A test developed by Berkeley Lab scientists can quickly and easily detect whether sperm cells are carrying chromosomal defects, an advance that will help men who have undergone cancer treatment father healthy children.
In lab study, nanoparticle shows promising results for treating severe allergies
January 15, 2021UCLA
For about 1 in 13 children in the U.S., usually harmless foodstuffs such as milk, eggs and peanuts can send the body’s natural defenses into overdrive.
Symptoms of food allergies can vary widely, but at worst, a systemwide allergic response can lead to anaphylaxis, a life-threatening condition characterized by a sudden drop in blood pressure and difficulty breathing.
Although there are now some preventive measures for food-induced anaphylaxis, there are not yet any long-lasting solutions treatments capable of locking the immune system into a state of tolerance, so that it doesn’t respond to allergens.
A new paper claims that people vaping instead of smoking are putting their hearts at risk but their study does not show that. Instead, they mixed chemicals in Petri dishes with heart cells and used mice. Both of those are fine exploratory experiments but they are scientifically invalid to make the conclusions the authors make in their press release.
At a time when distrust of journalism and science has increased due to increased efforts at politicization of, well, everything, it is important that the public be shown the difference between clinically relevant work and papers that claim relevance while being nothing of the kind. Mice are not little people. No drug can get into the approval cycle at the US Food and Drug Administration if it only studied them or cells in dishes.
A genomic study of skin cells shows that there’s a wide range in the normal number of somatic mutations that arise from exposure to UV light and that these mutations are independent of age. The work, which was published today (January 14) in
, also confirms that darker skin is more protected from UV-related mutations something that scientists have long suspected.
Researchers “have this idea that the pigment protects you from the DNA damage that sunlight causes, and that’s something they really nicely show,” says Ruben van Boxtel, a cancer biologist at the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology in the Netherlands who did not participate in the work. Previous sequencing efforts have mostly been done in Caucasians, he adds, but these authors include samples from people with darker skin.