Send questions about the office, money, careers and work-life balance to workfriend@nytimes.com. Include your name and location, even if you want them withheld. Letters may be edited. Capital Punisher I work at a nonprofit, where we are passionate about our jobs. Execs recently hired a new head of human resources. Her first act: Change the…
Bunched on the kitchen counter, the bananas glowered. “Eat me, drink me, suck my juices,” they taunted, like the tempting fruit in Christina Rossetti’s kinky poem “Goblin Market.” I was flummoxed since I loathe the mushy texture of bananas. (Sorry, Chiquita!) But how else could I ingest more of the magnesium I need in order…
A man in his mid-20s regularly roams the streets of my small town in the middle of the night. He looks angry and doesn’t communicate clearly. Not everyone living in the area knows him. But the police do. “His father reached out to us,” said Sgt. Adrian Acevedo of the South Orange, N.J., police department,…
MADISON – New research by University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists reveals how a cellular filament helps neural stem cells clear damaged and clumped proteins, an important step in eventually producing new neurons. The work provides a new cellular target for interventions that could boost neuron production when it’s needed most, such as after brain injuries. And…
Scientists have detected that a previously overlooked gene behavior could potentially lead to a new way to diagnose Alzheimer’s earlier. Published in the journal Epigenetics, an international research team’s findings – discovered in mice and confirmed in human samples – suggest that the gene Presenilin1 (PSEN1) should be monitored as a ‘biomarker’: to see what…
Liberia was the epicenter of a high-profile Ebola outbreak in 2014-15, which led to more than 10,000 deaths in West Africa. But for all the devastation the illness caused, it could have been worse without an innovative, volunteer-based outreach program Liberia’s government deployed in late 2014. Now, a study co-authored by an MIT professor shows…
For the 250,000 Canadians living with type 1 diabetes, the days of desperately trying to keep their blood sugar stable are coming to an end. A team of researchers at McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine is working to optimize an artificial pancreas with the ability to minimize the glucose highs and lows that diminish quality…
Philadelphia, February 27, 2020–Researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have developed a novel computational algorithm to track the epidemiology of pediatric sepsis, allowing for the collection of more accurate data about outcomes and incidence of the condition over time, which is essential to the improvement of care. The tool was described in a paper…
When disease epidemics and outbreaks occur, conspiracy theories often emerge that compete with the information provided by public health officials. A Dartmouth-led study in Science Advances finds that information used to counter myths about Zika in Brazil not only failed to reduce misperceptions but also reduced the accuracy of people’s other beliefs about the disease.…
CLEVELAND — According to a new study published Feb. 25 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, abbreviated breast magnetic resonance imaging (also known as “Fast Breast MRI”) detected significantly more cancers than digital breast tomosynthesis (3-D mammography) in average-risk women with dense breast tissue. The study compared Fast Breast MRI, which is a…