General

Bdelloid rotifers are multicellular animals, so small a microscope is needed to see them. Despite their size, they're known for being tough — capable of surviving drying, freezing, starvation and low oxygen. Now, U.S. National Science Foundation-funded researchers have found that not only can they withstand being frozen, but they can […]

Babies in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) experience a lot of testing in the early days of their life, and research shows the associated pain and trauma can contribute to long term neurological deficits. Matthew Bizzarro, MD and Steven Peterec, MD were at a conference on the effects of pain on the […]

Human heart muscle cells are constantly at work – contracting roughly a million times a week in adults. Jessica Pfleger, a new assistant professor joining the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC’s Center for Vascular and Heart Research, studies how the heart’s genes are regulated in response to stimulation and stress. Her […]

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University have discovered a new technique to control inflammatory disorders that also maintains a patient’s ability to fight off infections. Principal investigator Carlos Subauste, professor of medicine and pathology at the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, and his team have identified the interaction of […]

Eating healthy is not easy. This is especially true today, when all the supermarkets are full of ready-made, ready-to-eat kinds of food. It is no wonder why many people choose such products on a daily basis: these ultra-processed meals are produced to taste good, are relatively inexpensive, and do not […]

An international team of scientists from Manchester, Montpellier and Copenhagen have identified why some endurance athletes experience a heart rhythm disturbance called ‘heart block’. The University of Manchester-led study found that long-term exercise in retired racehorses – the best available model of the athlete’s heart – and in mice, triggered […]

As “visual recognition memory” emerges in the visual cortex, one circuit of inhibitory neurons supplants another, and slower neural oscillations prevail. To focus on what’s new, we disregard what’s not. A new study by researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory substantially advances understanding of how a mammalian […]

James Cook University scientists believe they have made a breakthrough in the science of keeping premature babies alive. As part of her PhD work, JCU engineering lecturer Stephanie Baker led a pilot study that used a hybrid neural network to accurately predict how much risk individual premature babies face. She […]

Fruits, vegetables, red wine and chocolate are all rich in polyphenols, plant compounds that double as cancer-fighting antioxidants. Humans can access these foods' health benefits because the microbes in our guts happily feast on them, breaking them down into smaller chemical components. Microbiome scientists at Colorado State University wanted to know if […]

Researchers from Karolinska Institutet have discovered how platinum-chemotherapy can enhance the treatment resistance of ovarian cancer cells, by progressively changing the cancer cell-intrinsic adhesion signalling and cell-surrounding microenvironment. Platinum chemotherapy is a standard treatment in ovarian cancers, but treatment resistance commonly develops. The extracellular matrix (ECM)-derived biochemical and mechanical cues […]

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have analysed and described in detail the immune cells residing in the human bile duct. The findings may pave the way for new treatment strategies against disorders of the bile duct, which are often linked to immunological processes. The study is published in the journal Science […]

Thanks to many years of translational research, some children with the rare childhood cancer neuroblastoma may now be cured. In a study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, researchers at among others Karolinska Institutet and the University of Gothenburg write that a so-called ALK inhibitor should be tried to […]

For patients who have inflammatory bowel syndrome (IBS), the condition is literally a pain in the gut. Chronic — or long-term — abdominal pain is common, and there are currently no effective treatment options for this debilitating symptom. In a new study in ACS Pharmacology & Translational Science, researchers identify a […]

A sensitive blood test being developed by a team of researchers at the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center shows promise for predicting whether patients with metastatic HPV-positive throat cancer will respond to treatment months earlier than standard imaging scans. That’s according to a study, published in Oncotarget, validating the test in a small group of patients […]

Medical researchers in China develop a new risk score to predict relapse of leukemia. Several patients suffering from leukemia, who have undergone stem cell transplantation, are at a risk of relapse, owing to varied reasons. Before the inevitable, what if it is possible to predict this situation, and take appropriate […]

Tooth loss is often accepted as a natural part of ageing, but what if there was a way to better identify those most susceptible without the need for a dental exam? New research led by investigators at Harvard School of Dental Medicine suggests that machine learning tools can help identify […]

Children with obstructive sleep apnea are nearly three times more likely to develop high blood pressure when they become teenagers than children who never experience sleep apnea, according to a new study funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of the National Institutes of Health. However, […]

National Institutes of Health scientists and their collaborators have identified an internal communication network in mammals that may regulate tissue repair and inflammation, providing new insights on how diseases such as obesity and inflammatory skin disorders develop. The new research is published in Cell. The billions of organisms living on body […]

To better understand the role of bacteria in health and disease, National Institutes of Health researchers fed fruit flies antibiotics and monitored the lifetime activity of hundreds of genes that scientists have traditionally thought control aging. To their surprise, the antibiotics not only extended the lives of the flies but […]

In children with rhabdomyosarcoma or RMS, rare cancer that affects the muscles and other soft tissues, the presence of mutations in several genes, including TP53, MYOD1, and CDKN2A, appears to be associated with a more aggressive form of the disease and a poorer chance of survival. This finding is from the largest-ever […]

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified ingredients for snack food prototypes that have been formulated to deliberately change the gut microbiome in ways that can be linked to health. Translating results from animal models, the scientists have shown in two pilot human studies of […]

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists identified how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, gets inside cells to cause infection. All current COVID-19 vaccines and antibody-based therapeutics were designed to disrupt this route into cells, which requires a receptor called ACE2. Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in […]

The canine disease granulomatous meningoencephalomyelitis (GME), the most common neuroinflammatory disease that affects dogs, shares key features of its pathology and immunology with multiple sclerosis (MS), according to a new study. A detailed investigation of GME by a team led by Molly Church and Jorge Iván Alvarez of Penn’s School of Veterinary Medicine, incorporating MRI […]

Thanks to researchers in different fields who put in nearly two decades of past work on mRNA vaccine technology, people around the world are being immunized today from COVID-19 — and hopefully leading us out of this pandemic. Now, because of the increased focus on this versatile technology and that foundation […]

A Canadian research team has uncovered a new mechanism involved in Bourneville tuberous sclerosis (BTS), a genetic disease of childhood. The team hypothesizes that a mutation in the TSC1 gene causes neurodevelopmental disorders that develop in conjunction with the disease. Seen in one in 6,000 children, tuberous sclerosis causes benign […]

Researchers at UC San Francisco have found that extreme caloric restriction diets alter the microbiome in ways that could help with weight loss but might also result in an increased population of Clostridioides difficile, a pathogenic bacterium that can lead to severe diarrhoea and colitis. Such diets, which allow people only […]

Bone cancer is hard to treat and prone to metastasis. Research teams at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine have a new strategy to attack it. Chemist Han Xiao at Rice and biologist Xiang Zhang at Baylor and their labs have developed an antibody conjugate called BonTarg that delivers drugs to bone tumors and inhibits […]

Each day the average human heart beats 100,000 times and pumps about 2,000 gallons of blood. It’s a process that is critical to life, and yet it often goes awry for unknown reasons.   “Despite knowing a lot about muscle contraction and the heart, in particular, there are still a number of questions scientists have […]

A new art/science collaboration uses molecular structures as its creative medium. In Jenna Sutela’s work, which ranges from computational poetry to experimental music to installations and performance, the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) Visiting Artist enlists microbes and neural networks as co-creators. “I want to explore this notion […]

PhD student Sarah Nyquist applies computational methods to understudied areas of reproductive health, such as the cellular composition of breast milk. Sarah Nyquist got her first introduction to biology during high school, when she took an online MIT course taught by genomics pioneer Eric Lander. Initially unsure what to expect, […]