Category Health/Medical

Work on similar viruses is giving researchers clues to develop drugs against the disease. As the new coronavirus makes its way around the world, doctors and researchers are searching for drugs to treat the ill and stop the spread of the disease, which has already killed more than 3,800 people since its introduction in Wuhan, China, in December.

The culprit virus is in the same family as the coronaviruses that caused two other outbreaks, severe acute respiratory syndrome and Middle East respiratory syndrome...

Scientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center identified a tiny protein in scorpion venom that rapidly accumulates in joint cartilage. Then they linked these mini-proteins with steroids to reverse inflammation in rats with arthritis. The researchers found that the drugs concentrated in the joints, potentially avoiding the body-wide toxicities and infection risks caused by nontargeted steroid treatment.

“For people with multi-joint arthritis, the side effects of controlling the disease can be as bad or worse than the disease itself,” said the project’s senior scientist Dr...

Scientists have developed a customizable computing device using nanofabricated switches than can be rewired to optimize AI applications using 80% less power. These devices can be used as flexible computing platform for artificial intelligence tasks.

Scientists at Osaka University built a new computing device from field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) that can be customized by the user for maximum efficiency in artificial intelligence applications. Compared with currently used rewireable hardware, the system increases circuit density by a factor of 12. Also, it is expected to reduce energy usage by 80%...

A new study showed that people who periodically drank beverages with the low-calorie sweetener sucralose, which is found in low-cal soft drinks, candy, breakfast bars, and other products, did experience problematic metabolic and neural responses – but only when a carbohydrate in the form of a tasteless sugar was added to the drink. In contrast, people drinking beverages with low-calorie sweeteners alone, or beverages with real sugar, showed no changes in brain or metabolic response to sugars.

Several studies in recent years have reported that low-calorie sweeteners in foods and beverages disrupt the human , promoting the development of diabetes and obesity...