When Renee Seman learned she had Stage 4 breast cancer in 2014, she set a goal for herself: to use her remaining time to run marathons. Six of them, in fact, in New York, Chicago, Boston, Berlin, Tokyo and London. Together, they constitute the Abbott World Marathon Majors, a collection of the most distinguished marathons…
I am wondering how the spermicides on condoms affect my vagina. Is there a condom that is more vagina friendly? — Dominique McGrady, Comox, Canada [Have a question about women’s health? Ask Dr. Gunter yourself.] Short Take Spermicide can have negative effects on the vagina, and — maybe surprisingly — it doesn’t increase how well…
For most of my adult life, every winter when awards season rolled around I would get primed and ready to have an epic night. Not because I was an Oscar-nominated ingénue about to walk the red carpet in Valentino couture and Bulgari earrings, but because my mom’s red carpet commentary was the stuff of legend.…
A new synthetic biology toolkit developed at Northwestern University will help researchers design mammalian cells with new functionalities. The toolkit, called the Composable Mammalian Elements of Transcription (COMET), includes an ensemble of synthetic transcription factors and promoters that enable the design and tuning of gene expression programs in a way not previously possible. The result…
February 7, 2020 – Pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (PCVs) have been highly effective in reducing pneumonia and other invasive infections caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria. But rates of meningitis have shown little change, as pneumococcal strains not targeted by PCVs emerge as more important causes of meningitis, reports a paper in The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal,…
Visual acuity–the ability to discern letters, numbers, and objects from a distance–is essential for many tasks, from recognizing a friend across a room to driving a car. Researchers previously assumed that visual acuity was primarily determined by the optics of the eye and the anatomy of the retina. Now, researchers from the University of Rochester–including…
LOWELL, Mass. – A business incubator working to improve the lives of patients with heart, lung, blood and sleep disorders is expanding its reach to the next generation of pioneering biotech and medical-device entrepreneurs. Heart, lung and blood diseases account for 41 percent of deaths in the United States and lead to more than $400…
Few cannabis consumers understand what the THC numbers on packages of cannabis edibles really mean, according to a new University of Waterloo study. The study, which surveyed nearly 1,000 Canadians aged 16 to 30, found that most consumers could not identify whether a cannabis edible contained ‘low’ or ‘high’ levels of THC based on the…
NORMAN, OKLA. – An interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Oklahoma has been awarded a $730,000 grant from NASA to better understand emerging infectious disease threats in the region of Central Asia, including the 2019 novel coronavirus that is spreading from China. The research team will study coronavirus and other disease outbreaks that…
Rebecca Sutter, Assistant Professor, School of Nursing, College of Health and Human Services (CHHS), and Allison Evans Cuellar, Professor, Health Administration and Policy, CHHS, are implementing and evaluating the effectiveness of a Mobile Medication Assisted Therapy (MAT) Program in the Prince William Health District that will expand capacity for opioid use disorder support and services.…