In Margaret Atwood's 1988 novel "Cat's Eye," protagonist Elaine Risley describes the freedom of being a female painter in the male-dominated art world of the 1950s (and beyond): "Since it does not matter what I do, I can do whatever I want."

Biological sex, as well as gender in humans, affect the physiology of health and disease in major ways. Neurodevelopmental disorders, autoimmune disease, stroke – all of these affect men and women at different frequencies, and in different ways.

Researchers from Yale University and the Russian Shemyakin-Ovchinnikov Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry have developed an ultra high-throughput (uHT) microfluidic method that allowed them to profile the activity of complex microbiomes, and used it to isolate an antibiotic that was active against Staphylococcus aureus from the saliva of the Siberian bear. 

By simultaneously targeting two opioid receptor subtypes, researchers from Wake Forest School of Medicine and Astraea Therapeutics Inc. have developed a compound that, in nonhuman primates, was an effective analgesic that not only lacked the rewarding effects of currently used opioid analgesic, but blocked those effects, making it a potential treatment for both pain and opioid addiction.

Scientists at Stanford University have shown that activation of the opioid transmission system was necessary for ketamine's antidepressant effects. Ketamine, originally developed for its anesthetic properties, is also an effective antidepressant in about half of all individuals with treatment-resistant depression. 

In findings that underscore the complex roles of inflammation in the brain, researchers have reported that in a transgenic mouse model of Alzheimer's disease (AD), proinflammatory cytokines protected the animals from developing seizures that were severe enough to kill the animals.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have developed a gene therapy method that was successful in treating an autosomal dominant form of blindness in preclinical experiments.