Month: March 2013

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SARS: Past and Present

— With increased air travel, the emergence of infectious diseases anywhere in the world is a global concern. A recent outbreak garnering attention is the emergence of a SARS-like virus in the United Kingdom. Many symptoms of this new virus, including cough, headache, and muscle ache, are shared with other more common illnesses. However the symptoms that inspired its name are less general: a fever of over 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit (38.0 degrees Celsius) and difficult, abnormal breathing. SARS is as an acronym for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome and is caused by a cell-infiltration machine: a virus. The precise source of the new virus and its mode of transmission are still unknown, but some believe that it may be transmitted from animals due to its similarity to a known bat virus. Viruses that affect animals can occasionally be transferred to humans that come in contact with an infected animal, and this transmission of a pathogen from an animal to a human is known as zoonosis. Some common zoonotic diseases are Rabies, Malaria, Yellow Fever, and West Nile. The original SARS virus is thought to have originated in civet cats and then transferred to humans. Continue reading SARS: Past and Present

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Bionic Senses: How Neuroprosthetics Restore Hearing and Sight

— Of the five senses, sight and hearing are often felt to be the most important. They allow us to interact with each other and our environment, and the loss of either sense can be devastating. Worldwide, an estimated 39 million people have severe vision loss and 360 million people have disabling hearing loss. Scientists have spent many decades studying the causes of vision and hearing loss, as well as working to understand how images and sounds are transmitted to and represented in the brain. After years of research, they are now creating technologies that can at least partially restore these senses. These technologies are called neuroprosthetics and take the form of devices that connect to brain cells to deliver information that the brain can no longer receive on its own, often due to injury or disease. Continue reading Bionic Senses: How Neuroprosthetics Restore Hearing and Sight

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Keeping Warm: A discussion with Dr. Murray Hamlet on cold weather physiology

— Less than three weeks ago, the Northeast US was slammed by the largest blizzard in years: winter storm Nemo. Swarms of people ran to the grocery stores and gas stations to stock up on food, batteries, flashlights, clean water supplies, and gas in preparation for the storm. Fortunately, being able to stay within the comfort and warmth of their homes, most people didn’t have to be concerned about one of the greatest threats that comes with winter weather: cold weather injury. This month, the Science in the News Flash got in touch with Dr. Murray Hamlet, an expert on cold weather physiology and retired director of the Cold Research Division for the US Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine (Natick MA), to learn more about this fascinating, yet frightening, topic. Continue reading Keeping Warm: A discussion with Dr. Murray Hamlet on cold weather physiology

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Harnessing our Body’s Microorganisms to Combat Human Disease

— Have you ever considered that your body is its own ecosystem? Our bodies are host to countless microbial organisms, which live in and on every conceivable part of our body and outnumber our human cells ten to one. We depend on these microbes for a variety of reasons – their colonization of our skin keeps fungi and yeast from growing on us; in our gut they help digest some of the food we eat; and in our noses they even produce antibiotics to combat harmful microbes that we inhale. While we’ve known about the existence of bacteria since the 1670s, we know surprisingly little about most of them because of the difficulty in cultivating them in a laboratory. Recently, with the cost of DNA sequencing becoming ever more affordable, researchers have bypassed the old need to cultivate organisms in order to study them: they can now sequence the DNA from entire microbial communities (known as the “microbiome”) straight out of their natural habitats. Continue reading Harnessing our Body’s Microorganisms to Combat Human Disease

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