A Cleveland Clinic research team studying alcohol and the brain discovered a new way that alcohol abuse can cause brain dysfunction and damage: through immune cells called microglia. The research also identified a potential new treatment target.

The team showed that in a brain affected by alcohol, microglia tear down the extracellular matrix (ECM), the scaffold that surrounds our neurons. The ECM physically holds our brain cells together and allows them to work properly. When it’s disrupted, our neurons can’t communicate as effectively. Severe ECM disruption can affect our ability to move, think and even remain alert.

The research, published in Immunity, is new, fundamental knowledge that already guides the research team to explore new ways to p...

Johns Hopkins University engineers have created robots the size of a pencil tip intended to travel through the body to deliver medicine to infections inside a beating heart.

The bots, designed to replace risky open-heart surgery and ineffective IV drug therapy to treat life-threatening heart infections, could also be used to treat other hard-to-reach diseases, including cancer, less invasively and more precisely.

“With just a little pinprick, you insert a microrobot and do a procedure without infection or blood loss...

The fate of our solar system is written in the stars—well, one star to be precise: the sun. Estimates of what the end will look like once the sun sheds much of its mass and ultimately dies vary widely. New research published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters suggests that the final curtain for some of the outer planets will arrive much sooner than previously thought, shrinking the timeline from a quintillion years down to roughly 1 billion years.

The rock we live on will probably be long gone by then, but Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune might not make it either.

Traditional models assumed that the outer solar system would survive for billions of years before a passing star might disturb it...

Giardia duodenalis is a microscopic, flagellated parasite that often calls the human and animal gut its home. In most cases, it coexists harmlessly with its host, and most infected pets and people show no signs of illness. However, when it becomes pathogenic, it can cause diarrhea, digestive issues or weightloss.

Cats can carry a pathogenic version of the gut parasite that also infects humans, but how common is it among pet cats, and how often do they harbor such strains?

A recent study investigated these questions by analyzing stool test data from 157,616 pet cats across 49 U.S. states and five Canadian provinces between March 2022 and August 2023.

The results showed that 6.3% of the cats tested positive for Giardia duodenalis...