Health Sciences

Dramatic calorie restriction, diets reduced by 40 percent of a normal calorie total, have long been known to extend health span, the duration of disease-free aging, in animal studies, and even to extend life span in most animal species examined.

Population-based epidemiological studies provide new opportunities for innovation and collaboration among researchers addressing pressing global-health concerns.

A hundred years ago, the flu pandemic hit Philadelphia. Today, Penn researchers are working to prevent a future outbreak.

In many modern animated movies, the trick to achieving realistic movements for individual characters and objects lies in motion-capture technology. This process often involves someone wearing a tracking suit covered in small, colored balls while a camera captures the position of those colored balls, which is then used to represent how the person is moving.

Globally renowned bioethicist Ezekiel J.

Performance can be enhanced by as much as 15 percent, according to a study by Penn neuroscientists published in Nature Communications. It is the first time such a connection has been made.

As part of a breast-cancer diagnosis, doctors analyze the tumor to determine which therapies might best attack the malignancy. But for patients whose cancer is triple-negative — that is, lacking receptors for estrogen, progesterone and Her2 — the options for treatment dwindle. Triple-negative cancers, or TNBC, also tend to be more aggressive than other cancer subtypes.

This study showed that the majority of such intimate partner violence — more than 80 percent of incidents — involve boyfriends and girlfriends. What’s more, these partnerships result in the most physical violence.

Network science examines how the actions of a system’s individual parts affect the behavior of the system as a whole. Some commonly studied networks include computer chip components and social media users, but University of Pennsylvania engineers are now applying network science to a much older system: the human body.

With countless medical advances and efforts to curb smoking, one might expect that life expectancy in the United States would improve. Yet according to recent studies, there’s been a reduction in the rate of improvement in American mortality during the past three decades.