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Ryan Petrie, PhD, an assistant professor in Drexel's College of Arts and Sciences, has led a study related to the spread of cancer. According to him, cancer is fatal because of the ability of cancer cells to move to unaffected organs. Therefore, prevention of their movement along with other therapies would help the patient survive the disease. Read more about his research here.

Multiresistant bacteria render treatments ineffective and scientists worldwide are trying to tackle this issue. Often even sensitive bacteria display resistance to drugs and are therefore called “persister cells.” Researchers at the BASP Centre, Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen discovered how these bacteria survive antibiotic treatments and cause infections. Read more about their research here.

Researchers at the University of Liverpool conducted a study to understand whether climatic changes affected the spread of Zika virus. They created an epidemiological model that analyzed the distribution of the vectors (the yellow fever mosquito and the Asian tiger mosquito), mosquito-biting rates, viral development rates within mosquitoes, mortality rates, etc. Read more about their research here.

A university press is most often a loss making entity serving an established research university. In addition to producing textbooks for students, its rationale has long been to serve the needs of scholars by publishing peer-reviewed research, advancing the university’s academic mission, and helping faculty members gain tenure. Carl Straumsheim (Inside Higher Ed) explores the daunting challenges currently facing this venerable institution. Read more about his research here.

In today’s digital world, there are numerous platforms on which people can pose questions and add to their knowledge. In August 2016, EconTalk - one of the leading economics podcasts - host Russ Roberts interviewed Adam D'Angelo (CEO of Quora) on the challenges of getting the right questions to the people best placed to answer them. Read more about it here.

Researchers from the Duke University conducted a study on rhesus monkeys and discovered that stress on monkeys belonging to lower social rungs affected their immune system. The team studied a group of 45 unrelated female rhesus monkeys. After the monkeys created a social order among themselves, the researchers took immune cells from the monkeys and measured the activity of about 9,000 genes. Read more about their research here.

Immune cells protect the body from any infection and foreign invasions. However, it has been observed that in several types of tumor, immune system cells called macrophages help tumors grow. The researchers at The Scripps Research Institute found that in cancer, macrophages sometimes get reprogrammed to behave like cancer stem cells. Read more about their research here.

Scientific research is increasingly collaborative and contributions made by each author must be suitably acknowledged by co-authors. Often, there is much prestige associated with being the first author of a published paper. Hence, the decision-making  process in a contribution-based system can be quite contentious. Economics avoids this potential rancor by being one of the very few disciplines to list authors in alphabetical order. Matthias Weber has identified the presence of alphabetical discrimination in economics and the strategies used by researchers to counter its effects. Read more about his research here

Our body is incapable of repairing injured or dead heart cells. When a person gets a heart attack, the connective tissue forms a scar tissue at the site of the injury, which ultimately leads to heart failure. To explore cellular reprogramming of heart, researchers at the Gladstone Institutes conducted a new study using a mouse model. Read more about their research here.

Offering deeper insights into the mechanics of learning, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin analyzed how dynamic shifts in a person's knowledge influence decision making. The researchers used brain decoding techniques to determine the level of information available to a person while making a decision, and then measured how new knowledge is reflected in changed opinions and decisions. Read more about their research here.