Health News

Everyone’s asking when the pandemic will be over. Here’s how we’ll know

Throughout each day, Cheryl Bettigole receives granular, neighborhood-level updates on the numbers we’ve all been hearing for months. The percentage of people testing positive for COVID-19. Transmission rates. Hospitalizations, deaths, and progress with vaccines—in Philadelphia and beyond. The lines on the graphs often bounce around like the stock market. Yet at some point the city’s […]

Health News

Mapping the mouse brain, and by extension, the human brain too

The circuits of the human brain contain more than 100 billion neurons, each linked to many other neurons via thousands of synaptic connections, resulting in a three-pound organ that is profoundly more complex than the sum of its innumerable parts. In recent years, however, transformative advances in imaging, sequencing and computational technologies have opened the […]

Health News

Unraveling the mystery of why we overeat

Eating is one of life’s greatest pleasures, and overeating is one of life’s growing problems. In 2019, researchers from The Stuber Lab at the University of Washington School of Medicine discovered that certain cells light up in obese mice and prevent signals that indicate satiety, or feeling full. Now comes a deeper dive into what […]

Health News

On the trail of a medical mystery: Scientists zero in on elevated MRSA susceptibility after liver transplants

For decades, recipients of liver transplants have been inexplicably vulnerable to MRSA infection after their lifesaving surgeries, but the molecular mechanisms underlying that risk had remained stubbornly mystifying, at least until now. In the hunt for a culprit at the core of a nagging—and sometimes deadly—susceptibility, a multidisciplinary team of physicians, surgeons and scientists in […]