Category Health/Medical

Engineers have developed a new material that mimics human cartilage — the body’s shock absorbing and lubrication system, and it could herald the development of a new generation of lightweight bearings.

Cartilage is a soft fibrous tissue found around joints which provides protection from the compressive loading generated by walking, running or lifting. It also provides a protective, lubricating layer allowing bones to pass over one another in a frictionless way. For years, scientists have been trying to create a synthetic material with the properties of cartilage.

To date, they have had mixed results.

But in a paper published in the journal Applied Polymer Mate...

A study in cells and mice finds compound works with fewer side effects than opioids. Fentanyl, oxycodone, morphine—these substances are familiar to many as a source of both pain relief and the cause of a painful epidemic of addiction and death.

Scientists have attempted for years to balance the potent pain-relieving properties of opioids with their numerous negative side effects—with mostly mixed results.

Work by John Traynor, Ph.D., and Andrew Alt, Ph.D., and their team at the University of Michigan Edward F. Domino Research Center, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, seeks to side-step these problems by harnessing the body’s own ability to block pain.

All opioid drugs—from poppy-derived opium to heroin—work on receptors that are naturally prese...

Known as ‘pair-density waves,’ it may be key to understanding how superconductivity can exist at relatively high temperatures...

New approach to gene therapy can correct any disease-causing mutation within a gene. A new approach to gene editing using the CRISPR/ Cas9 system bypasses disease-causing mutations in a gene, enabling treatment of genetic diseases linked to a single gene, such as cystic fibrosis, certain types of sickle cell anemia, and other rare diseases. The method, developed and tested in mice and human tissue cultures by researchers at Penn State, involves inserting a new, fully functional copy of the gene that displaces the mutated gene.

A proof-of-concept for the approach is described in a paper appearing online April 20 in the journal Molecular Therapy.

The CRISPR/Cas9 system has allowed promising new gene therapies that can target and correct disease-causing mutations in a gene...