Researchers identify gene mutation capable of regulating pain

Pain afflicts at least 1.5 billion people worldwide, and despite the availability of various painkilling drugs, not all forms of pain are treatable. Moreover, pain medications can have side-effects such as dependence and ...

Video: Why it hurts to eat hot peppers

You have probably had the burning sensation of eating a jalapeno or other tear-inducing pepper. What causes this painful fire in your mouth? The short answer is capsaicin. But what exactly is capsaicin? How does it work? ...

Researchers uncover pain-relief secrets in hot chili peppers

Anyone who has ever bitten unknowingly into a red hot chili pepper remembers the unhappy result – burning, painful sensations that make one's mouth feel as though it has caught on fire. Yet the very chemical that causes ...

Taking the bite out of baseball bats

Miss hitting the "sweet spot" on a baseball bat and the resulting vibrations can zing your hands. Bat companies have tried for decades to reduce these painful shocks with limited success. But Daniel Russell, a professor in ...

A new avenue to better medicines: Metal-peptide complexes

Researchers at the Ruhr-Universitaet-Bochum and from Berkeley have used metal complexes to modify peptide hormones. In the Journal of the American Chemical Society, they report for the first time on the three-dimensional ...

Scientists sequence DNA of cancer-resistant rodent

Scientists at the University of Liverpool, in partnership with The Genome Analysis Centre, Norwich, have generated the first whole-genome sequencing data of the naked mole-rat, a rodent that is resistant to cancer and lives ...