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Magazine
In the June 22 SN: New approaches in Lyme disease diagnostics, seafood shells get a second life, illegal emissions traced to China, Pluto’s icy volcano, how to walk like a sauropod, a World War II uranium cube mystery and more.
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News
Gut microbes might help elite athletes boost their physical performance
06/24/2019 - 11:00 Microbes, Biomedicine, MicrobiologyOne difference between elite athletes and the rest of us might be in what hangs out in their guts.
Microbes that flourished in the guts of some runners after a marathon boosted the time that lab mice ran on a treadmill, researchers report June 24 in Nature Medicine. These particular microbes seem to take lactate, pumped out by muscles during exercise, and turn it into a compound that may...
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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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News
Gut bacteria may change the way many drugs work in the body
06/03/2019 - 11:00 Microbiology, Biomedicine, HealthPrescribing the best medication may require going with a patient’s gut — or at least, the bacteria that live there.
Anecdotal reports have revealed that some gut-dwelling microbes chemically alter oral medications, affecting how well those drugs work (SN Online: 7/19/13). But the scope of this problem has remained unclear. Now, a sweeping survey of these interactions suggests that gut...
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News
How bacteria nearly killed by antibiotics can recover — and gain resistance
05/28/2019 - 06:00 Microbiology, Genetics, BiomedicineMostly dead bacteria can sometimes be resurrected as antibiotic-resistant cells.
A protein that pumps toxic chemicals out of E. coli bacterial cells can buy time for even nearly dead microbes to become antibiotic resistant. The protein, known as the AcrAB-TolC multidrug efflux pump, doesn’t work well enough to defeat antibiotics on its own. But it can move enough antibiotic molecules out...
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Feature
Measles erases the immune system’s memory
05/21/2019 - 06:00 Health, BiomedicineThe most iconic thing about measles is the rash — red, livid splotches that make infection painfully visible.
But that rash, and even the fever, coughing and watery, sore eyes, are all distractions from the virus’s real harm — an all-out attack on the immune system.
Measles silently wipes clean the immune system’s memory of past infections. In this way, the virus can cast a long...
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News
Vaccines may help bats fight white nose syndrome
05/17/2019 - 07:00 Animals, BiomedicineOral vaccines could give wild bats a better chance at surviving white nose syndrome, the fungal disease that has ravaged bat colonies in North America. In lab tests conducted on captured little brown bats, vaccination led to fewer infected bats developing lesions and more of the bats surviving, researchers report May 1 in Scientific Reports.
White nose syndrome, caused by the fungus...
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50 years ago, scientists tried to transplant part of a human eye
Transplants: Part of a whole eye —05/09/2019 - 07:00 BiomedicineAfter an attempted cornea transplant failed, ophthalmologists in Houston, Tex., tried a more daring experiment to restore the vision of 54-year-old John Madden…. They transplanted an entire eye from a donor who had died of a brain tumor.… [Later, the doctor who did the surgery] announced that only the front part of the donor’s eye had been...
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News
A lack of circular RNAs may trigger lupus
04/25/2019 - 11:00 Genetics, BiomedicineA lack of certain mysterious genetic molecules may spin the immune system out of control and lead to lupus.
People with lupus have lower than normal levels of circular RNAs, triggering an immune reaction meant to fight viruses, biochemist Lingling Chen of the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology and her colleagues discovered. Switching on the body’s virus-fighting...
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Feature
How an obscure sexually transmitted parasite tangos with the immune system
04/23/2019 - 06:00 BiomedicineFrances Mercer runs a fight club.
In one corner, the parasite Trichomonas vaginalis, which causes a widespread sexually transmitted infection that many people have never heard of. In the other corner are neutrophils, the immune system cells best equipped to take down the aggressor.
Watching the two battle it out, Mercer, an immunoparasitologist at California State Polytechnic...