by Ernie Mundell Of course grief can ravage your mind, but science shows it can also weaken your body, leaving you open to illness. “As humans, we are strongly motivated to seek out social bonds that are warm, dependable, friendly and supportive,” explained George Slavich. He directs the Laboratory for Stress Assessment and Research at...
by Weizmann Institute of Science Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain While physicists continue to argue about whether time is indeed an illusion, as Albert Einstein claimed, biologists have no doubt about its significance for understanding life as a dynamic system. In recent years, they have been gaining an increasingly deeper understanding of complex biological systems using tools...
Illustration: Keith NegleyAmerica’s dirty divide Heat is the number one cause of weather-related deaths in the US. What happens to our bodies when we overheat?by Aliya Uteuova with illustrations by Keith NegleySupported by About this contentThu 17 Aug 2023 06.00 EDT Hundreds of millions of people across the globe are living amid unprecedented temperatures, with July becoming...
Written by Angela Dunn, MD, MPH | Reviewed by Katie E. Golden, MDUpdated on July 17, 2023 Key takeaways: Drinking too much water can be dangerous when it leads to low sodium levels in the blood. This is called hyponatremia, and severe cases can be life-threatening. This is rarely a problem for healthy people. But...
by Cara Murez, HealthDay Reporter Giving up cigarettes can be excruciating, with cravings and withdrawal symptoms lingering for weeks, especially if you aren’t strongly motivated. Yet, just minutes after that first smoke-free breath, your body starts to change for the better. And with all the healthy breaths you take in the weeks and months that...
by Rob Poole, The Conversation Opioids can cause severe constipation. Credit: Tomas Nevesely/Shutterstock In his new autobiography, Matthew Perry reveals that his colon burst as a result of his addiction to opioid painkillers. The 53-year-old actor, who played Chandler Bing in Friends, was in a coma for two weeks following the incident and had to wear a...
by Claudia Coons, UC Davis RNA-Seq variant calling identified a psoriasis-associated SNP in 3′ UTR of the PCSK9 gene. (A) SNP calling was performed on 2 separate psoriasis RNA-Seq data sets (12, 14), and ORs were calculated using the allele counting method. Fisher’s exact test was performed to calculate P values. Names of analyzed data sets...
by Alex Viveros, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard Small intestine at steady state. Credit: National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health Trillions of bacteria and other microbes thrive in our gut microbiomes, and over the last decade, scientists have become increasingly aware of the vital role that they play in creating...
New research provides insight into how an important class of molecules are created and moved in human cells. For years, scientists knew that mitochondria – specialized structures inside cells in the body that are essential for respiration and energy production – were involved in the assembly and movement of iron-sulfur cofactors, some of the essential compounds...
A research team led by Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine scientist Parameswaran Ramakrishnan is developing a drug to reduce the number of insulin injections needed by children with type 1 diabetes. Generally, people with diabetes either don’t produce enough insulin or can’t sufficiently use the insulin their bodies make, resulting in too much blood sugar...
