Latest ‘organ-on-a-chip’ is a new way to study cancer-related muscle wasting
Studying drug effects on human muscles just got easier thanks to a new “muscle-on-a-chip,” developed by a team of researchers from Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and Inha University in Incheon, Korea. Bioengineering’s Dan Huh and colleagues have developed a number of organ-on-a-chip devices to simulate how human cells grow and perform in their natural environments. Their latest is a muscle-on-a-chip, which carefully captures the directionality of muscle cells as they anchor themselves within the body. (Image: Melissa Pappas).
Muscle tissue is essential to almost all of the body’s organs, however, diseases such as cancer and diabetes can cause muscle tissue degradation or “wasting,” severely decreasing organ function and quality of life. Traditional drug testing for treatment and prevention of muscle wasting is limited through animal studies
In Greece, It s Almost Normal - The New York Times nytimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nytimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Researchers measure different types of curiosity studying ‘hunters and busybodies’
Curiosity has been found to play a role in our learning and emotional well-being, but due to the open-ended nature of how curiosity is actually practiced, measuring it is challenging. Psychological studies have attempted to gauge participants’ curiosity through their engagement in specific activities, however, such methods focus on quantifying a person’s curiosity rather than understanding the different ways it can be expressed. Curiosity styles as knowledge networks where each node is a Wikipedia page and the paths between nodes represent the similarity between pages. “The hunter” style is characterized by high clustering and low overall path length, while “the busybody” style is characterized by low clustering and high overall path length. (Image: Melissa Pappas)