No one expects to live a before-and-after kind of life, divided into the moments before and the moments after a single defining event. When the two of us met, fell in love and got married in Sonia’s ...

If you’re familiar with the word prion than you probably associate it with dysfunction and disease. Prions infamously cause bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly known as mad cow disease, as well ...

A mysterious neurological disease was killing women and children in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Patients in the final stages experienced uncontrollable outbursts of laughter, earning ...

Dirt may help scientists answer a question that has baffled them for decades: How does chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer and elk spread from animal to animal? MADISON - Dirt may help scientists ...

A new test may detect the presence of abnormal proteins indicative of a deadly prion disease known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD). By adapting an established blood test for variant CJD, ...

Special proteins known as prions, which are perhaps best known as the agents of mad cow and other neurodegenerative diseases, can also serve as an important source of beneficial variation in nature.

People with the rare and fatal brain disorder Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) show signs of the disease in their eyes, according to a new study. The study found evidence of prions — the infectious ...

Prion diseases aren't common, but they are scary. Incurable and inevitably fatal, they can be either genetic or infectious, although the latter only occurs via contact with infected tissue. However, a ...

One of the strangest things that can sicken us—a rogue misfolded protein that destroys the brain, known as a prion—is even scarier than we knew. Researchers were able to find the prions responsible ...

I was at my laboratory bench one morning in 1980 when a colleague walked in and declared that he had identified the cause of scrapie, a mysterious and fatal infection that leaves tiny holes in the ...