Category Health/Medical

This image shows neural activity during sleep differs between older and younger adults. Credit: Courtesy of Matthew Walker and Bryce Mander

Restorative, sedative-free slumber can ward off mental and physical ailments. As we grow old, our nights are frequently plagued by bouts of wakefulness, bathroom trips and other nuisances as we lose our ability to generate the deep, restorative slumber we enjoyed in youth. But does that mean older people just need less sleep? Not according to UC Berkeley researchers, who argue in an article published April 5 in the journal Neuron that the unmet sleep needs of the elderly elevate their risk of memory loss and a wide range of mental and physical disorders.

“Nearly every disease killing us in later life has a causal link to lack of sleep,” said Matthew Wa...

Scientists have created porous ‘egg-box’ structured nanofibers using seaweed extract. Credit: American Chemical Society

Seaweed, the edible algae with a long history in some Asian cuisines, and which has also become part of the Western foodie culture, could turn out to be an essential ingredient in another trend: the development of more sustainable ways to power our devices. Researchers have made a seaweed-derived material to help boost the performance of superconductors, lithium-ion batteries and fuel cells.

“Carbon-based materials are the most versatile materials used in the field of energy storage and conversion,” Dongjiang Yang, Ph.D., says. “We wanted to produce carbon-based materials via a really ‘green’ pathway...

Jason Gerstner, assistant research professor in WSU’s Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine, is lead author of a Science Advances paper describing a gene involved in the quality of sleep experienced by three different animals, including humans. Credit: Washington State University

Washington State University researchers have seen how a particular gene is involved in the quality of sleep experienced by 3 different animals, including humans. The gene and its function opens a new avenue for scientists exploring how sleep works and why animals need it so badly. As a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin, Gerstner looked at genes that change expression over the sleep-wake cycle and found expression of the gene FABP7 changed over the day throughout the brain of mice...

Inflamed mouse colon mucosa, with an expanded population of intestinal stromal cells identified by expression of podoplanin (green). Epithelium is identified by expression of EpCAM (magenta); cyan, nuclei. Credit: Dr. Samuel Bullers

Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology and Translational Gastroenterology Unit, University of Oxford have identified a potential therapeutic target for IBD. The findings are of particular importance to the 40% of patients who don’t respond to anti-TNF therapy, the current treatment option available. The new study published in Nature Medicine shows that IBD patients have higher concentrations of Oncostatin M (OSM), a protein linked to inflammation, in their intestine and suggest that blocking OSM could prove to be a successful treatment for IBD.

The research also sho...