Loss of muscle volume is a common debilitating outcome of traumatic orthopedic injury, resulting in muscle weakness and loss of limb function.  The current best solution is muscle graft but a new therapeutic approach uses small pieces of autologous muscle which can be expanded in a collagen hydrogel and used to regenerate functional muscle at the sight of injury.

A study demonstrating the feasibility of using autologous minced tissue grafts for muscle regeneration shows it would be better for repairing large areas of muscle loss.  

Some studies find that the immune system, which protects our bodies from foreign invaders, plays a part in Alzheimer's disease, though the actual role of immunity in the disease is a mystery.

A new Duke University study in mice suggests that in Alzheimer's disease, certain immune cells that normally protect the brain begin to abnormally consume an important nutrient: arginine. Blocking this process with a small-molecule drug prevented the characteristic brain plaques and memory loss in a mouse model of the disease.

Many newborns are exposed in their earliest days to bisphenol A (BPA) and lots of other chemicals, the world is all chemical, but BPA has been the subject of more scrutiny than most because it is ubiquitous. Due to that, environmental advocacy studies have claimed there is probably risk to adults and newborns, while more neutral science says that it is detectable but not harmful.

If you have hepatitis B or C and feel like you are treated poorly by others due to it, you are not alone. As many as half of people infected with viral hepatitis say they have suffered discrimination and one-quarter admit that family members have avoided physical contact with them after finding out they had the infection. 

What makes triple negative breast cancer more lethal in African-American women than European-American ("White") women? A new study reveals specific genetic alterations that appears to impact their prognosis and ultimately survival rates.

Seismologists have discovered a massive magma reservoir beneath the Yellowstone supervolcano in Wyoming, US, that suggests its volcanic system could be more than 5.6 times larger than was previously thought.

I am presently in Athens for a few days, to give a seminar and meet the local group of CMS physicists. So I took the chance to visit yesterday evening the Astrophysics department of the University of Athens, where at the top floor is housed a nice 40cm Cassegrain telescope (see picture below). There I joined a small crowd which professor Kosmas Gazeas entertained with views of Jupiter, the Moon, Venus, and a few other celestial targets. I need to thank my friend Nadia, a fellow physicist and amateur astronomer, for inviting us to the event.

When a feather or a plastic bag or almost anything light is placed in water, these items will generally float.  This is easy to understand if you think of water being more dense than the other item.  If you put something heavier in water, it tends to sink like a rock or a piece of metal but this doesn't fully explain how an iron ship can float. 

Scientists may get frustrated at Dr. Oz and The Food Babe and other people who are against genetically modified organisms (GMOs) while munching happily on organic strains created by mutagenesis, but if we care about cognitive science issues, the evidence-based world might want to be a little kinder to them in the future.

The reason some people don't trust science has evolutionary roots, a group of Belgian scholars believe - science is complex, they say, and when brains were more primitive, the world had to be made as simple as possible. So 'if I can't pronounce it, you should not eat it' may be a relic of our neuroscience past and some people will have that fear in greater amounts than others.

What does it mean when a supermassive black hole exists in a place where it isn't supposed to exist? It's another puzzle of the early universe.

Henize 2-10 is a small irregular galaxy that is not too far away, at least in astronomical terms: 30 million light-years. "This is a dwarf starburst galaxy -- a small galaxy with regions of very rapid star formation -- about 10 percent of the size of our own Milky Way," says Ryan Hickox, an assistant professor in Dartmouth's Department of Physics and Astronomy. "If you look at it, it's a blob, but it surprisingly harbors a central black hole."