Robot

Before the days of rote texting and email, if you wanted to communicate with a friend you might have personalized and assembled a physical letter. Similarly, the individual cells in our bodies communicate with each other by sending tailored “letters”—not with paper and pen, but in the form of proteins […]

The antidepressant fluoxetine has been suggested as a means to improve brain recovery after acute stroke. However, a large randomized study on stroke patients at 35 Swedish hospitals shows that the drug has no such effect. The study, which was led by researchers at Karolinska Institutet, is published in The […]

A group of researchers from the University of Toronto has developed a credit-card-sized tool for growing cancer cells outside the human body, which they believe will enhance their understanding of breast cancer metastasis. The device, described in a paper published in Science Advances, reproduces various environments within the human body where […]

Across the globe, approximately 50 million people are living with dementia. The two most common forms are Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), which develop when neurons in specific parts of the brain stop functioning – triggering memory loss and other behavioral or personality changes. Without a cure, the […]

In addition to responding to electrical and chemical stimuli, many of the body’s neural cells can also respond to mechanical effects, such as pressure or vibration. But these responses have been more difficult for researchers to study because there has been no easily controllable method for inducing such mechanical stimulation […]

A study by MIT neuroscientists into how seemingly similar neuronal subtypes drive locomotion in the fruit fly reveals an unexpected diversity as the brain’s commands were relayed to muscle fibers. A sequence of experiments found a dramatic difference between the two nerve cells: One neuron scrambled to adjust to different […]

Alzheimer's disease progressively degrades a person's memory and cognitive abilities, often resulting in dementia. Amid efforts to find novel treatments for this disease, a recent breakthrough study by scientists from Japan shows that oxytocin―the hormone that we commonly know to induce feelings of love and well-being―can also effectively reverse some […]

Researchers at ETH Zurich and ZHAW present a simple method to precisely map resistance exercise on machines and record missing comparative figures. This could help to develop optimized training strategies in the future, such as for age-associated muscular atrophy. Muscles play a critical role in life. Skeletal muscle mass alone […]

Scientists have discovered that one of the good bacteria found in the human gut has a benefit that has remained unrecognized until now: the potential to reduce the risk of heart disease. The bacteria’s activity in the intestines reduces the production of a chemical that has been linked to the […]

For the past several years, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists and engineers have made significant progress in development of a three-dimensional “brain-on-a-chip” device capable of recording neural activity of human brain cell cultures grown outside the body. Now, LLNL researchers have a way to computationally model the activity and structures of neuronal communities […]

Infertility affects one in seven men of reproductive age worldwide. One idea for treating male sterility is spermatogonial stem cell (SSC) therapy. In this approach, sperm stem cells in the testis are transferred to a test tube, cultured and nudged into becoming fully fledged sperm. However, a key bottleneck has […]

Molecular biologists and bioengineers at the University of California San Diego have unraveled key mechanisms behind the mysteries of aging. They isolated two distinct paths that cells travel during aging and engineered a new way to genetically program these processes to extend lifespan. The research was described in the journal […]

A unique nanoparticle to deliver a localized cancer treatment inhibits tumor growth in mice, according to a team of Penn State researchers. The nanoparticles, developed by Daniel Hayes, associate professor of biomedical engineering, have a specific chemistry that allows a microRNA (miRNA) to attach to it. A miRNA is a […]

It might seem as though humans have little in common with the lowly yeast cell. Humans have hair, skin, muscles, and bones, among other attributes. Yeast has, well, none of those things. But besides their obvious differences, yeast, and humans, and much of life for that matter, have a great […]

Ultrasound imaging, as most people are familiar with it, is used for taking pictures of a fetus while it is still inside the womb, but it has other medical purposes, such as diagnosing diseases of organs and tissues. For years, Caltech's Mikhail Shapiro has been working to extend ultrasound imaging into […]

New study sheds light on how nutrient-starved cells recycle internal components. The idea of the cell as a city is a common introduction to biology, conjuring depictions of the cell’s organelles as power plants, factories, roads, libraries, warehouses and more. Like a city, these structures require a great deal of […]

For every cell in the body there comes a time when it must decide what it wants to do for the rest of its life. In an article published in the journal PNAS, National Institutes of Health researchers report for the first time that ancient viral genes that were once […]

The Sagol Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Research at Shamir Medical Center, together with the Sackler School of Medicine and Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel Aviv University, announced today that a peer-reviewed study has demonstrated for the first time that hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) can significantly enhance the cognitive performance of healthy older adults. […]

Researchers from the Penn Institute of Immunology discovered three distinct immune responses to the SARS-CoV2 infection that could help predict the trajectory of disease in severe COVID-19 patients and may ultimately inform how to best treat them. The findings were published in Science. “For patients who are hospitalized with COVID-19, there isn’t just […]

In a groundbreaking new study, researchers at the University of Minnesota have 3D printed a functioning centimeter-scale human heart pump in the lab. The discovery could have major implications for studying heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States killing more than 600,000 people a year. The […]

The development of the mammalian placenta depends upon an unusual twist that separates DNA’s classic double helix into a single-stranded form, Yale researchers report in the journal Nature. The Yale team also identified the molecular regulator that acts upon this single strand to accelerate or stop placental development, a discovery with […]

Yale pharmacology professor Barbara Ehrlich and her team have uncovered a mechanism driving a rare, lethal disease called Wolfram Syndrome and also a potential treatment. Their findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Wolfram Syndrome — a progressive degenerative disease that affects about one in 500,000 people worldwide […]

The DNA-cutting proteins central to CRISPR-Cas9 and related gene-editing tools originally came from bacteria, but a newfound variety of Cas proteins apparently evolved in viruses that infect bacteria. The new Cas proteins were found in the largest known bacteria-infecting viruses, called bacteriophages, and are the most compact working Cas variants […]

With the growing interest in the accumulation of senescent cells as an important cause of aging, and more funding flowing into this part of the field, researchers are uncovering numerous direct links between cellular senescence and age-related conditions. Senescent cells cause harm to tissues via their inflammatory secretions, the senescence-associated […]

The emergency rooms in Barcelona were collapsing under the pressure. Hundreds of patients were arriving in desperate need as they struggled to breathe, while intensive care units struggled to cope with the sudden influx of respiratory problems. Epidemiologists scrambled to trace the source of the outbreak. This epidemic in the […]

What can the common fruit fly teach us about cancer? “Over the last few decades, the fruit fly – Drosophila melanogaster – has become a successful model for studying human cancers,” said Wu-Min Deng, Ph.D., professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and the Gerald and Flora Jo Mansfield Piltz Professor of […]

Peter Reddien's lab at the Whitehead Institute takes a step forward in understanding how neural circuits could be regenerated in adults. If anything happens to the eyes of the tiny, freshwater-dwelling planarian Schmidtea mediterranea, they can grow them back within just a few days. How they do this is a scientific conundrum […]

Stem cell activity declines with age throughout the body. In some cases this is because stem cells become less active in response to changes in the signaling environment. In other cases, the cells are damaged or the populations greatly reduced. The consequence of this decline is that fewer daughter somatic […]

Researchers at the University of East Anglia and the University of Manchester have made an important breakthrough that could lead to ‘kinder’ treatments for children with bone cancer, and save lives. Current treatment is grueling, with outdated chemotherapy cocktails and limb amputation. But despite all of this, the five-year survival […]

In a study published in PNAS, researchers from Karolinska Institutet, the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Nagoya University and Technische Universität Braunschweig show an undiscovered heterogeneity of adult zebrafish Purkinje cells, revealing the existence of anatomically and functionally distinct cell types. The cerebellum, sometimes referred to as the “tree of […]