General

A world-first study of the epigenetics of posttraumatic growth and resilience points the way for further research into how people can overcome the negative impacts of trauma after events such as bushfires, serious motor vehicle accidents, domestic violence, childhood and work-related trauma. QUT trauma researcher Professor Jane Shakespeare-Finch from the […]

MIT researchers pinpoint mechanism and demonstrate that drugs could help. By developing a lab-engineered model of the human blood-brain barrier (BBB), neuroscientists at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have discovered how the most common Alzheimer’s disease risk gene causes amyloid protein plaques to disrupt the brain’s vasculature and […]

Scientists have discovered an important cell signaling pathway in the kidney which if stopped, could hold the key to treating chronic kidney disease as well as other deadly conditions, including heart attack and stroke. The pathway was already known to exist in the brain, where it helps to maintain the […]

Our brains use various reference frames—also known as coordinate systems—to represent the motion of objects in a scene. Some coordinate systems are more useful than others for representing information. To represent a location on Earth, for example, we might use an Earth-centered coordinate system such as latitude and longitude. In […]

We owe a great deal to the hair cells in our inner ear—without them we couldn’t detect sounds or take five steps without tripping. Moreover, these cells happen to be a useful model for biologists who want to understand how tissues self-organize into complex shapes during embryonic development. The cells’ […]

Researchers found that efforts should be focused on optimizing embryo culture to ensure healthy outcomes for mothers and offspring. An experimental study from researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania links a specific procedure – embryo culture – that is part of the assisted reproduction […]

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the first video game therapeutic as a treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children, based on research by UC San Francisco’s Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD. In 2013, Gazzaley published a paper in Nature reporting that six weeks of training with a video game […]

In 2005, the University of California, Berkeley, researchers made the surprising discovery that making conjoined twins out of young and old mice — such that they share blood and organs — can rejuvenate tissues and reverse the signs of aging in the old mice. The finding sparked a flurry of research […]

Senescent cells accumulate throughout the body with age. They are constantly created and destroyed throughout life, but the balance between creation and destruction is upset with age, leading to an accumulated burden of cellular senescence. These cells secrete a potent mix of signals that produce chronic inflammation, disrupt tissue structure and cell function, and encourage […]

The formation of stress granules in cells is an interesting topic. As the name might suggest, this behavior emerges in cells undergoing stress, such as lack of nutrients, heat, cold, and so forth. Stress granules are transient structures that form within cells, made up of a wide variety of biomolecules that are packed […]

Many aspects of aging correlate with one another, even those with quite different underlying mechanisms and proximate causes. The various forms of root cause damage that result in the aging process, as well as their downstream consequences, all interact with one another. So whether or not any specific correlation teaches us anything […]

Using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and deleting a key gene, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have created natural killer cells — a type of immune cell — with measurably stronger activity against a form of leukemia, both in vivo and in vitro. The findings were published in […]