“When a child is interested in an activity or learning something new, he or she will forget their pain, sickness or boredom,” Sheryl Bucsanyi tells the Daily News. Bucsanyi is a pediatric hospital teacher at UTMB and she brings laughter and smiles to her patients and coworkers with her elaborate costumes.

“Hidden among those microbes in our mouths and guts, are thousands of virus-like entities,” write Drs. Norbert Herzog and David Niesel. Scientists have named the entities – flat rod-shaped loops of RNA found in bacteria – obelisks but don’t know if they influence our microbiome, affect our immune system or any other processes in our bodies. “It seems that Mother Nature still can surprise us, and hopefully, more science will enlighten us,” write Herzog and Niesel.

UTMB’s Dr. Scott Weaver spoke to USA Today for this story on NIH budget cuts. UTMB receives about $150 million in NIH grants annually and has already lost about $19.3 million due to cuts, Weaver told USA Today.

Researchers at UTMB have been awarded nearly $5 million in grants from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas to forward their work as well as $2 million to recruit Dr. Xun Sun.

Texas has allocated $50 million to fund clinical trials of a psychedelic reported to help those with PTSD and Galveston County is in a good position to lead the way in that research, writes UTMB’s Dr. Jarrel De Matas. “Galveston stands at a critical intersection of education, public health and innovation,” De Matas writes.

UTMB’s League City and Clear Lake Campuses are highlighted in this news roundup by Community Impact. Updates in Clear Lake include new clinic openings as well as the comprehensive stroke center. In League City, the hospital began seeing oncology patients on the ambulatory side.