✔️ The A&P Professor Science & Education Updates - Issue #131

Life Science

What is the significance of the sclera of our eyes? A question which researchers have been interested in for some time now. Recently a research team led by comparative psychologist Dr Fuhimiro Kano has succeeded in deciphering the mystery: The white of the eye contributes decisively to the visibility of directions of gaze through its basic colour properties.

Wound Healing and Stem Cells When wounds of intermediate depth occur, hair-follicle stem cells migrate to the wound and adopt the function, form, and gene-expression pattern of epidermal stem cells...

Nearly 75 years ago, researchers discovered that high levels of fetal hemoglobin appeared to prevent the complications of sickle cell disease in babies. This finding raised a series of related questions. How does fetal hemoglobin prevent deoxy-sickle hemoglobin polymerization? Which differences in amino acids between fetal and adult hemoglobin are critical to such antisickling effects? Could the postnatal switch from fetal to adult hemoglobin be reversed?

The next chapter of our Covid response will center on unwinding the tangle of policies put in place to help the country address the virus.

Flu shots aren’t preventing this season’s dominant strain of the virus from causing mild or moderate illness that requires medical treatment, according to an interim analysis by U.S. government-led researchers.

The formulation’s efficacy at preventing such cases was estimated at 16%, which was statistically indistinguishable from being unvaccinated, according to the study led by the U.S. Centers for Disease Prevention and Control. The findings were reported Thursday in the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. 

Vaccines that target multiple coronaviruses at once based on common elements are in the works to help dampen future pandemics.

Cancer detection is a major public health challenge, and the methods currently available to achieve it, for example MRIs and mammograms, are often expensive and invasive. This limits their large-scale use. To bypass these constraints, alternative methods are being studied, like the use of animals' sense of smell.

Patients in the emergency department reported significant positive changes to how they were feeling after the interaction.

Teaching & Learning

The 2002 report sent shock waves through medicine. But today, health disparities and the structural racism underlying them remain.

To reflect on the 2 years since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, we asked young scientists to imagine that they could go back in time and create a university course that would help scientists navigate the years 2020 to 2022. Read their pandemic course catalog here.

TAPP News & Notes

Get all the new audio episodes focused on teaching human anatomy & physiology. Hosted by A&P professor, author, & blogger Dr. Kevin Patton. TAPP Radio is an A&P professor's favorite virtual mentor!