About 3.7 billion people carry the herpes simplex virus-1 in our nerve cells where it lies quiescent until triggered by stress or injury. When activated, its symptoms are usually mild, limited to cold sores or ulcers in our ...
Jun 22, 2023
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Sensory cells in the vagus nerve can detect and locate food in the esophagus. Their signals help transport the food onward to the stomach. Signal failure leads to swallowing disorders, say a team led by Carmen Birchmeier ...
May 26, 2023
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Coronaviruses spread primarily through the air. When infected people speak, cough, sneeze or laugh, they expel droplets of saliva containing the virus. Other people then breathe in these airborne pathogens and become infected ...
Apr 3, 2023
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129
B lymphocytes—also known simply as B cells—play a central role in the immune system. If pathogens enter the body, B cells are activated and develop into plasma cells, which then release antibodies. One important step ...
Mar 16, 2023
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56
Researchers from the Max Delbrück Center have found a region of the brain that is responsible for our perception of temperature when we touch things. The paper, which appears in Nature, reports the discovery of a "thermal ...
Feb 14, 2023
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Eating too much salt, which is common in many Western societies, is not only bad for our blood pressure and cardiovascular system—it could also adversely impact the immune system.
Feb 9, 2023
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The signaling molecules of the immune system should trigger a response only where necessary. To prevent a life-threatening spread to the rest of the body, connective tissue can absorb these molecules like a sponge. A team ...
Feb 3, 2023
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Cancer has many faces—no wonder, then, that the range of cancer-causing mutations is huge as well. The totality of such genomic alterations in an individual is what experts call a "mutational landscape." These landscapes ...
Jan 25, 2023
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To perform coordinated movements, we rely on special sensory neurons in our muscles and joints. Without them, the brain wouldn't know what the rest of our body was doing. A team led by Niccolò Zampieri has studied their ...
Dec 9, 2022
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Every cell has two mechanisms for repairing DNA single- or double-strand breaks, which can be induced by such factors as environmental toxins, chemotherapy, or ionizing radiation. The first one consists of the DNA repair ...
Sep 21, 2022
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