John Travis

All Stories by John Travis

  1. Health & Medicine

    Antiviral Advance: Drug disables enzyme from hepatitis C virus

    A new drug prevents the replication of the hepatitis C virus.

  2. Health & Medicine

    First Viruses, Now Tumors: AIDS drug shows promise against brain cancers

    A potential AIDS drug may also slow the growth of deadly brain tumors.

  3. A Shot at Pain Prevention: Nerve-healing protein relieves rats’ misery

    A chemical that spurs growth of nerve cells during fetal development may provide a new way to treat severe chronic pain that results from nerve damage.

  4. Health & Medicine

    Danger, danger, cry injured cells

    Damaged cells may release uric acid to rouse the immune system.

  5. Rats join the roster of clones

    Scientists have finally cloned the rat, setting the stage for the creation of genetically engineered rats that can be used to study many more diseases in humans.

  6. Health & Medicine

    Making the heart burn

    Burning chest pain during a heart attack may stem from a protein that also responds to chili peppers.

  7. Visionary Research

    Scientists are debating why primates evolved full color vision and whether that development led to a reduced sense of smell.

  8. Letting the Dog Genome Out: Poodle DNA compared with that of mice, people

    Biologists have deciphered the DNA sequence of a poodle, an accomplishment that may help researchers study more than 300 human diseases that also affect dogs.

  9. Estrogen Shock: Mollusk gene rewrites history of sex hormone

    Estrogen and similar hormones evolved much earlier than thought.

  10. The Body Electric

    An electric field inside an embryo may tell it whether to place an internal organ on its left or right side.

  11. Health & Medicine

    Paper Chased: Cancer-vaccine study is retracted

    Researchers in Germany have retracted a paper that reported promising results for a vaccine that elicited immune responses against cancer cells.

  12. A New Shot at Fighting Obesity

    In another sign that people in the United States are losing the battle of the bulging waistlines, the New York Times recently ran a front-page story on the legion of people resorting to drastic obesity-fighting operations such as gastric bypass surgery. “Doctors and hospitals across the country are scrambling to satisfy the booming demand for […]