Artemisinin is the first of a class of drugs to kill the plasmodium in its early stages and is extremely effective.
Although Artemisinin is a game-changer, Tu’s victory may be short-lived: The parasite is beginning to evolve resistance to Artemisinin in places like Burma and Cambodia, Laurens said. The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura "for their discoveries concerning a novel therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasites," and Youyou Tu "for her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against malaria."
The therapies developed by these scientists, including the drugs Avermectin – a therapy developed by Campbell and Ōmura against onchocerciasis (commonly known as river blindness) and lymphatic filariasis (commonly known as elephantiasis) – and Artemisinin – a treatment developed by Tu for malaria – have saved many lives in some of the most vulnerable populations around the world.
Campbell and Ōmura were awarded one half of the prize, and Tu received the other half. Campbell is a native of Ireland with a faculty position at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Ōmura is a Japanese citizen and emeritus professor at Kitasato University in Tokyo. Tu is a citizen of China and chief professor at the China Academy of Traditional Science Medicine in Beijing.
Both experiments provided big answers.
"Neutrinos are among the fundamental particles," explained McDonald by phone during this morning's Nobel announcement in Sweden.
"The neutrino has a mass and it's more than a million times lighter than the electron," said Botner.
"Neutrinos punch above their weight. They contribute as much mass as stars do," Turner said. The mathematical model of the brain, published in Physical Review Letters, marks the latest attempt to simulate the surprisingly complicated effects of general anesthetics across the brain. Despite modern medicine’s 160-year use of ether, laughing gas and propofol in surgery, researchers still don’t know how exactly they tamp down the back-and-forth between the thalamus – the brain’s hub for sensory information – and the cortex, the wrinkly outer layer and seat of consciousness.
“It’s a medical wonder that we really don’t know the molecular mechanism,” said Yan Xu, the vice chairman for basic sciences at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in Pennsylvania, and the senior author of the study.
Researchers can track the amount of activity in the cortex by measuring brain waves, the rhythmic electrical crackles in the brain’s outermost nerve cells. A dose of anesthetics caused brain waves to predictably drop off, as activity unsurprisingly ebbs. But how do anesthetics — which act on individual nerves — slow down brain waves as a whole?
This isn’t an easy question. It’s a bit like asking how millions of leaderless ants coalesce and build an anthill. So researchers tried mathematically modeling these patterns in an effort to understand what might be going on. Xu, his student David Zhou and their collaborators started by building a mathematically generic “brain” with a branch of mathematics called percolation theory, which can be used to model everything from sponges’ porosity to flu outbreaks.
In essence, the theory assembles a large grid and then lays down some rules about how things move through the grid. In a coffeepot modeled with percolation theory, for example, the coffee grounds constitute a 3-D lattice, and a point in this lattice can be occupied by one of two things: empty space or a solid coffee ground.
In order to brew a cup of joe, water needs to weave its way through the grounds through a continuous path of empty space in the grid. But the odds of this path existing change with how loosely or tightly the coffee grounds are packed. At some happy medium, the coffee grounds just barely let water drip through, sending delicious coffee into the pot below. The mixture of coffee grounds and empty space delicately straddles the gap between no dripping and too much dripping, demarcating a “phase transition” much like that which occurs in liquid water on the cusp of boiling into vapor.
For their percolation model, Zhou and Xu mathematically built a grid of “nerve cells” wired together in layers roughly resembling the structures of the thalamus and cortex. Each “nerve cell” could send signals to others; “remember” the effects of prior signals it had received; and randomly fail to fire.
They are one of the most abundant kinds of known particles in the universe, second only to photons, or particles of light. Yet they are elusive and mysterious. Even though an estimated billions of neutrinos pass through humans every second, they "pass through our body unfelt and unseen," said Botner. Researchers already knew that chronic overeating can cause obesity and resistance to the insulin that the body uses to process glucose -- frequently leading to diabetes. But just how obesity leads to insulin resistance is unknown. Scientists have suspected a variety of factors, said Salim Merali, a biochemist at Temple University in Philadelphia and coauthor of the new study.
"But all of those are late events. They occur months and months after overeating," he said. "What is not known is, what are the early events that occur when someone overeats?"
To find out, the researchers put healthy, non-obese men on a 6,000-calorie diet. The volunteers were told they could be at risk for insulin resistance and would be expected to gain several pounds in a week. Guenther Boden, lead author on the new study and professor of medicine at Temple University, said the warnings of possible weight gain and safety risks were the main reason he was unable to recruit any women.
"We told them, 'You might gain six or seven pounds at the end of the week,' and that was the end of conversation," he said. "It's very difficult to get women for a study like this." researchers have developed a new algorithm that detects and measures wheezing, providing crucial information to help doctors monitor and understand diseases such as asthma, lung cancer, cystic fibrosis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease – or COPD.
The new method is not only more accurate than previous algorithms, according to the researchers, it also requires less data and computer power to extract the information a doctor needs to know about a patient's breathing.
"Our approach outperforms anything that we know out there in the literature," said Hamid Krim, an electrical engineer at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, who developed the algorithm with Saba Emrani, a graduate student at N.C. State. They're presenting the work at the 2015 European Signal Processing Conference in Nice, France, on September 3.
Although the algorithm can be used with all kinds of devices, the researchers envision that it will be part of a system connecting a smartphone with wireless sensors worn on the chest that track every breath an individual takes. Even through background noise, the algorithm can pick out when a patient is wheezing, and identify the characteristics of those wheezes.