Watches for Your Ears

Watch lovers are an intensely visual bunch: Consider the more than 2.1 million images tagged #wristshot on Instagram. But the rising popularity of horology podcasts also indicates a growing appetite for informed yet casual conversation about timepieces — a hunger made all the sharper by Covid-19. “Engagement is up across all our channels because a…

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Erika Hersch-Green wins CAREER Award for Biodiversity Research

Erika Hersch-Green, evolutionary biologist and assistant professor of biological sciences at Michigan Technological University, has received a National Science Foundation CAREER award to investigate how increased nitrogen and phosphorus availability across different temperature and water regimes alters the primary productivity of some plants, while reducing the growth of others. Hersch-Green will examine how the amounts…

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Family history misses identifying individuals with high genetic risk of CVD or cancer

Certain genetic changes, termed “pathogenic variants,” substantially increase risk for cardiovascular disease and cancer–the leading causes of death–but testing to identify individual carriers is not part of current clinical practice. Now a team led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) determined that nearly 1% of the population carry such pathogenic variants. These individuals were…

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Parkinson’s dyskinesia mechanism explained

JUPITER, Fla.–May 1, 2020–Many people with Parkinson’s disease eventually develop debilitating movements called dyskinesia, a side effect of their much-needed dopamine replacement medication. The mechanism underlying this unwanted side effect has been unknown, until now. An international collaboration led by Scripps Research, Florida has found a key cause, and with it, potentially, a new route…

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Rheumatoid arthritis patients on medicare seeing increased costs for specialty medications

After a sharp drop in out-of-pocket costs between 2010 and 2011, Medicare patients who use specialty biologic medications for rheumatoid arthritis have seen higher out-of-pocket spending for those same drugs because of gradual price increases, a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association Open finds. Led by Vanderbilt University School of Medicine…

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