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A team of UConn Health researchers has designed a novel, hybrid hydrogel system to help address some of the challenges in repairing bone in the event of injury. The UConn Health team, led by associate professor of orthopedic surgery Syam Nukavarapu, described their findings in a recent issue of Journal of Biomedical Materials […]

Older adults often complain about forgetting, but Penn State psychologists suggest that another problem may be misremembering. In a study, the researchers found that as people age, they may be more likely to rely on a type of memory — called schematic memory — that helps them remember the gist […]

To understand the link between aging and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, scientists from the National Institutes of Health compared the genetic clocks that tick during the lives of normal and mutant flies. They found that altering the activity of a gene called Cdk5 appeared to make the clocks […]

A surprising finding by Rockefeller University scientists about a rare liver cancer’s behavior could lead to more comprehensive patient monitoring and hopefully better outcomes. The scientists recommend that people with advanced-stage fibrolamellar hepatocellular carcinoma, which mostly affects teenagers and young adults, receive regular neuroimaging scans because of the tumor’s apparent […]

The research team has studied an important protein, called C3, from the part of the innate immune system known as the complement system. Upon recognition of pathogenic organisms or dying cells from our own body, C3 is cleaved by blood enzymes as part of a defence mechanism. These enzymes are […]

It’s every over-achiever’s dream: a gene mutation that allows them to function normally with just four to six hours of sleep a night instead of the normal eight. In 2009, UC San Francisco neurology professor Ying-Hui Fu, PhD, discovered a mutation in the gene DEC2 in a family of natural short […]

Tumor cells circulating throughout the body in blood vessels have long been feared as harbingers of metastasizing cancer — even though most free-floating cancer cells will not go on to establish a new tumor. But if these cast-offs could be accurately counted, they could provide an additional way to track […]

The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE and funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF), discovered that a weak grip can be associated with changes in the heart’s structure and function, and could be used as a broad measure of someone’s heart health. By asking people to grip a device called a dynamometer […]

While in previous experiments, artificial materials were made to interact with a variety of individual parts of biological cells, such as enzymes crucial for chemical reactions, a team of researchers from the new FABRICELL centre at the Imperial College London (ICL) had recently gone a step further. In a new […]

Approximately 10–15 per cent of breast cancer patients have so-called basal breast cancer that do not respond to treatment with hormone therapy, which means that they are more aggressive and often recur. Recent studies emphasise the importance of the communication of cancer cells with other cell types in the surrounding […]

Fifteen years ago, Michael Jung was already an eminent scientist when his wife asked him a question that would change his career, and extend the lives of many men with a particularly lethal form of prostate cancer. “When I turned 55 — I’m now 70 — my wife, Alice, said […]

After being stung by a parasitic wasp, the American cockroach loses control of its behavior, becoming host to the wasp’s egg. Days later, the hatchling consumes the cockroach alive. While this is a gruesome process for the cockroach, scientists report in ACS’ journal Biochemistry the discovery of a new family of peptides […]