The world is in desperate need of new antibiotics, as bacteria continue to evolve and develop resistance to the ones we have. Now, researchers at La Trobe University have found a peptide in the flower of a tobacco plant that could be the first of a new kind of antibiotic.
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Allowing scientists to make cut-and-paste edits to an organism’s genome, the CRISPR gene-editing tool may be powerful, but it’s still a bit clumsy. Now, researchers have developed a neater new version dubbed MAGESTIC, which they describe as swapping the scissors for a word processor.
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If we really want to cut down on the hundreds of millions of malaria cases they cause every year, we need more effective weapons. Now, researchers have used the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing tool to engineered mosquitoes that are highly resistant to the malaria parasite, by deleting one specific gene.
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Needles are usually seen as a necessary evil, but maybe they don’t have to be - plenty of painless alternatives are in the works. Now, a pain-free jet-injection device has emerged from development limbo with a commercialization deal that should see it soon hit the market.
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Legionnaires’ disease can spread when water in a building's air conditioning system becomes infected with Legionella bacteria. Checking for that bacteria takes up to two weeks, and requires water samples to be sent away. The Spartan Cube, however, can do the job on location in less than an hour.
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A team of researchers has found that house flies and blow flies can spread a whole host of bacteria that was previously unsuspected to hitch a ride on the insects. But this bacteria-carrying capability could be hijacked and used in a public health surveillance capacity to track pathogen outbreaks
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A team at Columbia University has studied the health records of over ten million people across three different countries and discovered some compelling links between a person’s lifetime disease risk and the month they were born in.
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While you likely already know that the tsetse fly causes sleeping sickness in people, you may not realize that it also spreads the often-lethal disease among cattle. Help is on the way, however, in the form of antelope-scented cow collars.
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If sepsis is addressed too late, it can result in organ failure and ultimately death. Scientists at the University of Illinois are working at detecting the harmful immune response quicker than ever, with a new lab-on-a-chip device.
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The fight against Ebola continues with news of a new outbreak in the Republic of Congo. That said, a discovery by scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine offers reason to be optimistic: they have found the first human antibodies that can neutralize all strains of ebolavirus.
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