Category Health/Medical

A new study suggests that receiving rewards as you learn can help cement new facts and skills in your memory, particularly when combined with a daytime nap. The findings from the University of Geneva reveal that memories associated with a reward are preferentially reinforced by sleep. Even a short nap after a period of learning is beneficial.

“Rewards may act as a kind of tag, sealing information in the brain during learning,” says lead researcher Dr Kinga Igloi from the University of Geneva. “During sleep, that information is favourably consolidated over information associated with a low reward and is transferred to areas of the brain associated with long-term memory.”

“Our findings are relevant for understanding the devastating effects that lack of sleep can have on achievement,” s...

This is a photograph of subunits of telomerase. Credit: UCLA department of chemistry and biochemistry

Research could lead to new strategies for treating disease. The telomerase enzyme is known to play a significant role in aging and most cancers. Scientists have discovered several major new insights about this enzyme and they are now able to see the complex enzyme’s sub-units in much sharper resolution than ever before.

Telomerase is particularly active in cancer cells, which helps make them immortal and enables cancer to grow and spread. Scientists believe that controlling the length of telomeres in cancer cells could be a way to prevent them from multiplying.
Feigon and her colleagues have been filling in pieces of the telomerase puzzle, using Tetrahymena...

Figure 1. Radiologic Images of the Patient’s Liver and Phosphoinositide 3-Kinase (PI3K) Expression in the Patient’s Tumor Cells.

Metastatic Merkel-cell carcinoma is often fatal and there is no effective treatment. Now a researcher is reporting some positive results from treating this illness with a drug called idelalisib. Gao’s 86-year-old female patient was diagnosed in 2013 with stage IIIB Merkel-cell carcinoma of the right temple. She had surgery and received radiation therapy in May 2013 and additional surgery in Jul 2014. In Nov 2014 the cancer had metastasized.

Gao, a dermatologist who treats Merkel-cell carcinoma patients from Arkansas and surrounding states, performed genetics tests on the tumor that revealed multiple mutations, including PI3Kδ...

Human finger touches robotic finger. The transparent plastic and black device on the golden “fingertip” is the skin-like sensor developed by Stanford engineers. This sensor can detect pressure and transmit that touch sensation to a nerve cell. The goal is to create artificial skin, studded with many such miniaturized sensors, to give prosthetic appendages some of the sensory capabilities of human skin. Credit: Bao Lab

Engineers have created a plastic skin-like material that can detect pressure and deliver a Morse code-like signal directly to a living brain cell. The work takes a big step toward adding a sense of touch to prosthetic limbs...