Katherine Unger Baillie

Pork is the world’s most consumed meat, thanks in large part to the Chinese. China consumes half of the planet’s pork and, accordingly, is home to roughly 50 percent of the world’s pigs.

Autoimmune diseases tend to strike women more than men and having multiple X chromosomes could be the main reason why. While a process called X chromosome inactivation serves to balance out gene dosage between males and females, some genes on the “inactive X” chromosome in immune cells can sometimes escape this process, giving women an extra dose of immunity-related gene expression.

Human populations feature a broad palette of skin tones. But until now, few genes have been shown to contribute to normal variation in skin color, and these had primarily been discovered through studies of European populations.

Walking around Penn’s verdant campus today, it’s easy to take the abundant tree canopy for granted. But at various points in history, the University was not as bucolic.

Infections caused by viruses, such as respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, measles, parainfluenza and Ebola, are typically considered acute. These viruses cause disease quickly and live within a host for a limited time. But in some cases the effects of the infection, and presence of the virus itself, can persist.

No one can travel inside the earth to study what happens there. So scientists must do their best to replicate real-world conditions inside the lab.

The immune system is constantly performing surveillance to detect foreign organisms that might do harm. But pathogens, for their part, have evolved a number of strategies to evade this detection, such as secreting proteins that hinder a host’s ability to mount an immune response.

In 2014, new combination therapies to treat patients with metastatic melanoma hit the market, helping extend the lives of those with this aggressive disease. Yet unfortunately, after several months of treatment, almost all patients on the regimen eventually relapsed.

Across the city and the nation, now is the time of year that many teachers open their wallets to personally pay for classroom supplies that dwindling school budgets may not provide. And many families find themselves confronted with lengthy checklists of supplies that can be costly, sometimes prohibitively so.