Long-Distance Marine Connectivity: Poorly Understood but Potentially Important

Thrombosis – Besieged but Poorly Understood

In biology, thrombosis is a mechanism of maintaining the integrity of biological surfaces in higher mammals, limiting fluid loss, and facilitating the recognition, containment, and destruction of pathogens and foreign materials by a scaffold of fibrin and DNA strands. However, thrombosis may also lead to vascular occlusion and subsequent tissue damage. In medicine, thrombosis is a hallmark of l...

Rare, potentially fatal, poorly understood propofol infusion syndrome

We present the case of a 7-year old boy with traumatic brain injury who received propofol during 38 h. Thirty-six hours after cessation of propofol infusion asystole occurred. After immediate mechanical and medical resuscitation, unreactive dilated pupils were observed. The following computed tomography scan revealed a generalized brain edema with transtentorial herniation. Prolonged bradyarrhy...

Q Fever: An Old but Still a Poorly Understood Disease

Q fever is a bacterial infection affecting mainly the lungs, liver, and heart. It is found around the world and is caused by the bacteria Coxiella burnetii. The bacteria affects sheep, goats, cattle, dogs, cats, birds, rodents, and ticks. Infected animals shed this bacteria in birth products, feces, milk, and urine. Humans usually get Q fever by breathing in contaminated droplets released by in...

Premenstrual asthma: still poorly understood.

Oligonucleotide microarrays: widely applied--poorly understood.

Microarray technology, which has been around for almost two decades, now provides an indispensable service to the biomedical research community. Soaring demand for high-throughput screening of genes potentially associated with cancer and other diseases, as well as the increased need for identifying microorganisms, have substantially opened up the application of this technology to many fields of...