Blocking a key regulator of the immune system helps unleash the body's natural defenses against several forms of cancer, a discovery which opened up a new era of cancer immunotherapy. 

Now researchers have flipped this script and found that, when impaired, a molecularly similar regulator can cause the damaging immune system attacks on skin and organs that are the hallmark of the autoimmune disease lupus. Though still just in the exploratory stage, mice are not little people so this does not translate to humans, the work suggests a way to restore function of this inhibitor which could one day provide new therapy to treat the disease.

A joke in nutrition circles is that while you once needed to be rich to be fat, now you need to be rich to be thin. Scientific progress has given us cheap food, anyone can afford to eat well, and after an existence of worrying about food availability it takes generations for culture to change to not eating as much as we can. Rich people, though, have gym memberships.

The holiday season brings up memories and emotions for people of all ages, but elders are often overlooked. This time of year also can provide an opportunity to become more alert to signs of elder abuse, aware of how to help and available to begin sincere conversations with older adults about their perceptions of abuse and the remedies they recommend.

Since 2007, claim lines with diagnoses of Lyme disease increased nationally 117 percent, according to a new white paper.

Medieval doctors had to acquire a range of skills including an ability to read Latin texts, a working knowledge of the bodily “humours” and an understanding of the rudiments of blood circulation. Their diagnostic techniques were largely limited to examining a patient’s urine: they could match the colour of the urine to that on a chart, such as one now in the Bodleian Library, which offers an alarming spectrum of hues. After diagnosis, one of the most important treatments was bloodletting, for which physicians used detailed astrological charts.

A new study found that people given accurate statistics on a controversial issue misremembered those numbers to fit commonly held beliefs.

That means the source of fake news is often not malevolent organizations manipulating social media, it is people convinced they are correct. 

How did the most famous concept devised in neurobiology--the homunculus of neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield - originate?

Some answers derive from assessing Penfield's archives at the Osler Library of McGill University, as well as the only known copy from which the beginnings of the homunculus may be traced--Edwin Boldrey's 1936 McGill master's degree thesis supervised by Penfield.

Biotechnology is the future of plant optimization, because ecology and people demand more sustainable food development, and that means embracing progress.

A roadmap of the genes which drive plant architecture in maize will help, because plants grow throughout their entire life, controlled by a small structure at the tip of the plant’s shoots, known as the meristem.

A cross-sectional study has found that head and neck injuries related to cell phone use increased steadily over a recent 20-year period.

But that may not be meaningful in a relative risk way. The sample was just over 2,500 cases from 1998 through 2017. Media will trumpet 300 percent since 2007 but that doesn't make injuries common. It just means that as phones changed from phones to messagers to full-on portable televisions and computers people are able to walk and be distracted more.

Although I’m a trained and credentialed epidemiologist, and an ardent supporter of the professional discipline as a foundational science that underlies legitimate public health efforts, several of my past blogs (Bond 2016 and Bond 2017) have remarked on the many limitations of observational epidemiology¹ research for establishing disease causation.