Humans
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Health & Medicine
Shuttling medicines via blood cells
Researchers have developed a way of encapsulating drugs in red blood cells, which can be used to deliver low doses of anti-inflammatory drugs to cystic fibrosis patients.
- Health & Medicine
Standing Up to Gravity
Studies in space can help physicians better understand a disorder in which patients get faint or dizzy while standing.
- Humans
Solar series wins award for Science News
The Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society has given its 2002 popular writing award to Ron Cowen and Sid Perkins for a two-part series on cyclic variations in the sun's activity.
- Health & Medicine
Efficient Germ: Human body boosts power of cholera microbe
Some genes in the cholera-causing bacterium Vibrio cholerae are activated and others are silenced when the microbe passes through the human gut, changes that make the bacterium more virulent.
- Health & Medicine
Transplant Triumph: Cloned cow kidneys thrive for months
Cow kidneys and other tissue made by cloning ward off immune rejection after transplantation into cows.
- Health & Medicine
Dieting woes tied to hunger hormone
A rise in the appetite-enhancing hormone ghrelin after weight loss may explain why dieters regain pounds.
- Health & Medicine
Arthritis drug fights Crohn’s disease
The inflammation-fighting drug infliximab can hold off the painful symptoms of Crohn's disease for as long as a year in many patients.
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- Health & Medicine
Learning from leprosy’s nerve damage
The bacterium that causes leprosy directly damages a protective sheathing around many nerve cells.
- Health & Medicine
What Activates AIDS?
New studies suggest that a natural process called immune activation—the signaling that alerts immune cells of foreign invaders—plays a key role in explaining why infection with the human immunodeficiency virus progresses to AIDS more quickly in some people than in others.
- Health & Medicine
Sickening Food
If food that was going to leave you with gut-wrenching cramps — or more — tasted sickening, few people would indulge. The problem, of course, is that sickening food can taste quite scrumptious. Foods that look, smell, and taste yummy can still harbor disease-causing pathogens. Mead et al./Emerging Infectious Diseases Indeed, when the hour of […]
- Health & Medicine
Eat Broccoli, Beat Bacteria: Plant compound kills microbe behind ulcers and a cancer
A chemical abundant in broccoli and certain other vegetables kills ulcer-causing Helicobacter pylori bacteria in the laboratory and inhibits stomach cancer in mice.
