E-Mail
Credit: BBVA Foundation
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biology and Biomedicine has gone in this thirteenth edition to David Julius, from the University of California, San Francisco, and Ardem Patapoutian, from the Scripps Institute, La Jolla (United States), for identifying the receptors that enable us to sense temperature, pain and pressure. Temperature, pain and pressure are part of our sense of touch, perhaps the least understood of the five main senses of humans, read the opening words of the citation. Julius and Patapoutian provided a molecular and neural basis for thermosensation and mechanosensation.
This line of research holds out exciting medical possibilities, because it sheds light on how to reduce chronic and acute pain associated with a range of diseases, trauma and their treatments. In fact, several pharmaceutical laboratories are working to identify molecules that act on these receptors with the aim of treating different fo
Study reveals immune driver of brain aging
Scientists have identified a key factor in mental aging and shown that it might be prevented or reversed by fixing a glitch in the immune system’s front-line soldiers. Jan 20 2021
Katrin Andreasson is the senior author of a study that identifies a particular set of immune cells as a key driver of mental aging.
Steve Fisch
Suppose Smokey Bear were to lose it and start setting forest fires instead of putting them out. That roughly describes the behavior of certain cells of our immune system that become increasingly irascible as we grow older. Instead of stamping out embers, they stoke the flames of chronic inflammation.
E-Mail
Suppose Smokey the Bear were to go on a tear and start setting forest fires instead of putting them out. That roughly describes the behavior of certain cells of our immune system that become increasingly irascible as we grow older. Instead of stamping out embers, they stoke the flames of chronic inflammation.
Biologists have long theorized that reducing this inflammation could slow the aging process and delay the onset of age-associated conditions, such as heart disease, Alzheimer s disease, cancer and frailty, and perhaps even forestall the gradual loss of mental acuity that happens to nearly everyone.
Yet the question of what, exactly, causes particular cells of the immune system to kick into inflammatory overdrive has lacked a definitive answer.
Denver, Colo., Dec 10, 2017 / 04:01 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- This week, TIME Magazine announced a group of women and men as their collective Person of the Year.
What do these people have in common? They are what TIME called “The Silence Breakers” – people who have blown the whistle on sexual assault and abuse within the workplace, largely in the industries of film, politics, and media.
In recent months an avalanche of abuse allegations have been brought to light against powerful figures, starting most notably with a piece in the New York Times in which several women accused Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. This sparked a flood of men and women coming forward with other allegations of abuse against numerous people in positions of power.