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Have you ever wondered how your ears can pick up the faintest whisper yet also handle loud music without damage? Scientists at Rockefeller University have achieved a remarkable feat: they kept a tiny piece of cochlea alive and working outside the body, allowing them to witness the hearing process in unprecedented detail. First, a technological…
Women’s health has long been ignored by pharmaceutical research. Not only are they less often included in clinical trials, but many exclusive female conditions are either not or barely researched. One of those is menopause. A change that every woman will experience and that is characterised by a plethora of (unwelcome) symptoms: hot flashes, brain…
Many (if not most) clinical trials end up failing, but given the bias towards positive results sometimes the reasons for their not working remain unclear. Luckily, a team at Open Targets and EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) have analysed the reasons for aborted clinical trials mentioned in Clinicaltrials.gov, the open-source register for clinical trials worldwide,…
Pain is highly personal. What to some doesn’t even deserve the name for others can be unbereable. Now, we just discovered a diffence in pain sensation: men and women have different pain receptors. If you want to learn about what this means and what the research tells us, continue reading at MappingIgnorance.org
Amniotic fluid contains cells, cells shed by the growing fetus and which could be used to buld “mini organs” in vitro, as new study reports. What do we mean by “mini organs”? This so-called organoids are 3D cellular systems that aim to replicate the structure and function of real organs but at a smaller scale….
One of the biggest challenges of medical imaging technologies is actually resolving the structures of interest, be it a tumour, a lung or a blood vessel, without the “noise” from other bodily parts like skin or muscle. A new imaging technique allows for visualisation inside intact animals at higher resolution than ever before. A team…
Intermittent fasting, that is, eating only over certain time period during the day can have positive mental health effects, at least according to a recent study. Intermittent fasting for 16 hours a day, that is a 16:8 fasting paradigm, for five days a week during three months improved quality of life while decreasing the presence…
Clinical research has fundamentally discriminated women, assuming that they are nothing more than “small” men and therefore, drugs should work mostly the same if just adjusting the dose to their lower weight. However, this has been proven not to be the case. The physiology of the two sexes differs in several parameters, that is why…
Electrical stimulation of the spinal cord can help recover mobility in some paralysed patients. However, the mechanism underlying this partial recovery of function remains unknown. A recent human study has confirmed the involvement of a previously identified group of cells in mice, paving the way to targeted treatments. In a recently published study in Nature,…
Mostly, people think that an embryo can only (except in case of parthenogenesis) result from the sum of sperm and an egg. However, two research teams, one in Israel and another multinational collaboration have recently reported producing a synthetic mouse embryo from stem cells which lasted enough to have a brain and a beating heart….