Imagine you are a pediatrician working in an emergency department when a young female patient who was recently diagnosed as bipolar is brought in by her mother. She is visibly angry upon arrival, and her mother looks tired and distressed. When you enter the room, the young girl begins the interaction with foul language. She […]
With Disaster Comes Hope
Posted by Xin Liu | A Day in the Life, Perspectives in ResearchOn the afternoon of May 12, 2008, a magnitude-8 earthquake hit Sichuan province, a mountainous region in western China. Official figures stated that 69,197 were confirmed dead, including 68,636 in Sichuan province, and 374,176 injured, with 18,222 listed as missing. The earthquake left about 4.8 million people homeless,though the number could have been as high as […]
Mar 5, 2015
Cancer Immunotherapy: The Next Breakthrough Gains Footing
Posted by Paul Sirajuddin | Perspectives in ResearchWhat do faulty brakes on a car and cancer cells have in common? For one, cancer cells have found ways to evade checkpoints that the body’s cells use as brakes to stop them from dividing out of control. By this same analogy, the accelerator in a cancer cell is always pushed to the floor, and […]
Mar 5, 2015
How the Brain Navigates to a New Restaurant
Posted by Kevin Monk | Perspectives in ResearchImagine a new restaurant just opened downtown and you want to check it out. You hop on the bus and take it a few stops. Once you get off, you have no sense of where you are or how to get to your destination. You look around to collect your bearings: Camden Yards is to […]
Feb 26, 2015
Lessons from the Dr. Oz Senate Appearance
Posted by Arielle Medford | Perspectives in ResearchAs 2014 ended, Medscape released “The Year in Medicine 2014: News That Made a Difference.” Among the notable stories were the Dr. Oz Senate hearings, in which the celebrity doctor was censured for “perpetuating weight loss fraud.” He defended himself, saying he believed in his products, though still admitting the products’ claims were not backed […]
Feb 25, 2015
Scientists Discover Widespread Age-Associated ‘Fingerprints’ in the Human Brain
Posted by Alisa Mo | Perspectives in ResearchAn interdisciplinary team of scientists from the Lieber Institute and Johns Hopkins has discovered more than 50,000 regions of the genome that show different levels of activity in the brain across six stages of human development. Their report1, published online on Dec. 15 in Nature Neuroscience, highlights the complexity of genes associated with brain growth […]
Feb 25, 2015
New Mechanism of Protein Synthesis Linked to Alzheimer’s
Posted by Shannen Cravens | Perspectives in ResearchAnyone who has taken a biology or biochemistry class is familiar with the central dogma of the biological sciences, which describes the flow of genetic information. It dates back to Francis Crick in 1956 and can be simplified to the following concept: DNA encodes for RNA, and RNA encodes for proteins. A new study1 from […]
Feb 25, 2015
More Colds in the Cold?
Posted by Bree Yanagisawa | Perspectives in ResearchWhile we’ve all heard the tired warning to wear our coats outside so we don’t get sick, it’s fair to wonder how much validity there is to such reasoning. Are we really more likely to catch a cold in colder weather? Lucky for us, scientists at Yale are looking into it. Their recent article1, published […]
Feb 25, 2015
‘2014 Breakthrough of the Year’ Named by Science Magazine
Posted by Kirstie Keller | Perspectives in ResearchIn a year where scientists have turned back the clock on aging and designed robots to think as a group, choosing a standout success is a charge that is near impossible. However, when Science magazine released its annual short list of the most outstanding contributions to the scientific field, it ultimately made the difficult decision […]
Feb 20, 2015