Recent Episodes
-
Cats and Smell
Does your cat spend a lot of time sniffing everything around her? Mine does—especially my shoes! Sniffing is a way cats explore, and now a new study from Tokyo helps us understand how they respond to scent.
-
Calcineurin Inhibitors and reduced incidence of Dementia
Sometimes the biggest scientific discoveries are made when ideas from different fields collide, especially when they're not even working on the same question. We call this, “collision science.” At our university, a neuroscientist studying dementia and a transplant surgeon were having a casual conversation when they realized that transplant patients have lower rates of dementia. They thought it could be the drugs these patients take to keep their immune systems from “rejecting” the new organ.
-
Another COVID Controversary
In one of the first large studies to quantify the long-term harms of long COVID, the results are not encouraging. Researchers used the Veterans Administration database to compare 150,000 veterans who had COVID with 6 million veterans who did not. The results were striking.
-
A Gene Therapy for DMD
There are a number of genetic disorders that interfere with normal muscle function. Duchenne's Muscular Dystrophy or DMD is one of them. A genetic mutation stops a functional dystrophin protein from being made. It's a very large protein that helps to connect structures within muscle cells called the cytoskeleton to proteins that form the extracellular matrix outside the cell.
-
A Unique Knight
Among the remains of medieval Spanish knights at a castle just east of Madrid, scientists found a uniquely shaped skull. It was unusually narrow and long, measuring 9 inches long by four inches wide compared to a normal 5.5 by 5.5 inch skull.
