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Magazine
In the July 6 SN: Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, stone tool dates face scrutiny, ocean plastic goes deep, records of Inca taxation, erosion spurred plate tectonics and more.
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Feature
New approaches may help solve the Lyme disease diagnosis dilemma
06/23/2019 - 07:00 Biomedicine, Microbes, Immune ScienceIn 2005, Rachel Straub was a college student returning home from a three-week medical service mission in Central America. Soon after, she suffered a brutal case of the flu. Or so she thought.
“We were staying in orphanages,” she says of her trip to Costa Rica and Nicaragua. “There were bugs everywhere. I remember going to the bathroom and the sinks would be solid bugs.” She plucked at...
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Editor's Note
Science hasn’t managed to span the diagnosis gap
06/17/2019 - 07:00 Science & Society, Biomedicine, Immune ScienceStar Trek’s Dr. McCoy had no problem finding out what ailed his patients. He simply waved a handheld scanner over them, and the tricorder spat out a diagnosis — even if the patient was a Romulan.
Earthbound diagnostics haven’t yet measured up to the extragalactic version, alas. Go to the doctor, and it’s likely to take a variety of tests to come up with a diagnosis. And even then,...
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Editor's Note
Resurgence of measles is a tale as old as human history
Late last year, researchers reported a discovery from a 5,000-year-old mass grave in Sweden: DNA from the bacterium that causes plague. The people in that grave were probably felled by an epidemic that spread via trade routes from southeastern Europe and contributed to sharp population declines across the continent (SN: 1/19/19, p. 12), a precursor to the Black Death that wiped out up...05/29/2019 - 15:28 Health, Immune Science, Science & Society -
Feature
How the battle against measles varies around the world
05/21/2019 - 06:00 Science & Society, Immune Science, HealthThe World Health Organization’s goal was lofty but achievable: eliminate measles from five of the world’s six regions by 2020. But recent outbreaks — even in places where elimination had been achieved — are making that goal a distant dream.
In the first four months of 2019, 179 countries reported 168,193 cases of measles. That’s almost 117,000 more cases reported during the same period...
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News
How allergens in pollen help plants do more than make you sneeze
05/19/2019 - 08:00 Health, Plants, Immune Science“Are plants trying to kill us?” allergy sufferers often ask Deborah Devis.
A plant molecular geneticist at the University of Adelaide’s Waite campus in Australia, Devis should know the answer better than most. She is chugging through the last few months of a Ph.D. that involves predicting how grasses use pollen proteins that make people sneeze, wheeze and weep for days on end.
What...
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Reviews & Previews
‘An Elegant Defense’ explores the immune system’s softer side
04/23/2019 - 08:00 Immune Science, History of ScienceAn Elegant DefenseMatt RichtelWilliam Morrow, $28.99
We like to think of the immune system as our own personal military, ready to attack foreign invaders. Slice your finger, and immune cells rush in to destroy rogue pathogens.
But it’s misleading to think of the immune system as solely a war machine. It must also keep the peace, assessing each threat and, in many cases,...
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News
How helpful gut microbes send signals that they are friends, not foes
03/07/2019 - 14:26 Cells, Immune Science, MicrobiologySome gut bacteria really put the hooks into their host — but in a good way. Observations in mice show that certain filamentous microbes use a hooklike appendage to send messages that researchers believe are aimed at preventing immune cells from attacking the microbes.
The finding, reported in the March 8 Science, could help explain how an immune system distinguishes friendly gut bacteria...
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News
Eating a lot of fiber could improve some cancer treatments
03/01/2019 - 12:32 Microbiology, Cancer, Immune ScienceWhat you eat can affect how well immune therapies work against cancer. High-fiber diets may change gut microbes and make these therapies more effective, but taking probiotics could do the opposite.
Researchers looked at people with melanoma skin cancer who were getting a kind of immune therapy called PD-1 blockade or checkpoint inhibition (SN: 10/27/18, p. 16). Those who ate a high-fiber...
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Feature
With its burning grip, shingles can do lasting damage
02/26/2019 - 09:00 Health, Clinical Trials, Neuroscience, Immune ScienceAt age 37, Hope Hartman developed a painful, burning rash in her right ear, in the part “you would clean with a Q-tip,” the Denver resident says. The pain got so bad she went to a local emergency room, where the staff was flummoxed. Hartman was admitted to the hospital, where she started to lose sensation on the right side of her face.
During that 2013 health crisis, Hartman’s husband,...
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News in Brief
In some cases, getting dengue may protect against Zika
02/07/2019 - 14:00 Health, Immune SciencePrevious infections with dengue virus may have protected some people in an urban slum in Brazil from getting Zika.
In a study of more than 1,400 people in the Pau da Lima area of Salvador, those with higher levels of antibodies against a particular dengue virus protein were at lower risk of contracting Zika, researchers report in the Feb. 8 Science. “The higher the antibody, the higher...