Australian-German research finds world-first cure for deadly skin disease

Sydney, (IANS): Researchers from Australia and Germany have for the first time cured patients suffering from toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN), a deadly skin disease, said a news release on Monday.An international collaboration, including researchers from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) in Melbourne and the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Germany, has developed the first-ever cure for TEN in a breakthrough study published in Nature, WEHI said in a news release on Monday.Also known as Lyell's syndrome, TEN is a rare skin disease that causes widespread blistering and detachment of the skin and can lead to dehydration, sepsis, pneumonia and organ failure, Xinhua news agency reported.The potentially deadly condition is triggered by a severe adverse reaction to common medications and has a mortality rate of approximately 30 per cent.The new study identified a hyperactivation of the JAK-STAT signaling pathway - a chain of interactions between proteins in a cell that is involved in processes such as immunity, cell death and tumour formation - as a driver of TEN.By using JAK inhibitors - an existing class of drugs used to treat inflammatory diseases - they were able to treat patients with TEN."Finding a cure for lethal diseases like this is the holy grail of medical research. I am beyond proud of this...

Read More........→November 13, 2024

Scientists Studying Crows Get Big Surprise –They’re So Smart They Understand the Concept of Zero

Chuck Homler, DBA Focus on Wildlife/CC license 4.0Building on substantial evidence of crow consciousness, a German university has proven some crows can learn to recognize ‘zero’ as a counting unit. While that sounds ridiculous, zero is not nothing, rather it’s one of the most complex mathematical concepts devised—that something can and should represent nothing, not only as the base value, but as a placeholder. The work comes from the University of Tübingen in Germany, where professor Andreas Nieder works with carrion crows to perform intelligence tests. “The conception of “nothing” as number “zero” is celebrated as one of the greatest achievements in mathematics,” wrote Nieder in his paper. “We show that crows can grasp the empty set as a null numerical quantity that is mentally represented next to number one.” Exactly how this breakthrough was made is straightforward and did not involve birds watching Sesame Street. The crows were shown two sets of dots on a screen and were taught to indicate if the two screens had the same values. There could be between zero and four dots. Exactly as with 1, 2, 3, and 4—when the screens showed no dots, neurons in the crow’s brain demonstrated it was understanding this was a numeric value, but that it was a numeric value that contained nothing. Sometimes the crows made mistakes, often by thinking...

Read More........→May 01, 2024