KETURA, Israel — The plump, golden-brown dates hanging in a bunch just above the sandy soil were finally ready to pick. They had been slowly ripening in the desert heat for months. But the young tree on which they grew had a much more ancient history — sprouting from a 2,000-year-old seed retrieved from an…
Selecting treatments according to genetic differences could help children and teenagers with asthma, according to research presented at the European Respiratory Society International Congress. [1] The trial, which compares patients treated according to small genetic differences with patients treated according to existing guidelines, is the first of its kind in children and teenagers. Researchers say…
Probiotics may help children and adolescents with obesity lose weight when taken alongside a calorie-controlled diet, according to a study being presented at e-ECE 2020. The study found that obese children who were put on a calorie-restricted diet and given probiotics Bifidobacterium breve BR03 and Bifidobacterium breve B632, lost more weight and had improved insulin…
Free, circulating vitamin D levels in the blood may be a better predictor of future health risks in aging men, according to a study being presented at e-ECE 2020. These data suggest the free, precursor form of vitamin D found circulating in the bloodstream is a more accurate predictor of future health and disease risk,…
WASHINGTON — Infants and young children have brains with a superpower, of sorts, say Georgetown University Medical Center neuroscientists. Whereas adults process most discrete neural tasks in specific areas in one or the other of their brain’s two hemispheres, youngsters use both the right and left hemispheres to do the same task. The finding suggests…
BOSTON – For many individuals with different types of cancer, immune checkpoint inhibitors can effectively boost their immune system to fight their disease, but not all patients benefit from these medications. Now a team led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) has developed an approach to help identify potential…
Japan and the U.S. have seen an increase in percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) procedures, which is driven primarily by a rise in elective PCIs in Japan compared to non-elective in the U.S., according to a study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Since adoption of large-scale PCI trial results vary internationally, the…
In a significant advance, UC San Francisco Weill Institute for Neurosciences researchers working towards a brain-controlled prosthetic limb have shown that machine learning techniques helped an individual with paralysis learn to control a computer cursor using their brain activity without requiring extensive daily retraining, which has been a requirement of all past brain-computer interface (BCI) efforts. “The…
CINCINNATI – As the world scrambles to control the growing COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, new research in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology shows viruses also play a key evolutionary role in mammals’ ability to reproduce and survive. Scientists in the Cincinnati Children’s Perinatal Institute and at Azabu University in Japan obtained their data by studying laboratory…
Cough, fever, chills — with fall fast on the way, symptoms alone won’t be useful in distinguishing Covid-19 from similar-looking cases of the flu. That means routinely testing for both viruses will be crucial — even, perhaps, after some patients have already died. That will at least be true in New York, where officials recently…