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    Category Health/Medical

    Healthy Aging Requires an Understanding of Personality Types

    October 12, 2022, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

     Relationship between lifestyle factors and different cognitive categories. The figure is color coded based on similarity of covariate. In dark blue are the factors related to financial strain, in shades of orange are the factors that require greater levels of concentration, in shades of green are the factors that relate to physical exercise, in purple and light blue is age and level of education, and in shades of yellow is smoking and drinking.

    New research shows that older adults may be better supported as they age when their personalities are considered — for example, are they more like orchids or dandelions?

    Researchers from Simon Fraser University’s Circle Innovation examined the potential effects of lifestyle activities on the cognitive health of more than 3,500 adults aged 60...

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    The New Compound that Destroys the MRSA Superbug

    October 11, 2022, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    Image of bacteria seen under the microscope
    In lab tests, the new compound destroys 10 strains of antibiotic-resistant MRSA.

    A compound that both inhibits the MRSA superbug and renders it more vulnerable to antibiotics has been discovered by scientists at the University of Bath in the UK led by Dr Maisem Laabei and Dr Ian Blagbrough.

    The novel compound – a polyamine – seems to destroy Staphylococcus aureus, the bacterium that causes (among other things) deadly Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections, by disrupting the pathogen’s cell membrane.

    The compound was tested in-vitro against 10 different antibiotic-resistant strains of S. aureus, including some that are known to be resistant to vancomycin – the final drug of choice given to patients fighting an MRSA infection...

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    Age vs. Genetics: Which is More Important for Determining How we Age?

    October 8, 2022, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    The relative importance of genetics and age in controlling gene expression as a function of evolutionary constraints. Genes further to the right along the x-axis are more evolutionarily “constrained,” and thus more likely to be important in human disease. (Image credit: Peter Sudmant, UC Berkeley)

    Amid much speculation and research about how our genetics affect the way we age, a University of California, Berkeley, study now shows that individual differences in our DNA matter less as we get older and become prone to diseases of aging, such as diabetes and cancer.

    In a study of the relative effects of genetics, aging and the environment on how some 20,000 human genes are expressed, the researchers found that aging and environment are far more important than genetic variation in af...

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    Researchers find Link between Immune Cells’ Closest Neighbors and Survival Time in Patients with Pancreatic Cancer

    October 7, 2022, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    Immune cells
    Immune cells called myelomonocytes (green) cluster near pancreatic cancer cells (red). Credit: Haoyang Mi, Johns Hopkins Medicine

    Researchers from Johns Hopkins Medicine have discovered that the organization of different types of immune cells within pancreatic tumors is associated with how well patients with pancreatic cancer respond to treatment and how long they survive. The new findings, published Sept. 16 in Cancer Research, could eventually lead to new ways of treating pancreatic cancer, which has the highest mortality rate of all major cancers.

    “Mapping the location of certain immune cells associated with a tumor could be a new biomarker to predict patient survival,” says Aleksander Popel, Ph.D...

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