Article in the Sunday NYT about checkpoint inhibitors, harnessing the body's immune system against cancer. Checkpoints have to do with the progression of a cell from one stage of cell division to another, aiding in the proliferation of a cancer.Bristol-Myers Squibb markets two checkpoint inhibitors.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160730154504.htm From Science Daily, a report about a collaboration between Duke and the Singapore Genome Institute and the National Neuroscience Institute that has grown human mini midbrains in a dish. This research should help Parkinson's Disease victims.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/15/heel-pain-treatment/?_r=0 Here is a link to Ask Well, the NYT wellness blog about an article in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports describing an exercise that is effective against plantar fasciitis, an irritation of the connective tissue at the bottom of the foot, which, let me tell you, can cause extreme pain upon walking and even standing. (Yes, that is a run-on sentence.) This will keep you off antiinflammatories like ibuprofen or cortisone.
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/46688/title/Mystery-Mechanisms/ An article from the New Scientist, about commonly used drugs for which the mechanism of action is unknown.
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/46651/title/Humans-Never-Stopped-Evolving/ From the New Scientist, an article about natural selection, the mechanism of evolution, by a paleontologist at the U of Wisconsin-Madison describing recent evolutionary changes. Published research done on blood typing and lactose digestion is cited.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/junk-dna-tells-mice-and-snakes-how-grow-backbone From Science magazine an amazing article about how snakes and mice "know" to grow backbones. As published in Developmental Cell, researchers at the Gulbenkian Institute studied the interaction between the gene GDF11 and second gene OCT4 which they theorized was important for animals to grow the proper number of vertebrae. But what they found was that the noncoding or "junk" DNA is different in mice, humans and snakes and that it is what actually regulates the number of vertebrae formed by slowing down OCT4.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/science/scientists-puzzle-over-a-biological-mystery-the-female-orgasm.html?_r=0 From Carl Zimmer and the NYT, an article about the female orgasm and its evolutionary significance. In the J of Experimental Zoology, the authors posit that the advent of the female orgasm in mammals 150 million years ago served to release eggs to be fertilized after sex. Many hypotheses have been put forward including that the orgasm increases the chance that a woman's eggs are fertilized by an attractive male.
http://www.nature.com/news/women-in-physics-face-big-hurdles-still-1.20349 From Nature News a commentary about the difficulties of women in physics.
http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2016/08/creationists-ev.html From the blog, "The Panda's Thumb", an article about the "struggles" of creationists to explain genetic diversity. Creationists have to deal with genetic diversity as represented (in their minds) by the ark.I am not familiar with many of the arguments of the creationists but this writer describes their view of the multitude of species as a deck of playing cards that is shuffled and dealt and cut, continually limiting the population to a smaller subset of the original deck. (Some of this is a direct quote.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/04/health/dust-asthma-children.html?_r=0
An article in the NYT about research published in the NE Journal of Medicine about farm dirt as a potential cure for asthma. The Amish and people raised on farms rarely get asthma. The study was small but the result were compelling: a comparison of Amish and Hutterite children showed that the Amish had more neutrophils (part of the innate immune system) than the Hutterites.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/an-enemy-in-our-midst-maryland-tries-to-fight-invasive-plant-species/2016/07/28/ac0f0774-4e8d-11e6-aa14-e0c1087f7583_story.html An article in the Washington Post about invasive species.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/07/new-antibiotic-found-human-nose This is an article from Science magazine about a new antibiotic found in the human nose. As reported in the Euroscience Open Forum, and in Nature magazine, S. lugdunensis bacterium, found in nasal secretions, produces a compound that eliminates MRSA.
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