Search Results for: label/TGF-beta

• Leaky gut and wonky immune response might be double whammy leading to inflammatory bowel disease (in mice)

  A case of ulcerative colitis, a form of inflammatory bowel disease.Photo via Wikimedia Commons. Credit: Samir. A two-hit punch in the gut might explain why some people find themselves alone among their closest relatives in having inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The double gut punches come in the form of a compromised intestinal wall coupled with a poorly behaved immune system, say Emory researchers, whose work using mice was publishe…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on September 13, 2012

• Biology Explainer: The big 4 building blocks of life–carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and nucleic acids

  …molecules themselves break down into a surprisingly small number of building blocks. The proteins that make up all of the living things on this planet and ensure their appropriate structure and smooth function consist of only 20 different kinds of building blocks. Nucleic acids, specifically DNA, are even more basic: only four different kinds of molecules provide the materials to build the countless different genetic codes that translate into all…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on June 8, 2012

• After Newtown missteps, journalists get guidelines

  …almost twice as likely to say that they don’t want to live or work near a person with mental illness if they read an article about a person with mental illness involved in a mass shooting, according to a study published March 20 in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Interestingly, this tendency is the same even if the article avoids any mention of mental illness. This may be because this link between violence and mental illness is deeply engrain…

  Authored by DXS Contributor on March 27, 2013

• La vie est belle, n’est-ce pas?

  …e within rather than without — and by within, I mean through the oculars of a microscope. Beta-tubulin expression of a Drosophila third instar larval brain, with attached eye imaginal discs. This image placed 7th in the 2012 Olympus BioScapes competition.  (Source) To me, there’s nothing quite so lovely as a really powerful photomicrograph or time-lapse series. Want a good example? Here’s one: On 18 March, Howard Hughes Medical…

  Authored by Jeffrey Perkel on April 14, 2013

• Dominants, alphas, and queens: Happy Mother’s Day!

  …mammoths. Here are a few examples: The Queen, surrounded by her supportive workers. Honey bees: Bee colonies are giant matriarchal societies ruled by a single queen—quite literally the “queen mum.” Her offspring (as many as 25,000 at a time) make up the entire clan of female workers and male drones. The queen spends her life tended to by her worker daughters. These workers have underdeveloped reproductive systems, so the queen is the only femal…

  Authored by DXS Contributor on May 13, 2013

• Can the body handle a Mars trip?

  …217;re itching to be one of the first on a Mars colony, you could apply for the chance to go through the Mars One Project’s training – which is, of course, also a reality TV show – and perhaps end up on human outpost in 2023. But I digress…) The real question is, are WE – us actual humans – physiologically ready for such a trip? The health considerations of space travel are no small thing. In fact, in BMJ‘s Christmas issue, S. M…

  Authored by Tara Haelle on January 30, 2013

• Unicorns and Brainbows

  Brainbow is a mouse with a rainbow brain. By Jeffrey Perkel    A couple weeks ago I wrote about the beautiful world right under our noses, a world visible only under the microscope. The cover image for that post was this picture, a “‘Brainbow’ transgenic mouse hippocampus,” which placed 18th in the 2008 Nikon Small World Photomicroscopy contest. Brainbow technology also won the 2007 Olympus Bioscapes contest, with this be…

  Authored by Jeffrey Perkel on May 6, 2013

• Is the bar high enough for screening breast ultrasounds for breast cancer?

  …n controversial. What’s new is the “Are You Dense?” patient movement and legislation to inform women that they have dense breasts. Merits and pitfalls of device approval The approval of breast ultrasound hinges on a study of 200 women with dense breast evaluated retrospectively at 13 sites across the United States with mammography and ultrasound. The study showed a statistically significant increase in breast cancer detection when ultrasound was…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on September 21, 2012

• Autism and the DSM-5

  …ial social aspect of this change, and the one thing that might, when it comes to autism, elevate the DSM-5 above the level of doorstop. [Image credit: Dave Bullock, UK, via Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 generic license.]…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on April 23, 2013

• Depressing genes

  Can depression be a matter of genetic fate? by Siobhan Mitchell          [This post is the latest installment in our I Am Mental Illness series.] What if you could know if you were fated to be depressed? With the rise of personal genotyping services such as 23andme, almost can find out what their psychiatric ‘fate’ will be, but what do you do with this information once you have it? When I first considered testing myself for depressio…

  Authored by DXS Contributor on May 17, 2013