Knowtex

Sometimes,the unexpected leads to discoveries. A clinical observation has put researchers on the trail of a new treatment for Parkinson’s disease. Injecting bee venom seems to hold back the slow and progressive degeneration of dopaminergic neurons.

CrowdMed is revolutionizing healthcare by harnessing ‘the wisdom of crowds’ to help solve even the world’s most difficult medical cases quickly and accurately online.

MEDinART is an online place for artists around the world that communicate through their art aspects of bio-medical sciences.

Since the beginning of the month, China has been affected by an outbreak of avian influenza. According to a survey conducted in Bangladesh during a severe epidemic in 2007, half of the people surveyed had never heard of this disease.

Our activities on the web, on our own time, can affect the work of epidemiologists—sometimes providing information, but also complicating matters by influencing our behavior. Analysis of search engine queries and communication via social networks could become standard tools of epidemiology.

 Grippenet, the French flu surveillance platform, tracks the illness through users’ self-reported symptoms. As epidemiologist Vittoria Colizza explains, involving citizens in this way yields unique and important information to complement data from traditional epidemic tracking systems.

Brain scans of expert perfumers show an increase in size in brain regions associated with smell, compared to untrained individuals. The more experience a perfume professional has, the greater the increase, compared to his or her less experienced peers.

Last summer, Florida high school student Brittanny Wenger was awarded first place in the Google Science Fair for building a cloud-based neural network to help doctors better detect breast cancer using a less invasive form of biopsy, known as Fine Needle Aspiration (FNA).

What do John Gurdon, Shinya Yamanaka, Brian Kobilka and Serge Haroche have in common? Yes, they are all winners of the 2012 Nobel Prize, but besides that? All of these Nobel laureates have also chosen to publish their research in open access.

For the past 70 years, Venezuelan researcher Dr. Jacinto Convit has been investigating some of the most challenging public health problems, from leprosy to leishmaniasis to cancer, and caring for thousands of the patients most in need.