Human physiology is the science of the mechanical, physical, and biochemical functions of humans in good health, their organs, and the cells of which they are composed. The principal level of focus of physiology is at the level of organs and systems. Most aspects of human physiology are closely homologous to corresponding aspects of animal physiology, and animal experimentation has provided much of the foundation of physiological knowledge. Anatomy and physiology are closely related fields of study: anatomy, the study of form, and physiology, the study of function, are intrinsically tied and are studied in tandem as part of a medical curriculum.
The latest Perspectives in General Physiology series examines the mechanisms of visual, aural, olfactory, and tactile processes that inform us about the environment. The series appears in the September 2011 issue of the Journal of General Physiology.
Aerobic exercise is your best bet when it comes to losing that dreaded belly fat, a new study finds.
When investigating cancer cells, researchers discovered numerous peculiarities: Particular RNA molecules are present in large numbers, particular genes are overactive. Do these characteristics have a relation to cancer? Do they promote cell growth? Do they inactivate growth brakes or are they just a whim of nature?
Scientists at the Centre of Cancer Biomedicine at the Norwegian Radium Hospital are the first to show that uptake and accumulation of nanoparticles in cells can disrupt important intracellular transport pathways.
79 million American adults have prediabetes and will likely develop diabetes later in life, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As the number of people diagnosed with diabetes continues to grow, researchers are focusing on discovering why the prevalence of the disease is increasing.
Researchers at the Joslin Diabetes Center have shown that an enzyme found in the mitochondria of cells is decreased in the skeletal muscle of those with diabetes, a finding that could lead to the development of drugs to boost the activity of this enzyme in an effort to fight the disease.
A Kansas State University professor is trying to create a patient-friendly treatment to help the more than 220,000 people who are diagnosed with lung cancer each year.
Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have identified a brain-circuit defect that triggers absence seizures, the most common form of childhood epilepsy.
Patients can essentially drown in their own fluids when trauma and infection prompt blood vessels to leak, flooding millions of air sacs in their lungs.
Leaders in biomedical education at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine are calling for a radical new approach to post-graduate training in the life sciences to address significant challenges, including an avalanche of new discoveries in the last decade and the need to transcend traditional departmental boundaries to understand biological processes at multiple levels.
It's common enough for researchers to look at the impacts of prescribed drugs on the body. And if you're a diabetes researcher who believes that exercise has great benefits for those with type 2 diabetes, you're hoping your research will show that. But when Normand Boul- looked at the dual impacts of exercise and metformin - two of the most commonly-prescribed modalities for glucose control - on that very outcome, the hoped-for double whammy wasn't the result.
Heart disease has sometimes been considered a men's health issue, but the statistics prove otherwise. In the US alone, more than 42 million women live with the problem. Heart disease is responsible for more than one-third of deaths among American women each year, making it the number one killer of females older than 20.
By employing optogenetics, a new field that uses genetically altered cells to respond to light, and a tandem unit cell (TCU) strategy, researchers at Stony Brook University have demonstrated a way to control cell excitation and contraction in cardiac muscle cells, the details of which are published in the early online edition of Circulation: Arrhythmia & Electrophysiology: "Stimulating Cardiac Muscle by Light: Cardiac Optogenetics by Cell Delivery."
Much like cities organize contingency plans and supplies for emergencies, chronic infectious diseases like HIV form reservoirs that ensure their survival in adverse conditions. But these reservoirs-small populations of viruses or bacteria of a specific type that persist despite attack by the immune system or drug treatment-are not always well understood.
University of Adelaide research has shown for the first time that obesity directly causes electrical abnormalities of the heart.
University of Iowa scientists have discovered a new role for a protein that is mutated in Usher syndrome, one of the most common forms of deaf-blindness in humans. The findings, which were published Aug. 8 in Nature Neuroscience, may help explain why this mutation causes the most severe form of the condition.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh claim that it is possible to learn about a person’s childhood by looking at the symmetry of their face.
In 1991, Carl Lewis was both the fastest man on earth and a profound long jumper, perhaps the greatest track-and-field star of all time in the prime of his career. On June 14th of that year, however, Carl Lewis was human. Leroy Burrell blazed through the 100-meters, besting him by a razor-thin margin of three-hundredths of a second. In the time it takes the shutter to capture a single frame of video, Lewis's three-year-old world record was gone.
A major Center that will propel scientific efforts to pinpoint the specific genes involved in causing immune diseases, cancer and other diseases will be opened today at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology.
The Medical College of Wisconsin has received a five-year, $13 million grant to establish a National Center for Systems Biology.
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