fat-burning, endurance-enhancing pills fresh out of development, presumably not yet tested for in the barrage of drug tests they’re sure to undergo for the next few days.
To save myself from a load of acronyms and scientific gobbledygook, I present this […]
Lazy? Never feel like going out and exercising? would you rather sit in front of the TV or surf the web like you’re doing now?
It could be because of your genes.
A team of scientists at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte have used to number studies to come to a conclusion that genetics may predispose […]
If you have a thing about hypodermic needles and all that injection stuff, you’re going to love this. Researchers have developed a type of salmonella bacteria that, when dripped into the mouths of rodents, can trigger the mouse’s immune system without causing further harm. Why? Because it basically kills itself shortly upon arrival.
Hopefully the technology […]
We’ve known for a while that one way to make the body impervious to certain diseases is to give it a low, safe dose of that disease, so our immune system gets a good idea of how to fight it and build up antibodies to fight it. That’s the basic concept for vaccination in general.
What’s […]
According to a neurophysiologist at the University of California named Katherine Rankin, sarcasm may have played a significant role in human evolution.
Dr. Rankin discovered that sarcasm plays an important role in human social interaction. And when people lose their ability to detect it in each other (such as after head injuries or illnesses like dementia), […]
Personally I think sloths are kinda cool.
So I’m glad that new research suggests that they might have gotten a bit of a bad rap as… well… sloths.
People used to think that sloths slept for 16 hours a day, but German and US scientists published a study in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters that […]
What’s so small you can’t see it with the naked eye, has DNA spliced into it, and can solve computer science problems?
It’s the DNA computer!
Here’s the layman explanation, as far as I understand it:
Scientists have found a way to insert a bit of DNA into a living bacterial cell, and the DNA turns […]