Health Sciences

The body is structured to ensure that any invading organisms have a tough time reaching the brain, an organ obviously critical to survival. Known as the blood-brain barrier, cells that line the brain and spinal cord are tightly packed, making it difficult for anything besides very small molecules to cross from the bloodstream into the central nervous system.

The heart maintains a careful balancing act; too soft and it won’t pump blood, but too hard and it will overtax itself and stop entirely. There is an optimal amount of strain that a beating heart can generate and still beat at its usual rate, once per second.

The University of Pennsylvania, through its Center for Technology Transfer and its UPstart company formation program, has announced a new partnership with IP Group PLC, developer of intellectual property-based businesses. 

Brendan G. Carr, MD, MA, MS, assistant professor of Emergency Medicine and Epidemiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennslyvania, has been named as the director of the Emergency Care Coordination Center (ECCC). 

A new brain connectivity study from Penn Medicine published today in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences found striking differences in the neural wiring of men and women that’s lending credence to some commonly-held beliefs about their behavior.

A new, first-of-its-kind study by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania seeks to learn whether men with prostate cancer who are undergoing radiation therapy can benefit from yoga.

Using a video game in which people navigate through a virtual town delivering objects to specific locations, a team of neuroscientists from the University of Pennsylvania and Freiburg University has discovered how brain cells that encode spatial information form “geotags” for specific memories and are activated immediately before those memories are recalled.

A multi-institution study led by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has found that increasing the number of insured patients is not associated with higher intensive care unit (ICU) usage in Massachusetts. 

Five faculty members from the University of Pennsylvania have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The blood stem cells that live in bone marrow are at the top of a complex family tree. Such stem cells split and divide down various pathways that ultimately produce red cells, white cells and platelets.