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This 3D-printed robotic arm could be the most advanced and most realistic yet.

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Here’s how HyperStealth Biotechnology Corp.’s ‘invisibility cloak’ works ✨.

A new CDC report sets a baseline of infections and deaths from antibiotic-resistant germs and outlines strategies to slow drug-resistant infections.

An analysis of data from 1,654 people suggests that sleep duration may help predict early death risk in people with type 2 diabetes or hypertension.

Studies on gut bacteria in Parkinson’s disease differ in their findings and important methodological details, according to a new review that highlights these differences and proposes strategies to mitigate them in the future.

The study, titled “ Increasing Comparability and Utility of Gut Microbiome Studies in Parkinson’s Disease: A Systematic Review,” was published in the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease.

Although Parkinson’s is often thought of as a disorder of the brain, the gut likely plays an important role in the disease, but it has only been seriously studied in recent years. A number of studies have recently focused on how the gut microbiome — the bacteria that live inside the intestines — might impact Parkinson’s.

For a heavy drinker whose liver has been destroyed by alcohol, an organ transplant is often the only realistic option. But because of donor liver shortages and rules that withhold them from people who have not shed their alcohol addiction, many go without. Tens of thousands die from alcoholic liver disease each year in the United States—and some go downhill much faster than others. Now, scientists have found a reason for this disparity: a toxin produced by some strains of a common gut bacterium. Working in mice, they have also tested a potential therapy, based on bacteria-destroying viruses found lurking in the sewer.

Why some drinkers with liver disease fare much worse than others “has always been a conundrum,” says Jasmohan Bajaj, a gastroenterologist and liver specialist at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. The bacterium Enterococcus faecalis offers an explanation, Bernd Schnabl, a gastroenterologist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), School of Medicine, and colleagues report this week in Nature. In fecal samples from patients with alcoholic liver disease, levels of it were 2700 times higher than in nondrinkers, although the mere quantity didn’t correlate with a person’s outcome. Instead, the researchers identified a cell-destroying toxin called cytolysin produced by select strains of E. faecalis as the likely reason that some patients with alcoholic liver disease had severe symptoms.

Fewer than 5% of healthy people carry the toxinmaking strains, but the group found them in 30% of the people hospitalized with alcoholic liver disease whom they tested. And those patients had a much higher mortality rate within 180 days of admission—89% of the cytolysin-positive patients died compared with only 3.8% of the other patients. “Cytolysin is a factor that really drives mortality and liver disease severity,” Schnabl says.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel, and ETH Zurich, Switzerland, have presented new insights into the development of the human brain and differences in this process compared to other great apes. The study reveals features of brain development that are unique to humans, and outlines how these processes have diverged from those in other primates.

Since humans diverged from a common ancestor shared with chimpanzees and the other great apes, the human brain has changed dramatically. However, the genetic and developmental processes responsible for this divergence are not understood. Cerebral organoids (brain-like tissues), grown from stem cells in a dish, offer the possibility to study the evolution of early brain development in the laboratory.

Sabina Kanton, Michael James Boyle and Zhisong He, co-first authors of the study, together with Gray Camp, Barbara Treutlein and colleagues analyzed human cerebral organoids through their development from stem cells to explore the dynamics of gene expression and regulation using methods called single-cell RNA-seq and ATAC-seq. The authors also examined chimpanzee and macaque cerebral organoids to understand how organoid development differs in humans.

Scientists at the Morgridge Institute for Research have isolated a natural chemical that acts as a potent kryptonite against schistosomes, the parasitic worms that burrow through human skin and cause devastating health problems.

A research team led by Morgridge investigator Phillip Newmark reported in today’s (Oct. 17, 2019) issue of PLOS Biology the successful characterization of this chemical, which could lead to new ways to fight the neglected tropical disease schistosomiasis. This disease, caused by schistosome infection, affects more than 240 million people in Africa, Asia and parts of South America.

In this work the Newmark team focused on a phase of the schistosome life cycle that’s an intriguing target for preventing infection. Schistosomes seek out freshwater snails as hosts in order to produce millions of tiny fork-tailed creatures called cercaria, which are unleashed in the water and seek out mammals to infect. Their frenzied swimming allows them to penetrate human skin in minutes.