How to tell if a brain is awake

Remarkably, scientists are still debating just how to reliably determine whether someone is conscious. This question is of great practical importance when making medical decisions about anesthesia or treating patients in vegetative state or coma. Currently, researchers rely on various measurements from an electroencephalogram, or EEG, to assess level of consciousness in the brain. A…

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Delivery of healthy donor cells key to correcting bone disorder, UConn researchers find

Osteogensis imperfecta (OI) is a group of genetic disorders that mainly affect the bone. Patients with OI have bones that break easily, sometimes with no apparent cause. The disorder is commonly caused by mutations associated with type 1 collagen or molecules that participate in collagen processing, which results in a defective collagen bone matrix. Current…

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NFCR-funded translational cancer research project receives Virginia Catalyst grant

ROCKVILLE, MD – A translational research project supported by the National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR) has been awarded $700,000 from Virginia Catalyst to advance its lead cancer drug candidate. The funding will be used for collaboration among the laboratory of Virginia Commonwealth University’s (VCU) Paul Fisher, M.Ph., Ph.D., an NFCR fellow, a team at…

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New book series aims to provide frontier reviews on anti-infective agents

The series is essential reading for general readers, healthcare professionals, researchers and academicians actively involved in research on infectious diseases and anti-infective therapeutic drugs. The first volume is a comprehensive documentation on major infectious diseases from tropical countries which pose a serious threat to global healthcare programs. These include diseases such as tuberculosis, AIDS, leishmaniasis…

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Moms’ obesity in pregnancy is linked to lag in sons’ development and IQ

December 23, 2019 — A mother’s obesity in pregnancy can affect her child’s development years down the road, according to researchers who found lagging motor skills in preschoolers and lower IQ in middle childhood for boys whose mothers were severely overweight while pregnant. A team of epidemiologists, nutritionists and environmental health researchers at Columbia University…

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For CRISPR, tweaking DNA fragments before inserting yields highest efficiency rates yet

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — University of Illinois researchers achieved the highest reported rates of inserting genes into human cells with the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing system, a necessary step for harnessing CRISPR for clinical gene-therapy applications. By chemically tweaking the ends of the DNA to be inserted, the new technique is up to five times more efficient than…

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