Prion
lborkowski | January 24, 2011On April 5, 2010, a massive explosion at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, West Virginia, killed 29 miners. Last week, federal Mine Safety and Health Administration investigators briefed victims' relatives on what MSHA thinks happened at the mine. (MSHA's official final report is not expected for another 2-3 months, though.) NPR's Howard Berkes reports that the investigators' presentation "pointed to a tragedy that could have been prevented if the Upper Big Branch coal mine had complied with federal safety regulations."
In a related piece, Berkes explains some of the safety…
cwilcox | March 9, 2009In the late '90s, everyone started freaking out about their beef products, especially in Europe. Cows in Britain had started falling ill with a strange fatal neural disease. But not only the cows were getting sick - people who ate infected meat were hit too, dying by way of a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The cow disease became known as Mad Cow for the way in which the infected cows acted. Soon enough it had become epidemic, and people looked for the cause - and found it to be a little protein, called a prion.
Prions are misfolded proteins which cause diseases in animals. But…
edyong | February 25, 2009
Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia in the world, affecting more than 26 million people. Creutzfeld-Jacob disease (CJD), another affliction is far less common, but both conditions share many of the same qualities. They are fatal within a few years of diagnosis, they are incurable and they involved the crippling degeneration of the brain's neurons. Now, a group of Yale researchers have discovered that the two diseases are also linked by a pair of critical proteins.
Look into the brain of someone with Alzheimer's disease and you will see large, insoluble "plaques" sitting…
grrlscientist | September 12, 2008tags: Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, BSE, mad cow disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, CJD, pathogenic mutation, prion protein gene
Image: Orphaned.
Mad Cow Disease, technically known as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), is one of a group of transmissible diseases that destroy brain tissue, collectively known as Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSEs). TSEs are an unknown agent(s) that act by damaging the structure of brain proteins known as "prions" (PREE ons). In turn, these damaged prion proteins damage other normal prions and together, they build up to collectively…