Medicine, Health

Like with all animals, the olfactory nerves of crayfish are continuously exposed to damage and need replenishing. The crayfish's solution is, as New Scientist puts it, to create a ‘nursery’ for baby neurons, a little clump at the base of the brain called the niche.

'Ischaemic heart disease' (IHD) was responsible for 12?% of all deaths in the OECD in 2011. The disease, which causes blood supplies to the heart to diminish, progressively damages heart tissue.
Whilst the introduction of angioplasty and stents has successfully helped reduce early mortality rates, the lack of solutions to repair the damaged tissue often leads to initial patient recovery being followed by cardiac remodelling and 'Chronic heart failure' (CHF). The only cure for CHF is heart transplantation, but few patients are lucky enough to find a compatible donor in time.

Malaria kills more than 1 million people each year. The new technique by a team at Imperial College London involves injecting mosquitoes with a gene that causes the vast majority of their offspring to be male. According to the Guardian, this leads to an eventual dramatic decline in population within six generations as females disappear.

Since the beginning of the HIV epidemic, almost 75 million people have been infected with the virus and about 36 million people have died of HIV. In 2012, a total of 29 000 new cases of HIV were reported in the EU and the European Economic Area. Media are reporting that researchers have discovered a method for using the virus as a tool in the fight against hereditary diseases - and in the long term, against HIV infection itself as well.