The flu vaccine remains the best proactive way to protect yourself and your loved ones from the influenza virus. But there’s now a new weapon available against the nasty disease. On Thursday, the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. announced their approval of a new antiviral treatment for the flu, said to be the first drug of its kind.
Scientists across the world are working together to make the most detailed map of the human body — one that will show how the tissues and organs of the body function and interact with one another on a cellular level.
Scientists in the UK and Sweden believe they’ve come across an unprecedented advance in Alzheimer’s disease research: A method of developing new drugs that can target the roots of the fatal disease in a way that previous attempts couldn’t. But while the latest published work is genuinely intriguing, outside experts are worried that the researchers’ claims to the public are too grandiose.
Getting an early ultrasound to figure out when your child will be born has become part and parcel of becoming a new mum in countries such as Australia. For many women living in countries with poor-quality healthcare, however, ultrasounds are rarely available or too costly to afford. But a new study published by Science this week suggests there might someday be an easier, cheaper way to pin down the due date: A blood test.
Two years ago, a consortium of scientists, lawyers, and entrepreneurs announced a plan to synthesise an artificial human genome from scratch – an extremely ambitious endeavour that’s struggled to secure funding. Project organisers have now disclosed details of a scaled-down version of the venture, but with a goal that’s still quite audacious: creating human cells that are invulnerable to infections.
Ever since 2012, when researchers first discovered that bacterial immune systems could be hijacked to edit DNA in living creatures, CRISPR has been hailed as a maker of revolutions. This was the year that prediction felt like it was starting to come true.
An article at MIT Technology Review says some early work at Microsoft Research is looking at how to encode documents in DNA. The aim is to have some sort of working model by the end of this decade, with the tagline “Your Storage with DNA” being bandied about.
In the latest twist in the story of STAP cells, a new kind of stem cell described in two Nature papers in January, a scientist is live-blogging his latest attempt to generate the cells.
In the late 1980s, scientists at Osaka University in Japan noticed unusual repeated DNA sequences next to a gene they were studying in a common bacterium. They mentioned them in the final paragraph of a paper: “The biological significance of these sequences is not known.”
London: In experiments that could open a new era in stem cell biology, scientists have found a simple way to reprogram mature animal cells back into an embryonic-like state that allows them to generate many types of tissue.