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- Parent Category: Biology
- Category: Anatomy & Physiology
Can a retrofitted bathroom scale costing less than $100 save lives and improve the health of millions of Americans living with heart failure while cutting billions of dollars in annual health care spending?
A team led by Mozziyar Etemadi, MS, has been awarded $110,000to find out. Etemadi is an an MD/PhD student in the UCSF Medical Scientist Training Program through which he is pursuing a PhD in the UCSF/UCB Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering and working in the lab of School of Pharmacy faculty member Shuvo Roy, PhD.
Read more: Home Monitoring of Heart Failure via Web-Enabled Bathroom Scales
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- Parent Category: Biology
- Category: Zoology
Method cuts testing time from a day or more to less than an hour.
by Matthew Chin
Read more: UCLA engineers develop faster method to detect bacterial contamination in coastal waters
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- Parent Category: Biology
- Category: Cell & Molecular
Researchers develop novel strategy to probe 'genetic haystack'
by Mark Wheeler
In ongoing work to identify how genes interact with social environments to impact human health, UCLA researchers have discovered what they describe as a biochemical link between misery and death. In addition, they found a specific genetic variation in some individuals that seems to disconnect that link, rendering them more biologically resilient in the face of adversity.
Perhaps most important to science in the long term, Steven Cole, a member of the UCLA Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology and an associate professor of medicine in the division of hematology-oncology, and his colleagues have developed a unique strategy for finding and confirming gene–environment interactions to more efficiently probe what he calls the "genetic haystack."
Read more: UCLA study finds genetic link between misery and death
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- Parent Category: Biology
- Category: Anatomy & Physiology
Eric Kandel on how our brains manage data, and are changed by it
by Steve Bradt
“If you remember anything about this lecture, it’s because genes in your brain will be altered,” Noted neuroscientist Eric Kandel told those attending his Monday afternoon lecture at Harvard. The Columbia University professor, who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his studies on memory then said, “If you remember this tomorrow, or the next day, a week later, you will have a different brain than when you walked into this lecture.
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- Parent Category: Biology
- Category: Anatomy & Physiology
New Harvard research casts doubt on the old adage, “All you need to run is a pair of shoes.”
Scientists have found that people who run barefoot, or in minimal footwear, tend to avoid “heel-striking,” and instead land on the ball of the foot or the middle of the foot. In so doing, these runners use the architecture of the foot and leg and some clever Newtonian physics to avoid hurtful and potentially damaging impacts, equivalent to two to three times body weight, that shod heel-strikers repeatedly experience.
Read more: Barefoot Running Easier on Feet than Running Shoes
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- Parent Category: Biology
- Category: Cell & Molecular
Scientists have long pondered the seeming contradiction that taking broad-spectrum antibiotics over a long period of time can lead to severe secondary bacterial infections. Now researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine may have figured out why.
The investigators show that "good" bacteria in the gut keep the immune system primed to more effectively fight infection from invading pathogenic bacteria. Altering the intricate dynamic between resident and foreign bacteria – via antibiotics, for example – compromises an animal’s immune response, specifically, the function of white blood cells called neutrophils.