Category Health/Medical

The lifespan of a small roundworm that has been used as a key model organism in ageing research is limited by how it self-sacrifices to feed its young, finds a new study led by UCL researchers.

The authors of the new Nature Communications paper say their findings raise questions about how well insights from the Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) worm can be translated to human ageing advances.

C. elegans is widely used as a laboratory animal, and has been central to ageing research for 40 years thanks to discoveries of genes that can be supressed to produce up to a tenfold increase in the worm’s lifespan.

The UCL research team investigated what drives the lifespan of C...

Scientists discover role immune system’s T cells play in regulating fat and muscle loss during infection in mice. Scientists discovered that 1) the wasting response to T. brucei infection in mice occurs in two phases, each regulated by different immune cells and 2) fat loss did not benefit the fight against infection, but muscle loss did. The findings inform the development of more effective therapeutics that spare people from wasting and increase our understanding of how wasting influences survival and morbidity across infections, cancers, chronic illnesses, and more.

Although infections can present with many different symptoms, one common symptom is the loss of fat and muscle, a proc...

Researchers at Monash University have designed a new co-training AI algorithm for medical imaging that can effectively mimic the process of seeking a second opinion.

Published recently in Nature Machine Intelligence, the research addressed the limited availability of human annotated, or labelled, medical images by using an adversarial, or competitive, learning approach against unlabelled data.

This research, by Monash University faculties of Engineering and IT, will advance the field of medical image analysis for radiologists and other health experts.

PhD candidate Himashi Peiris of the Faculty of Engineering, said the research design had set out to create a competition between the two components...

Shifting from a high-pressure mindset to a curious one improves people’s memory.

New research from Duke found that people who imagined being a thief scouting a virtual art museum in preparation for a heist were better at remembering the paintings they saw, compared to people who played the same computer game while imagining that they were executing the heist in-the-moment.

These subtle differences in motivation—urgent, immediate goal-seeking versus curious exploration for a future goal—have big potential for framing real-world challenges such as encouraging people to get a vaccine, prompting climate change action, and even treating psychiatric disorders.

The findings appeared online July 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Alyssa Sinclair, Ph.D...