General

Senescent cells accumulate with age throughout the body, and contribute directly to the onset and progression of a wide range of age-related conditions. While never present in large numbers in comparison to normal somatic cells, senescent cells are metabolically active, secreting signals that provoke chronic inflammation, altered cell behavior, and […]

Heart rate variability is an increasingly popular measure of cardiovascular health. Heart rate variability is known to decline with age, but to what degree is this a reflection of processes of cardiovascular aging versus the loss of physical fitness that is a feature of old age in our present, overly […]

Does the adult mammalian body contain naturally pluripotent stem cells, capable for forming any other cell type, given the right stimuli? Over the past twenty years various groups have argued that it does, but none of those scientists have produced evidence that is both compelling and easily replicated. If they […]

Psychological stress appears to modestly accelerate some measures of aging, though most of the evidence for this correlation comes from animal studies. Evidence points to chronic inflammation, and the immune system in general, as an important factor in this correlation. Separately, chronic inflammation in brain tissue is known to be important in neurodegenerative conditions, and […]

Biomedical Engineering Professor Corey Neu and Benjamin Seelbinder wanted to answer two fundamental questions. How do cells adapt to their environment and how does a mechanical environment influence a cell? What they discovered during their more than six years of research has the potential to tackle major health obstacles and advance […]

A few strategies offer the possibility of growing additional redundant blood vessels, though this is far from rigorously proven. Intermittently provoking hematopoietic stem cells to leave the bone marrow via CXCL12 upregulation, for example. Humans are not completely uniform in their major blood vessel networks, there are variant populations with […]

Skoltech researchers and their colleagues have come one step closer to a working optoacoustic endoscopic probe — a device that could slip inside a blood vessel and analyze atherosclerotic plaques by shining laser light on them to make them wobble like a loudspeaker membrane and betray their chemical composition with […]