Freelance Science Writer
The next time you have a suspicious-looking mole on your back, your dermatologist may be able to skip the scalpel and instead scan the spot with a noninvasive “virtual biopsy” to determine whether it contains any cancerous cells. Similarly, surgeons trying to determine whether they have removed all of a breast tumor may eventually rely …
By analyzing millions of small genetic differences across a person’s genome, researchers can calculate a polygenic risk score to estimate someone’s lifetime odds of developing a certain disease. Over the past decade, scientists have developed these risk scores for dozens of diseases, including heart disease, kidney disease, diabetes, and cancer, with the hope that patients …
Drifting at sea, isolated on a space station, or stuck in a war zone, engineers trying to build new things or patch together a repair are often constrained by the materials they have at hand. But what if they had one single polymer that they could coax into anything from a rubber band-like material or …
A team led by Stanford Medicine analyzed thousands of genomes, including those newly sequenced from 204 skeletons, to gain insight into how and where people moved during the Roman Empire. Read at Stanford Medicine website.
In Patients with Long COVID, Immune Cells Don’t Follow the Rules Scientists at Gladstone Institutes and UC San Francisco analyzed immune cells in people with and without long COVID, making significant discoveries that will help answer questions about what causes the condition and how to treat it Read at Gladstone.org
The technique, called Slide-tags, allows scientists to map the location of cells within tissues in standard single-cell experiments. Read at Broad Institute.
Stanford Medicine researchers find that ibogaine, a plant-based psychoactive compound, safely led to improvements in depression, anxiety and functioning among veterans with traumatic brain injuries. Read at Stanford Medicine News Center.
A new understanding of oobleck-like fluids contributes to smart material design. UChicago research on the science behind non-Newtonian fluids – which change viscosity under under stress among other properties – could lead to applications ranging from clump-free paint to wearable protective gear. Read at University of Chicago.