Lifeboat Foundation

Just in time for Halloween, doctors in France say they witnessed a real-life horror tale involving an antibiotic-resistant superbug. In less than a month, their patient’s infection evolved resistance to the last-resort drug they had used to treat it. Thankfully, the doctors were still able to defeat the microscopic threat—and the case may have uncovered a peculiar weakness in the germ.

According to the report, published in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a young child had been dealing with recurrent infections of the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa for over two years. P. aeruginosa is an opportunistic infection that sickens tens of thousands of already weakened people in hospitals and other health-care settings in the U.S. a year. In these people, it can cause serious infections.

United Parcel Service Inc. is striking a series of drone-delivery agreements with health-care groups as it develops new technology pitched to the growing medical market.

The plans include expanding the use of drones to deliver cargo such as medical samples and supplies on hospital campuses in Utah and elsewhere, and an agreement with CVS Health Corp. to evaluate the use of drones for home delivery of prescriptions and other products, UPS said Monday.

The agreements are the first UPS has announced since the package delivery giant won U.S. regulatory approval to operate commercial drone flights through the company’s Flight Forward subsidiary. The nod from the Federal Aviation Administration paves the way for UPS to scale up operations as it competes with FedEx Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and others vying to develop drone delivery services in the U.S.

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Small proteins also promise to revise the current understanding of the genome. Many appear to be encoded in stretches of DNA—and RNA—that were not thought to help build proteins of any sort. Some researchers speculate that the short stretches of DNA could be newborn genes, on their way to evolving into larger genes that make full-size proteins. Thanks in part to small proteins, “We need to rethink what genes are,” says microbiologist and molecular biologist Gisela Storz of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Maryland.

Tiny proteins help power muscles and provide the toxic punch to many venoms.

The newly fashionable pills and foods meant to increase the variety of healthy bacteria in our bodies can actually have the opposite effect.

Contrary to popular belief, cartilage in human joints can repair itself through a process similar to that used by creatures such as salamanders and zebrafish to regenerate limbs, researchers at Duke Health found.

Publishing online Oct. 9 in the journal Science Advances, the researchers identified a mechanism for cartilage repair that appears to be more robust in ankle joints and less so in hips. The finding could potentially lead to treatments for osteoarthritis, the most common joint disorder in the world.

“We believe that an understanding of this ‘salamander-like’ regenerative capacity in humans, and the critically missing components of this regulatory circuit, could provide the foundation for new approaches to repair joint tissues and possibly whole human limbs,” said senior author Virginia Byers Kraus, M.D., Ph.D., a professor in the departments of Medicine, Pathology and Orthopedic Surgery at Duke.