Focus: Hidden - Maryland

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The flu virus can be lethal. But what is often just as dangerous is the body’s own reaction to the invader. Now, a University of Maryland School of Medicine researcher has identified a “decoy” molecule that can rein in this runaway inflammatory response.

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A new ultrasonic fingerprint sensor measures 3-D image of your finger’s surface and the tissue beneath it—enhancing biometrics and information security for smartphones and other devices

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The annual incidence rates for accidental drownings among U.S. active component service members decreased during a 10-year surveillance period, but death rates remained relatively stable, according to a newly released health surveillance report.

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An analysis of the results of more than 16,000 brain and spine surgeries suggests patients have nothing to fear from having residents — physicians-in-training — assist in those operations. The contributions of residents, who work under the supervision and alongside senior physicians, do nothing to increase patients’ risks of postoperative complications or of dying within 30 days of the surgery, the analysis showed.

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Johns Hopkins dean responds on ACA: Focus on patient care, health all through life is right up the alley of a new breed of caregiver,

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Charles L. Rice, M.D., president of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, announced the selection of Yvonne T. Maddox, Ph.D., former acting director of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities at the National Institutes of Health, effective June 15, 2015.

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A large number of patients use online communication tools such as email and Facebook to engage with their physicians, despite recommendations from some hospitals and professional organizations that clinicians limit email contact with patients and avoid “friending” patients on social media, new research suggests.

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On the hunt for better cancer screening tests, Johns Hopkins scientists led a proof of principle study that successfully identified tumor DNA shed into the blood and saliva of 93 patients with head and neck cancer. A report on the findings is published in the June 24 issue of Science Translational Medicine.

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In a genome-wide association study believed to be the largest of its kind, Johns Hopkins researchers have uncovered four regions in the human genome where changes may increase the risk of pancreatic cancer.

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Working with heart muscle cells from diabetic rats, scientists at Johns Hopkins have located what they say is the epicenter of mischief wreaked by too much blood sugar and used a sugar-gobbling enzyme to restore normal function in the glucose-damaged cells of animal heart muscles.

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In what may be a major leap forward in the quest for new treatments of the most common form of cardiovascular disease, scientists at Johns Hopkins report they have found a way to halt and reverse the progression of atherosclerosis in rodents by loading microscopic nanoparticles with a chemical that restores the animals’ ability to properly handle cholesterol.

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Congress needs to immediately lift the ban on federal funding for needle exchange programs to counter the threat of HIV outbreaks among injection drug users like the one that has seen an alarming number of new cases erupt in a single rural Indiana county.

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Outpatient Treatment May Help Patients Whose Cancer Has Spread to the Spine with their pain and quality of life

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Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) scientists have profiled key features of the genetic material inside three types of brain cells and found vast differences in the patterns of chemical modifications that affect how the genes in each type of neuron are regulated. The analysis was made possible by a new method of collecting and purifying the nuclei of specific kinds of cells. Doing this type of study on cells in brain tissue has been challenging because the cells are densely packed and intimately intertwined.

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Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered an immense cloud of hydrogen dispersing from a warm, Neptune-sized planet orbiting a nearby star. The enormous comet-like tail of the planet is about 50 times the size of the parent star. The findings will be published in the June 25 issue of the journal Nature.

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The notion that geography often shapes economic and political destiny has long informed the work of economists and political scholars. Now a study led by medical scientists at Johns Hopkins reveals how geography also appears to affect the very survival of people with end-stage kidney disease in need of dialysis.

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"How American Can Spend Its Way Back to Greatness" explains how the nation's money supply is created and outlines how Congress could create a new money stream to directly fund the nation's most urgent needs.

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Fish may seem to glide effortlessly through the water, but the tiny ripples they leave behind are evidence of a constant give-and-take of energy between the swimmer and its aqueous environment -- a momentum exchange that propels the fish forward but is devilishly tricky to quantify. Now, new research shows that a fish's propulsion can be understood by studying vortices in the surrounding water as individual units instead of examining the flow as a whole.

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In a proof-of-concept study, a team led by a Johns Hopkins researcher reports that the vast majority of edible cannabis products sold in a small sample of medical marijuana dispensaries carried labels that overstated or understated the amount of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Though the scope of the study was small, the researchers say, the results of the study suggest some medical cannabis patients could be unintentionally overdosing or are being cheated by mislabeled products.

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Many primary care physicians – the top prescribers of prescription pain pills in the United States – don’t understand basic facts about how people may abuse the drugs or how addictive different formulations of the medications can be, new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health research suggests.

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A review of medical records for almost 200 patients with breast cancer suggests that more selective use of biomarker testing for such patients has the potential to save millions of dollars in health care spending without compromising care.

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Mild elevations in blood pressure considered to be in the upper range of normal during young adulthood can lead to subclinical heart damage by middle age — a condition that sets the stage for full-blown heart failure, according to findings of a federally funded study led by scientists at Johns Hopkins

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High-transition-temperature materials demand novel device architectures, which have proved difficult to create. Added to that set of challenges, process control at the sub-10-nanometer-scale is required to make high-quality Josephson junctions -- the basic building block of superconducting electronics -- out of these materials. Maneuvering around these challenges, a group of researchers has developed a new approach to fabricate oxide Josephson junctions, which they report in a paper this week in Applied Physics Letters.

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The new study, co-led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator David Reich at Harvard Medical School and Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, provides the first genetic evidence that humans interbred with Neanderthals in Europe.

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Many women experience water retention and bloating when their hormone levels change, but how sex hormones affect water balance is not understood. A new study offers an explanation, finding that sex hormones can directly control how the body reabsorbs water.

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An amino acid whose role in the body has been all but a mystery appears to act as a potent seizure inhibitor in mice, according to a study by researchers at Johns Hopkins.

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By volunteering to mail saliva to researchers working with their health care provider, thousands of people in California have helped build one of the nation’s most powerful medical research tools. The researchers have now published the first reports describing these volunteers’ genetic characteristics, how their self-reported ethnicity relates to genetic ancestry, and details of the innovative methods that allowed them to complete DNA analysis within 14 months. The articles are published in the journal GENETICS.

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You can whack it with a hammer, attack it with a drill, or even stab it with a screwdriver. But try as you might, you won’t be able to get into this pill dispenser. Which is exactly the idea.

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Astronomers used Hubble Space Telescope's near-infrared vision to uncover the mysterious early formative years of quasars, the brightest beacons in the universe. Hubble's sharp images unveil chaotic collisions between galaxies that gave birth to quasars by fueling supermassive central black holes. Join the live Hubble Hangout discussion at 3:00 pm EDT on Thurs., June 18, to learn even more about these dust-reddened quasars and the Hubble Space Telescope. To join, visit http://hbbl.us/z7F .

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A cosmetic surgery that uses injections of hyaluronic acid to make lips appear fuller could also improve the lives of people with facial paralysis, according to results of a small study by researchers at Johns Hopkins and Stanford universities.

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Patients seeking certainty in genetic tests often receive a perplexing result. Many learn they carry a “variant of unknown significance” of a disease-linked gene. Such variants might—or equally might not—increase disease risk. A study published in the June issue of the journal GENETICS characterized nearly 2000 variants of the breast cancer-associated gene BRCA1, demonstrating the potential of a new approach for sorting out which variants are harmful and which are harmless.

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With the help of some Johns Hopkins University math students, Minor League Baseball is catching up with the majors in using computers to produce season schedules.

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Leo Rouse, D.D.S., F.A.C.D., dean of Howard University’s College of Dentistry, was recently confirmed by the Secretary of Defense as the newest member of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences governing board. Rouse’s appointment was effective May 15, 2015.

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Brain surgery is famously difficult for good reason: When removing a tumor, for example, neurosurgeons walk a tightrope as they try to take out as much of the cancer as possible while keeping crucial brain tissue intact — and visually distinguishing the two is often impossible. Now Johns Hopkins researchers report they have developed an imaging technology that could provide surgeons with a color-coded map of a patient’s brain showing which areas are and are not cancer.

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Now research conducted in fruit flies, rats and monkeys by scientists at Johns Hopkins, UC San Diego, and other institutions reveals that levels of a protein called vinculin increase with age to alter the shape and performance of cardiac muscle cells — a healthy adaptive change that helps sustain heart muscle vitality over many decades.

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An NIBIB-funded researcher has developed a new technique that creates digital pictures of a tissue’s chemical composition using light and a computer. The technique replaces the need for dyes or stains, which can be costly and require significant time and effort to apply.

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During the coming monsoon season, survivors of the recent earthquake that destroyed parts of Nepal face a “very high” risk of a hepatitis E outbreak that could be especially deadly to pregnant women, according to a consensus statement from a group of infectious disease experts from around the world.

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For healing the heart after a heart attack, stem cell therapies show promise but are slow to implement. Researchers develop a new treatment called microsphere therapy that can be kept on-hand and administered more readily than stem cells.

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Attention, shoppers: “Loyalty reward” discounts are more useful, from the perspective of both consumers and retailers, in the online arena than at traditional brick-and-mortar stores, according to new research from Johns Hopkins University.

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Routine communications blackouts, between a re-entry spacecraft and ground control, can cause anxiety, as there is no way to know or control the location and state of the spacecraft from the ground, but researchers at the Harbin Institute of Technology in China have proposed a new way to maintain communication with spacecraft as they re-enter the atmosphere. The approach might also be applied to other hypersonic vehicles such as futuristic military planes and ballistic missiles.

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Researchers have developed tiny, diamond-based probes that optically transmit detailed temperature information and can operate in conditions ranging from 150 - 850 degrees Kelvin.

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Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have located a new – and likely more promising, they say – target for a potential vaccine against malaria, a mosquito-borne illness that kills as many as 750,000 people each year.

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A decade of work at Johns Hopkins has yielded a computer formula that predicts which mutations are likely to have the largest effect on the activity of "genetic dimmer switches," suggesting new targets for diagnosis and treatment of many complex diseases.

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Low-income fathers who might be labeled “deadbeat dads” often spend as much on their children as parents in formal child-support arrangements, but they choose to give goods like food and clothing rather than cash.

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