News Articles

Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), which emerged in humans last year in the Saudi Arabian peninsula, causes severe respiratory disease, with a mortality rate of 35 percent. No specific therapy is currently available. 
Passive immunization, a procedure where you inject a former patient's antibodies into a new patient to fight the disease, has been used in the past, including last year in a small number of cases of Ebola, but in the case of MERS, few former patients are available to donate antibodies. Additionally, their antibody titers are often too low, and many former patients are not healthy enough to donate.

It's supposed to help keep our bodies healthy in stressful situations. But the constant stress of our everyday lives means we're getting overexposed to cortisol. Raychelle Burks, Ph.D., explains why too much cortisol is bad for you in the latest episode of the Reactions series Get To Know A Molecule.

Display screens are everywhere but convenience needs are going up, not down, and people are wanting to break free of rigid monitors. The race is on to develop computer displays that can be easily rolled up and put away rather than requiring a flat surface for storage and transportation.A new study suggests that a novel DNA-peptide structure can be used to produce thin, transparent, and flexible screens. The research, conducted researchers at Tel Aviv University, harnesses bionanotechnology to emit a full range of colors in one pliable pixel layer, as opposed to the several rigid layers that constitute today's screens.

Warming winters may be linked to mountain pine beetle outbreaks in the coldest areas of the western United States but the causes are multi-faceted, according to a new U.S. Forest Service study.

A new epidemiology paper on the effects of sedentary or 'sitting' time on diabetes risk matched the curves of television watching and obesity and correlated each hour spent watching TV daily with a 3.4 percent greater risk of developing diabetes.

There may be unconscious race and social class biases in trauma and acute-care clinicians, according to a survey, but they did not affects clinical decisions finds an analysis in JAMA Surgery.

New research shows bacteria can use tiny magnetic particles to effectively create a 'natural battery.' The bacteria can load electrons onto and discharge electrons from microscopic particles of magnetite. This discovery holds out the potential of using this mechanism to help clean up environmental pollution, and other bioengineering applications. 
Researchers from the University of Tübingen, the University of Manchester, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, USA, incubated the soil and water dwelling purple bacteria Rhodopseudomonas palustris with magnetite and controlled the amount of light the cultures were exposed to.

Deforestation could impact global food production by triggering changes in local climate, according to research on albedo (the amount of the sun's radiation reflected from Earth's surface) and evapotranspiration (the transport of water into the atmosphere from soil, vegetation, and other surfaces) as the primary drivers of changes in local temperature.

A microstimulator and geomagnetic compass attached to the brains of blind rats allows them to spontaneously learn to use new information about their location and navigate through a maze nearly as well as normally sighted rats. The findings show the incredible flexibility of the mammalian brain but also suggest that a similar kind of neuroprosthesis could help blind people walk freely through the world.

In a study of more than 6,500 pairs of twins, researchers found that more than half of the differences between pupils performance on the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) can be explained by differences in genetics.The research found that although IQ showed the strongest relationship with exam scores other genetically influenced traits such as personality and behavior also explained individual differences in achievement. Intelligence accounted for more of the heritability of GCSE results than any other single domain but the joint contribution of pupils' self-belief, health, behavior problems, personality, well-being, and perceptions of home and school, collectively accounted for the same amount again.

The scientific community is facing a 'pollution problem' in academic publishing, one that poses a serious threat to the "trustworthiness, utility, and value of science and medicine," according to Arthur L. Caplan, PhD, director of the Division of Medical Ethics in the Department of Population Health at NYU Langone Medical Center.

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