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Published On January 18, 2017
TECHNOLOGY
Skin Deep
Photographer Cara Phillips captures skin damage, beautifully.
Skin damage can be hard to see with the naked eye, but photographer Cara Phillips captures her subjects under ultraviolet light, a standby tool of dermatologists. With its shorter wavelength, UV light passes beneath the surface layer of the skin to expose spots of melanin below—part of the body’s response to sun damage. For Phillips, highlighting this damage contrasts with “a culture dominated by retouched images.”
Such damage to the skin can lead to melanoma, one of the more dangerous forms of skin cancer. Men with melanoma fare worse than woman do, and are twice as likely to die from the disease. A study published last December in Science Translational Medicine may begin to explain why. A gene called PPP2R3B helps prevent melanoma, and women benefit more from this because they originally have two X chromosomes, where the gene is found. The vast majority of men have only one X chromosome.
Dispatches

What Makes a Kid Clumsy? More research into coordination disorders shows why some children are more prone to trip, fumble and spill the milk.

Eyes in the Sky Satellite data can be used to assess the health impact of dust storms and the spread of mosquito-borne diseases. Additional applications could be on the horizon.

Could This One Change Help Curb the Opioid Crisis? To prescribe an effective bridge to addiction treatment, emergency physicians must get special training and receive a waiver. Making that process easier—or eliminating the requirement altogether—could make a big impact.

One Thing Leads to the Next Robert Lefkowitz is best known for revealing the mechanism behind hundreds of drugs in use today. But he thinks of himself as a storyteller first and has a new book out to make his case.

Podcast: The Research Year That Was Medical research labs have faced a difficult stretch of closed buildings and competing priorities. Yet they have also produced milestone discoveries—and not only on COVID-19.

The Shape of Us Two milestone discoveries in protein modeling promise to change the fundamentals of drug discovery.

Universal Flu Vaccines Move Forward In the shadow of coronavirus vaccine development, another vaccine was making solid progress.

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