Tag: how

Teenag who 'switched off' half her brain has to relearn how to talk

When Imogen Golder was four years old, she began to have life-threatening seizures. It took 12 years for her to finally get a diagnosis of rasmussen’s encephalitis, a rare inflammatory neurological disease that can cause dementia. Sufferers of the illness experience frequent and severe seizures, loss of motor skills and speech, weakness on one side

How people would choose who gets scarce COVID-19 treatment

As COVID-19 cases begin climbing again in the United States, the possibility arises of a grim moral dilemma: Which patients should be prioritized if medical resources are scarce? Researchers from the United States and China asked more than 5,000 people from 11 countries how they would make one version of that ethical decision. Study participants

How the immune system deals with the gut’s plethora of microbes

The gut is an unusually noisy place, where hundreds of species of bacteria live alongside whatever microbes happen to have hitched a ride in on your lunch. Scientists have long suspected that the gut’s immune system, in the face of so many stimuli, takes an uncharacteristically blunt approach to population control and protection from foreign

Expert discusses how COVID-19 is monitored

When someone is infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, they can feel a variety of different ways. Some people will be completely asymptomatic, while others will have symptoms, and some can even become severely ill. Many people with symptoms will have fever, chills, sweats, body aches, and a feeling like they have the

How changing vaccine schedules can save costs and lives: Findings from South Africa

In 2005, before most low- and middle-income countries started vaccinating children routinely for pneumococcal disease, it caused approximately 1.5 million deaths worldwide annually. About 700,000 to 1 million of these deaths were in children under five years. Pneumococcal disease occurs when Streptococcus pneumoniae invades a normally sterile area of the body, causing meningitis, pneumonia, septicaemia

Exploring how social touch affects communication between female animals

The sense of touch can significantly affect how animals and humans perceive the world around them, enriching their experiences and allowing them to gather more information about their surroundings and other living organisms. Although touch is a crucial aspect of perceptual experience, in philosophical, psychological and neuroscientific research it has often been overshadowed by vision.