Pain is highly personal. What to some doesn’t even deserve the name, for others can be unbereable. Now, we just discovered a difference in how we feel it: men and women have different pain receptors. Recent research has demonstrated in rodents and, importantly, primates including humans, that there are sex differences in pain receptors, also […]
One of the things I mostly hated in school was having to practise my calligraphy skills, I found it monotonous and uninspiring. However, despite not having served to improve my handwriting, it may have helped me fixate new information during my studies, as new research points towards handwriting being better than typing for learning and […]
Amniotic fluid contains cells, cells shed by the growing fetus and which could be used to build “mini organs” in vitro, as a 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 […]
Roundworms are the most commonly used animal model to investigate aging and methods to increase the lifespan such as intermittent fasting. Latest research indicates that jumping genes could be another target for interventions aiming towards expanding the lifespan. What are jumping genes? Also called transposons, are movable stretches of DNA of possible viral origin that […]
Source: Zhang et al. (2023) Despite their importance in our daily lives, we do not give much importance to our hands or feet, and even less at how they came to be. Even if roughly known, the process of human limb development had never been observed at single cell level resolution. Recently, Sarah Teichmann and […]
To eat, a cell needs to carry its main nutrients (sugars, lipids, and peptides –pieces of proteins–) across the cell membrane. To do so, it has a number of molecular transporters. Interestingly, although sugar transporters are highly specific to the type of sugar they transport, peptide transporters are not picky at all. This promiscuity has […]
Biology • Biomedicine • Medicine • Pharmacy
One of the biggest health threats in our current society is not related to a virus, not even to diabetes or cardiovascular disease, but to antimicrobial resistance. In fact, over 5 million deaths per year are associated with resistant bacteria, of which nearly 1.3 million deaths per year are directly attributable to antimicrobial resistance. This […]
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 […]
Music is not only a pleasure for our brains, it seems that learning it at an old age can help prevent grey matter loss. This non-medicinal intervention would be a very interesting way of delaying the onset of dementia and loss of cognitive abilities associated with ageing. Recently, a team of researchers recruited a group […]
Biochemistry • Biomedicine • Health • Medicine • Neuroscience
Recent research has demonstrated that obesity impairs the mechanisms that allow our brains to realize when our stomachs are full and that these changes are maintained despite dieting, giving insights into why it is difficult for obese people to avoid excessive eating and why there is often a yo-yo effect after dieting. It has been […]