A new study published in Nature Communications reveals a novel approach to mitigating tissue damage caused by Streptococcus pyogenes, the flesh-eating bacterium responsible for severe infections such as necrotizing fasciitis. The research highlights how disrupting bacterial metabolism can help the body better tolerate infection and heal more effectively. 

The Zika virus builds tiny tunnels, called tunneling nanotubes, to stealthily transport material needed to infect nearby cells, including in placental cells, according to a team of researchers from Penn State and Baylor College of Medicine. It’s one way the virus crosses the placental barrier, transmitting from mother to fetus during pregnancy without raising alarm in the immune system. The team also demonstrated, for the first time, that one specific Zika protein — non-structural protein 1 (NS1) — is responsible for the formation of the nanotubes.

Funding from the National Institutes of Health will allow the team to investigate how a technique called cranial osteopathic manual manipulation might affect brain fluid motion and help balance the autonomic nervous system.

Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine have developed a powerful AI tool, built on the same transformer architecture used by large language models like ChatGPT, to process an entire night’s sleep. To date, it is one of the largest studies, analyzing 1,011,192 hours of sleep. Details on their findings were reported in the March 13 online issue of the journal Sleep [https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsaf061]. The model, called patch foundational transformer for sleep (PFTSleep), analyzes brain waves, muscle activity, heart rate, and breathing patterns to classify sleep stages more effectively than traditional methods, streamlining sleep analysis, reducing variability, and supporting future clinical tools to detect sleep disorders and other health risks.