The Research

S cience is amazing, but it can involve doing some pretty weird stuff. Just in time for Halloween, here are seven science experiments that are creepy, scary, or just plain gross! 1.  Scientist lets insect live inside her The sand flea  Tunga penetrans , here in a scanning electron microscope several days after penetrating the skin. Eye of Science/Science Source The sand flea, also known as chigger flea, is pretty gross. It burrows permanently into the skin of a warm-blooded host—like a human—where it swells, defecates, and produces eggs, before dying 4-6 weeks later, still embedded in the skin. We know a lot about them, but until now, their sex lives have been shrouded in mystery. Not anymore: A researcher in Madagascar was so interested in sand flea development that she let one of the bugs live inside her foot for 2 months. Her intimate observations paid off: She figured out that the parasites most likely have sex when the females are already in...

A s the worldwide death toll from tobacco use continues to climb—it’s currently six million per year and is expected to top eight million by 2030, according to the World Health Organization—efforts to unlock the secrets of nicotine addiction take on a distinct urgency. “Nicotine is one of the most difficult drugs to quit,” says Ines Ibanez-Tallon, a scientists in the lab of Nathaniel Heintz, who is James and Marilyn Simons Professor at the Rockefeller University. For sure, while 70 percent of cigarette smokers in the U.S. say they would like to quit, each year only 3 percent are able to do so successfully. Now, in her latest paper, Ibanez-Tallon and colleagues from Rockefeller, Mount Sinai Medical School, and the National Institute of Biological Sciences, China, move us one step closer to understanding how nicotine maintains its powerful grip on the brain. The research, published this week in the  Proceedings of the National Academy of Science , identifies specific chemica...

F or patients with mild cognitive impairment, don’t be surprised if your health care provider prescribes exercise rather than medication. A new guideline for medical practitioners says they should recommend twice-weekly exercise to people with mild cognitive impairment to improve memory and thinking. The recommendation is part of an updated guideline for mild cognitive impairment published in the Dec. 27 online issue of  Neurology , the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. “Regular physical exercise has long been shown to have heart health benefits, and now we can say exercise also may help improve memory for people with mild cognitive impairment,” says Ronald Petersen, M.D., Ph.D., lead author, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, Mayo Clinic, and the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging. “What’s good for your heart can be good for your brain.” Dr. Petersen is the Cora Kanow Professor of Alzheimer’s Disease Research. Mild cognitive impairment is a...

T umor cells use the unfolded protein response to alter circadian rhythm, which contributes to more tumor growth, Hollings Cancer Center researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) find. A key part of the circadian clock opposes this process, according to a paper published online Dec. 11 in Nature Cell Biology. For tumors to grow and spread, cancer cells must make larger than normal amounts of nucleic acids and protein, so they can replicate themselves. Yet in both normal and cancer cells that increase their synthesis of protein, a small percent of those proteins do not fold properly. When that happens, the cell activates its unfolded protein response (UPR), which slows down the making of new proteins while the misfolded proteins are refolded. Eventually, the buildup of misfolded proteins becomes toxic and leads to cell death. However, cancer cells have learned to use the UPR to slow protein synthesis when needed, in order to handle the backlog of misfolded pro...

Disturbing human experiments aren’t something the average person thinks too much about. Rather, the progress achieved in the last 150 years of human history is an accomplishment we’re reminded of almost daily. Achievements made in fields like biomedicine and psychology mean that we no longer need to worry about things like deadly diseases or masturbation as a form of insanity. For better or worse, we have developed more effective ways to gather information, treat skin abnormalities, and even kill each other. But what we are not constantly reminded of are the human lives that have been damaged or lost in the name of this progress. The following is a list of the 30 most disturbing human experiments in history. 30. The Tearoom Sex Study Sociologist Laud Humphreys often wondered about the men who commit impersonal sexual acts with one another in public restrooms. He wondered why “tearoom sex” — fellatio in public restrooms — led to the majority of homosexual arrests in ...