Healing Power

Healing power of honey.

Say the word “insect” and what comes to mind? I asked that question to nonentomology, first-year undergraduate students on the first day of class. The typical response: “Insects suck.” I suspect they were thinking of the suffering inflicted by mosquitoes and other bloodfeeding insects, crop damage caused by their vegetarian counterparts, and the invasion of human dwellings by cockroaches and te...

The healing power of Ron

n vertebrate cells, not all potential DNA replication origins fire in each S phase, but it is unclear what parameters control that decision. Mauro Anglana, Michelle Debatisse (Institut Curie, Paris, France), and colleagues find that nucleotide availability can determine which origins are activated. Under normal conditions (when nucleotides were readily available), initiation occurred predominan...

The Healing Power of Music

Sugar saps FOXO1’s healing power

Glucose’s effect on the transcription factor FOXO1 isn’t sweet. The protein usually fosters tissue repair, but Zhang et al. reveal that FOXO1 inhibits healing when sugar levels are high (1). This role reversal helps explain why wounds heal slowly in people with diabetes. For diabetes patients, even a cut or scrape can result in severe complications. Because the skin doesn’t close promptly, bact...

Vision for a self - healing power grid

Power system reliability has been thrust into the limelight by recent blackouts around the world. The social and economic costs of these failures can add up to billions of dollars every year. As the digital age prevails, more efficient manufacturing processes, based on computers and power electronics, have come to dominate industry. As the portion of electricity in the total energy consumption ...