When we sustain a cut or injury, more than a dozen clotting factors, or special proteins circulating in the body, are activated in a cascade to help us stop bleeding. “People born with the genetic disorder hemophilia have insufficient levels of one of these clotting factors, so they bleed for a...
A holdover from our prehistoric days, goosebumps are the end result of an adrenaline rush meant to ward off a big chill — or predators.
Now a growing area of research, aided by advances in human genome sequencing technology, shows that genetics plays an important role in the immune system’s ability to fight off foreign invaders.
Meant to remove invaders, either infectious or simply irritating, a scratch is human skin’s first line of defense.
Once one of the world’s deadliest diseases, smallpox’s complete eradication was the result of a worldwide deployment of a vaccine begun 50 years ago. To date it’s still the only human disease ever to disappear from Earth. ...
It’s an everyday occurrence. A little tickle in your throat, a wayward speck of pollen, perhaps — or a bit of water traveling down the wrong pipe — and then a full-on chain reaction in your body. ...
The length of our telomeres, the caps on the ends of chromosomes, can predict how well we’re aging.
Macrophages, the human immune system’s horde of cells that clear the body’s detritus by eating it, may be induced to gorge — in the name of helping combat Alzheimer’s and other diseases. ...
Human’s complex immune system is the vanquisher of pathogens, but it can also turn on itself.