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Researchers have developed a cheap and rapid test that reveals a person’s full history of viral infections from a single drop of blood.

The test allows doctors to read out a list of the viruses that have infected, or continue to infect, patients even when they have not caused any obvious symptoms. The technology means that GPs could screen patients for all of the viruses capable of infecting people

When a droplet of blood from a patient is mixed with the modified viruses, any antibodies they have latch on to human virus proteins they recognise as invaders. The scientists then pull out the antibodies and identify the human viruses from the protein fragments they have stuck to.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a personalized immune therapy that redirects T cells to seek and destroy a type of glioblastoma, or brain tumor.

About 30 percent of glioblastoma patients have tumors with a mutation in a growth receptor called EGFR.

"Patients that have that kind of mutation tend to have a worse prognosis than patients who don't have it."

How did experts get it so wrong?

the primary problem is that nutrition policy has long relied on a very weak kind of science: epidemiological, or “observational,” studies in which researchers follow large groups of people over many years. But even the most rigorous epidemiological studies suffer from a fundamental limitation. At best they can show only association, not causation.

Instead of accepting that this evidence was inadequate to give sound advice, strong-willed scientists overstated the significance of their studies.

Researchers from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have now been able to show for the first time how the pathological changes in the brain act on the information-storing processes during sleep.

slow oscillations, which our brain generates at night, have a particular role in consolidating what we have learned and in shifting memories into long-term storage.

In 1942, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu published “Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race,” an influential book that argued that race is a social concept with no genetic basis.

eginning in 1972, genetic findings began to be incorporated into this argument. That year, the geneticist Richard Lewontin published an important study of variation in protein types in blood. He grouped the human populations he analyzed into seven “races” — West Eurasians, Africans, East Asians, South Asians, Native Americans, Oceanians and Australians — and found that around 85 percent of variation in the protein types could be accounted for by variation within populations and “races,” and only 15 percent by variation across them. To the extent that there was variation among humans, he concluded, most of it was because of “differences between individuals.”

In this way, a consensus was established that among human populations there are no differences large enough to support the concept of “biological race.” Instead, it was argued, race is a “social construct,” a way of categorizing people that changes over time and across countries.

Until last week, I wasn’t sure I would get the vaccine. Some media reports highlight that mRNA vaccines have never been approved for use in humans outside clinical trials, making it seem like a new technology that has not been tested before. The vaccines were developed at such speed, I couldn’t be sure that major side effects hadn’t been overlooked. I worried about autoimmunity caused by expressing the coronavirus spike proteins on my own cells.

Every day in the emergency department, patients walk away from essential care against medical advice, and we watch them go with a shake of our heads and a rueful smile. Just like them, isolated with my doubts, I was ready to exercise my right to free will and refuse the vaccine.

When my non-medical friends asked me about it, I was torn between telling them my concerns and playacting the doctor who recommends the latest proven therapy.

When COVID-19 struck, mRNA vaccines in particular were ready to be put to a real-world test. The 94% efficacy of the mRNA vaccines surpassed health officials’ highest expectations.

DNA and mRNA vaccines offer huge advantages over traditional types of vaccines, since they use only genetic code from a pathogen – rather than the entire virus or bacteria.

Gene-based vaccines also produce precise and effective immune responses. They stimulate not only antibodies that block an infection, but also a strong T cell response that can clear an infection if one occurs.

A bizarre tentacled microbe discovered on the floor of the Pacific Ocean may help explain the origins of complex life on this planet and solve one of the deepest mysteries in biology, scientists reported on Wednesday.Two billion years ago, simple cells gave rise to far more complex cells. Biologists have struggled for decades to learn how it happened.

The new species, called Prometheoarchaeum, turns out to be just such a transitional form, helping to explain the origins of all animals, plants, fungi — and, of course, humans. The research was reported in the journal Nature.

Species that share these complex cells are known as eukaryotes, and they all descend from a common ancestor that lived an estimated two billion years ago.Before then, the world was home only to bacteria and a group of small, simple organisms called archaea. Bacteria and archaea have no nuclei, lysosomes, mitochondria or skeletons

Ethicists and physicians are concerned that, amid a desire to put an end to the Covid-19 pandemic, developers of drugs and vaccines have become overly enthusiastic about the chances their products will work.

Oxford has recently walked back some of its optimism, but for months, it set a tone that its vaccine was the most promising, without any solid evidence that this was based in fact.

Third, one leader in the Oxford team has gone so far as to denigrate other teams trying to get a Covid vaccine on the market, calling their technology "weird" and labeling it as merely "noise." Such name-calling is highly unusual and aggressive among scientists.

the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller in his book "The Mating Mind" explored the notion that since human males woo their mates with art, poetry, music and humor, as well as with brawn, much of the expansion of our brain may have been sexually selected.

sexual selection explains civilization itself. They mathematically explored the possibility that "as females prefer males who conspicuously consume, an increasing proportion of males engage in innovation, labor and other productive activities in order to engage in conspicuous consumption. These activities contribute to technological progress and economic growth.

Michael Shermer, in his book "The Mind of the Market," argues that you can trace anticapitalist egalitarianism to sexual selection. Back in the hunter-gatherer Paleolithic, inequality had reproductive consequences. The successful hunter, providing valuable protein for females, got a lot more mating opportunities than the unsuccessful.

academic researchers and scientists at companies like Microsoft, I.B.M. and Hewlett-Packard have been working to develop quantum computers.

Lockheed Martin — which bought an early version of such a computer from the Canadian company D-Wave Systems two years ago — is confident enough in the technology to upgrade it to commercial scale, becoming the first company to use quantum computing as part of its business.

if it performs as Lockheed and D-Wave expect, the design could be used to supercharge even the most powerful systems, solving some science and business problems millions of times faster

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Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.

Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.

You feel happiness all the way down to your genes, scientists say. But the kind of happiness you're feeling matters, as different kinds can have wildly different effects on your physical well-being.

he happiness you get from instant gratification -- eating that giant cupcake or buying that fabulous pair of shoes -- may have the same physical impact on your genes as depression or stress,

The experts divide well-being into two different types: hedonic and eudaimonic. These are fancy words to describe happiness that comes from two different sources.

Michael Keck has added more fuel to the fire about whether young children should play football.

diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the Alzheimer's-like disease

telltale sign of the disease is tangles of the protein tau, which takes over parts of the brain. They result from repeated hits to the head

The idea was this: genes strive for immortality, and individuals, families, and species are merely vehicles in that quest. The behaviour of all living things is in service of their genes hence, metaphorically, they are selfish.

Before this, it had been proposed that natural selection was honing the behaviour of living things to promote the continuance through time of the individual creature, or family, or group or species. But in fact, Dawkins said, it was the gene itself that was trying to survive, and it just so happened that the best way for it to survive was in concert with other genes in the impermanent husk of an individual

This gene-centric view of evolution also began to explain one of the oddities of life on Earth – the behaviour of social insects. What is the point of a drone bee, doomed to remain childless and in the service of a totalitarian queen? Suddenly it made sense that, with the gene itself steering evolution, the fact that the drone shared its DNA with the queen meant that its servitude guarantees not the individual’s survival, but the endurance of the genes they shar

n a traditional classroom, the teacher stands at the front of the class explaining what is clear in their mind to a group of passive students. Yet this pedagogical strategy doesn't positively impact retention of information from lecture, improve understanding basic concepts, or affect beliefs (that is, does new information change your belief about how something works).

. Everything that constitutes "understanding" science and "thinking scientifically" resides in the long-term memory, which is developed via the construction and assembly of component proteins.

The research tells us that the human brain can hold a maximum of about seven different items in its short-term working memory and can process no more than about four ideas at once. Exactly what an "item" means when translated from the cognitive science lab into the classroom is a bit fuzzy.

WIKIPEDIA, KEN HAMMOND (USDA)In 2008, Judy van de Water from the University of California, Davis, discovered a group of autoantibodies—those that trigger immune responses against the body’s own molecules—that are especially common in mothers of children with autism.

“Given that, at present, only between 15 and 20 percent of children with autism have known causes—mainly genetic and infectious mechanisms—this will be a major advance.”

“It would allow mothers to plan,” said van de Water, by enrolling their children in educational programs that promote social skills from an early age.

people usually experience the sensation of happiness whenever they have both health and freedom. It’s a simple formula: Happiness = Health + Freedom

I’m talking about the everyday freedom of being able to do what you want when you want to do it, at work and elsewhere. For happiness, timing is as important as the thing you’re doing

Matching your mood to your activity is a baseline requirement for happiness

but gene therapy may be coming to the rescue. Gene therapy’s success in treating  blindness disorders –many are in late stage trials—gave hope to a field deterred by early missteps. And now gene therapy researchers are expanding their gaze to focus on all manner of sensory diseases.

notable success in using gene therapy techniques to treat a sensory disorder came last year when otolaryngolotist

The neurons [in VGLUT3 mutant mice] are waiting for the neurotransmitter to activate them”—but no signal comes, and the mice are profoundly deaf,