Two major papers on repurposed drugs for COVID-19 by researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital face intense skepticism from the research community, prompting the editorial boards of The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet to publish Expressions of Concern on the validity of the underlying data. Such expressions are often the first step toward an outright retraction.

Fidget spinners are hand-held toys based on a roller bearing and three weighted lobes, which can spin freely, creating centrifugal force when activated manually.

In emergency situations, broad-spectrum antibiotics have their place. But their indiscriminate use has led to a resistance crisis that already kills tens of thousands of people annually in the U.S. alone.

Investigators are working to develop electrogenetic devices that use remote-controlled electrical stimulation to elicit specific behaviors in engineered cells. They are following in the footsteps of optogenetics, which use specific wavelengths of light to control cell function remotely. A new study published in Science used such a device paired with encapsulated, engineered human pancreatic beta cells to express enough insulin to restore normal glycemic levels in mice models of diabetes.

Investigators are working to develop electrogenetic devices that use remote-controlled electrical stimulation to elicit specific behaviors in engineered cells.

LONDON – A vast new body of genomics research has identified thousands of rare genetic variants that are predicted to cause loss of function in protein coding genes, providing novel in vivo models of human gene inactivation.