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A just completed clinical trial of K.Vita (Betashot), a dietary treatment for children and adults with severe forms of epilepsy, found it was well tolerated and reduced seizures. The product was developed to offset the risks of the ketogenic diet, which mimics a fasting state by altering the metabolism to use body fat as the primary fuel source. Ketosis is when the body switches from carbohydrates to fat for body fuel.It has shown some success with drug-resistant epilepsies but the restrictive high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet can cause constipation, low blood sugar, and stomach problems. 

Alternative polyadenylation (APA) is an RNA processing mechanism that regulates gene expression by generating different ends on RNA transcripts of the same gene. Though it affects more than half of human genes, the significance of APA was poorly understood.
Now a new study by The Wistar Institute describes an important function of APA in allowing certain mRNAs to reach specific sites of protein synthesis and reveals that length, sequence and structural properties can determine the destination (and fate) of mRNAs within the cell.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, wealthier people had the money to stay home and order online. Not so for poor people, who instead made more trips to local dollar stores and small groceries to get their family's food.Why is that bad? It isn't at face value, supporting local businesses is an aspirational claim for many, but a group of academics claim that without equal incomes and equal access to buying in bulk, poor people were worse off when it comes to making healthy food choices. That is like arguing muffin in a local bodega is bad while a muffin in a Whole Foods is good, when experts know the Whole Foods version has far more calories. 

An unknown methane-producing process is likely at work in the hidden ocean beneath the icy shell of Saturn's moon Enceladus, suggests a new study published in Nature Astronomy by scientists at the University of Arizona and Paris Sciences&Lettres University.

In an observational study using data from the Veterans Health Administration for 2,344 U.S. veterans hospitalized with COVID-19, remdesivir treatment was associated with prolonged hospitalization but wasn't associated with improved survival. 

Adolescent girls and young women can and will use HIV prevention products with consistency, according to interim results of a study of two different methods: daily use of the antiretroviral (ARV) tablet Truvada® as oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and the monthly dapivirine vaginal ring, a new HIV prevention product currently under regulatory review in several countries.
To provide protection against HIV, both must be used consistently- daily, for oral PrEP, and for the ring, a full month at a time - which previous studies of these products found to be especially challenging for younger women.

There is a belief that Airbnb listings cause increased crime in residential neighborhoods - or at least annoying late-night parties which increase risk of crimes. However, a new paper suggests that while Airbnb listings can be linked to a reduction in the local social dynamics that prevent crime, it isn't the tourists committing the crimes. And it takes years, which means Airbnb listings may be a symptom rather than the cause.

A new paper has statistically linked inflammatory bowel disease, an umbrella term for chronic inflammation of the digestive tract, to processed foods. But because every food is processed - no one eats wheat that hasn't been milled - the term has now become "ultra-processed."

Raw food, from milk to meat, can obviously bring higher risk of bacteria. The raw milk fad in the US creates risk of illness orders of magnitude higher than milk that has been pasteurized to remove harmful bacteria.In Europe, the 'raw' dog food fad may be creating something even worse; multidrug-resistant bacteria identical to those found in hospital patients. Drug-resistant infections kill an estimated 700,000 people a year globally and, with the figure projected to rise to 10 million by 2050 if no action is taken, the World Health Organisation (WHO) classes antibiotic resistance as one of the greatest public health threats facing humanity. 

Like coronavirus, Hepatitis C was only discovered as unique a few decades ago, but in that time science took its 2 million new HCV infections every year, with an estimated 70 million carriers of the virus globally, and 400,000 deaths annually to finding a cure. Directly acting antivirals (DAAs) can now stop it and therefore prevent the liver cirrhosis and liver cancer that can develop. Next up, said Professor Sir Michael Houghton at the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology along with three other scientists for discovering it was distinct in 1989, is a vaccine.

Two approaches in development may lead to an inhalable COVID-19 vaccine that is scalable and can be transported and stored at room temperature.They'll be too late to help with the actual COVID-19 but since coronavirus constantly mutates, like the flu, and 2019 was the third coronavirus pandemic in the last 17 years, it could be valuable for the next iteration.One strategy employs modified bacteriophage particles that can be inhaled to deliver protection via the lungs to the immune system. The other delivers injectable adeno-associated virus-phage particles that directly encode protection against the virus in immune cells. They're only in rodents so far but they produced antibodies.

The first two COVID-19 vaccines authorized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) utilized mRNA technology previously unused in FDA-approved vaccines. One of its chief proponents bounced from research job to research job for low pay because government-controlled science funding prefers guaranteed success for each round of funding rather than the hit-but-we'll-mostly-miss basic research approach of the private sector.  mRNA-based vaccines provide instructions for the body to build and release foreign proteins, such as the spike protein in the case of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but prior to the pandemic government funding agencies believed mRNA was a waste of time. Now everyone will be rushing to advance mRNA but what is yet to be known; will the benefits last?