Medicine

Since the beginning of the current outbreak last May, Ebola has been a near daily news story.  Most articles have focused on the public health aspect of the disease in terms of its spread throughout West Africa, attempts to contain it, and efforts to set…

Retinal pigment epithelial cells made from stem cells / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 An important milestone in the field of regenerative biology has been reached: earlier this month a Japanese patient became the first person to receive a tissue transplant derived…

More than 10 million women in the United States (almost 20% of women between the ages of 15 and 44) take birth control pills as a means of contraception []. In 2013, more than 2.9 million American women were living with breast cancer, almost 300,000…

 Let’s consider a virus like Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). If we want to study it in a lab setting, we need an animal model, that is a living entity that we can infect and observe for a certain period of time. We cannot infect humans for obvious…

Image credit: Wikipedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AClassic_roll.jpg A study published last month suggests that the potential value of cinnamon may go far beyond tickling our taste buds. The research group reports that cinnamon was…

Presented by Yuly Fuentes-Medel Model organism systems amenable to genetic manipulation have made seminal contributions to many aspects of modern science. These organisms with small brains have inspired the discoveries of big ideas in such complex…

Unfortunately, this concept isn't new – several other groups have generated similar pigs

Presented by Chris Garris Did you know that the average human gut is home to over 100 trillion microorganisms? These numbers are not from a diseased state, but rather are representative of a normal, healthy human gut. Clearly, this suggests that the…

Presented by Laura Klein Many of us are familiar with milk as a food in our supermarket aisles, whether as a beverage that pairs well with cookies, or as the starting ingredient for cheese and yogurt. But milk is also part of what makes us mammals, a…

Mitochondria provide the energy for cells, but unlike DNA, they are only inherited from our mothers through their eggs. Defective mitochondria cause diseases which are incurable in adulthood. However, they are treatable before conception with…