Blue Light and Essential Oil Compound Treat Antibiotic-Resistant Skin Infections in Mice
Graphic: Elena Scotti (Photos: Getty Images, Shutterstock) (Getty Images)
A team of scientists claim to have found a novel way to treat stubborn skin infections that don’t respond to antibiotics. In experiments with mice, they showed that a combination of blue light mixed with a compound found in oregano oil could easily kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria living in skin wounds without harming the mice. If validated in people, the research may someday provide doctors a new tool against superbugs.
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The need to find therapies against antibiotic-resistant bacteria is more pressing than ever. But it’s become harder and harder to find and develop new antibiotics in recent decades, and there’s always the worry that bacteria will eventually learn to adapt to new drugs, too. That’s led some scientists to explore methods of killing bacteria that are very different from antibiotics.
Some Things We Wrote That We Loved in 2020
Illustration: Elena Scotti, Chelsea Beck
The end of this year is finally upon us, and while everything around us all is mediocre at best and extremely distressing at worst, we managed to find a spare moment for some self-reflection. Everyone at Jezebel wrote a lot of very good blogs this year, but the ones we liked the most are the ones that were the most interesting or meaningful to write and hopefully, to read.
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Illustration: Chelsea Beck
As a white woman who loves fall, I really enjoyed figuring out where the fuck the stereotype that white women love fall comes from for this piece. I may or may not have eaten a loaf of pumpkin bread in the process of researching!
Our 9 Weirdest Pieces of Parenting Advice This Year (That We Still Stand By)
Best of LifehackerWhether we’ve made a complicated recipe absurdly simple, illustrated how to survive a natural disaster, or explained a political crisis in terms even your great-grandma would understand, these are some of our favorite stories from the past year.
There are many words one could choose to describe this shit show of a year (oh look, I just chose a couple), but I’m sure we can all agree that it was.
weird. Just epically strange and bizarre. As I reflect back on some of the parenting hacks I wrote this year, I realized they, too, were at times weird.
Graphic: Elena Scotti,Photo: Shutterstock,Photo: Getty Images
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I love ham. When I was nine years old, my parents went away for the night on Boxing Day; when they returned, they found that
someone had eaten most of a 9 kg leg of ham. I didn’t even understand how to slice it properly. I just shaved it from the top down. (One could say that I was ham-fisted in my approach.) In my haste to avoid blame, I didn’t think through my lies. Although I swore “it wasn’t me,” I was the only possible culprit my grandmother, who had stayed with me, was a Seventh Day Adventist and did not eat pork.
Here s Your COVID Vaccine Rumor Roundup
Illustration: Elena Scotti
Two COVID vaccines are now available in the US, and are currently being administered to healthcare workers and residents of long-term care facilities. But it’s new, and new things are scary, and both COVID and its vaccine have been relentlessly politicized. Rumors are flying.
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If people in your life are doubting the safety of the vaccine, or still wondering if the coronavirus is a hoax, we have some tips on talking to them here. There
are still a lot of unknowns about the vaccine, so just because somebody has doubts or questions does not mean they are an anti-vaxxer. If you have questions yourself, or if you’d like to talk to people in your life who do, we’ll break down some of the myths and facts for you here.