Category Health/Medical

A microscopic image of tumor tissue under the influence of TNF (left) and IFN- ? (right). Red blood cells are pictured in a magenta color. TNF bursts the blood vessels and releases large amounts of blood cells, whereas IFN-? lets vessels retreat. Credit: Christian Friese / MDC

Immunotherapy with T-cells offers great hope to people suffering from cancer. Some initial successes have already been made in treating blood cancer, but treating solid tumors remains a major challenge. The signaling molecule interferon gamma, produced by T-cells, plays a key role in the therapy. It cuts off the blood supply to tumors. The immune system is the body’s most powerful weapon against diseases...

High fat Diet + Vitamin A potentiation of Insulin resistance and body weight increase

Vitamin A is an essential nutrient that the human body needs to function properly. But new research presented today at the American Physiological Society (APS) annual meeting at Experimental Biology 2017 in Chicago suggests that normal levels of vitamin A within a high-fat diet can negatively affect expression of liver genes associated with glucose and fat metabolism.

Researchers fed 2 groups of rats a high-fat diet for 8 weeks. One group consumed normal amounts of vitamin A (“sufficient”), while the other group ate food that lacked the nutrient (“deficient”). The research team measured the rats’ body mass (an indicator of concentration of body fat) each week...

Credit: Vera Kratochvil/public domain

Researchers show that foot’s impact helps control, increase the amount of blood sent to the brain. You probably know that walking does your body good, but it’s not just your heart and muscles that benefit. Researchers at New Mexico Highlands University (NMHU) found that the foot’s impact during walking sends pressure waves through the arteries that significantly modify and can increase the supply of blood to the brain.

Until recently, the cerebral blood flow or CBF was thought to be involuntarily regulated by the body and relatively unaffected by changes in the blood pressure caused by exercise or exertion...

New imaging potential: Standard resolution (left) compared to (center, right) high resolution and super-resolution obtained with the chip-based technique. Credit: Bielefeld University/Robin Diekmann

Physicists have developed a photonic chip that makes it possible to carry out super-resolution light microscopy, ie ‘nanoscopy,’ with conventional microscopes. In nanoscopy, the position of single fluorescent molecules can be determined with a precision of just a few nano-meters (millionth of a millimeter). This information can be used to produce images with a resolution of ~20 to 30 nm, and thereby 10X that of conventional light microscopy. Until now, this method has required the use of expensive special instruments...