Jessa Netting

All Stories by Jessa Netting

  1. Health & Medicine

    Ancient Estrogen

    A jawless fish ancestor may have revealed the most ancient of hormones and how current hormones evolved from it.

  2. Sticky Situations

    Bacteria find strength in numbers as members of huge, mucous-covered communities called biofilms that can stall, equip, and initiate fierce infections.

  3. Health & Medicine

    Have a heart: Turn on just a single gene

    One gene appears to act as the master switch in embryonic heart formation.

  4. Telltale Heart

    Genetics is revealing the first steps in building a heart—the organ that is first to develop, subject to the most birth defects, and difficult to heal when damaged later in life.

  5. Health & Medicine

    Alzheimer’s damage might start off early

    Copper and free radicals may initiate the brain damage of Alzheimer's disease long before its hallmark protein plaques have formed.

  6. Health & Medicine

    Forget about jet lag, and much more

    Airline flight attendants with chronic jet lag have higher stress hormone concentrations and smaller temporal lobes (centers of short-term memory in the brain)than do more rested attendants.

  7. Health & Medicine

    Immune attack on self halts nerve damage

    T cells primed for autoimmune behavior may actually preserve nerves after a damaging blow.

  8. Dormant bacteria may spawn infection

    Clinicians' standard methods don't detect the dormant phase of a bacterium that commonly causes urinary tract infections in women.

  9. Dirty money harbors bacterial dangers

    More than half of 68 dollar bills collected at a high school sporting event and a grocery store in Ohio hosted bacteria that commonly infect poeple in hospitals or those with depressed immune systems.

  10. Breast milk battles thrush in infants

    Human breast milk inhibits the growth of yeast spores, the source of the painful fungal infection of the mouth and throat that can be deadly for infants with AIDS.

  11. Health & Medicine

    Heart disease linked to clotting gene

    African Americans with a mutation in a blood-clotting gene have a sixfold increase in the risk of heart disease, but this is not the case for white Americans with the same mutation.

  12. Health & Medicine

    Statins’ structure blocks cholesterol

    X-ray crystallography shows that statins impede the build-up of cholesterol by physically blocking the binding site of an enzyme important for cholesterol production.