Trait Psychology Fights Back

Innate Immunity: The Worm Fights Back

Innate immunity is an evolutionarily ancient defense system that enables animals and plants to resist invading microorganisms. Recent studies have demonstrated the existence of innate immune responses in Caenorhabditis elegans.

Hedgehog fights back: mechanisms of acquired resistance against Smoothened antagonists.

Acquired resistance to targeted therapies threatens the value of these otherwise very promising agents. The recent description of resistance to the Hedgehog pathway inhibitor vismodegib (GDC-0449) in a medulloblastoma patient who had a dramatic initial response has spurred efforts to understand potential mechanisms of drug resistance. Elucidating these mechanisms will play a significant role in...

Learning the Past Tense of English Verbs: Connectionism Fights Back

The ability to learn the past tense of English verbs has become a benchmark test for cognitive modelling. In a recent paper, Ling (1994) presented a detailed head-to-head comparison of the generalization abilities of a particular Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model and a general purpose Symbolic Pattern Associator (SPA). The conclusion was that the SPA generalizes the past tense of unseen ver...

Trait psychology comes of age.

When Cancer Fights Back: Multiple Myeloma, Proteasome Inhibition, and the Heat-Shock Response.

Multiple myeloma is a plasma cell malignancy with an estimated 26,850 new cases and 11,240 deaths in 2015 in the United States. Two main classes of agents are the mainstays of therapy-proteasome inhibitors (PI) and immunomodulatory drugs (IMiD). Other new targets are emerging rapidly, including monoclonal antibodies and histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors. These therapeutic options have great...