General

Osteoarthritis – the most common chronic joint condition, which causes joints to become painful and stiff. It’s been known for a long time that osteoarthritis is a somewhat of an occupational condition – people from some jobs are more likely to suffer from it. Now scientists the Universities of Sydney, […]

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 […]