Browsing: Lens_biology

Scientists are changing the rules for how DNA works.

Opening locked minds with music.

Earlier today three US-based researchers shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their research on vesicles, special structures that ferry all kinds of molecules around biological cells, and are fundamental to those cells’ functioning. Their findings provide some key background for our understanding of life—information that will fill textbooks for decades—though they lack […]

Brain-computer interfaces are getting very sensitive.

Before noon in the Soconusco region of southern Chiapas, down by the border where Mexico meets Guatemala, the lush, green terrain is rife with bodies in motion. It is an area abutting the Pacific, a vast collection of plantations, most of them growing coffee. Hsun-Yi Hsieh, a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan, has […]

Turning bacteria against each other can help fight antibiotic resistance.

Using molecular codes, plants cry for help, ward off bugs, and save each other.

Some cancer therapies focus the attention of the immune system like a spotlight over Hollywood.Everett Collection / Shutterstock In early May, 1891, William Coley, a New York surgeon, had before him an interesting case. The patient, a 35-year-old Italian man, had sarcoma tumors in his neck and tonsils, and was slowly starving to death as […]

When you think of fame, you probably picture Hollywood A-listers, big-time political players, or triumphant athletes, the people who routinely see photos of themselves when they glance at magazine and newspapers. But we are each of us an exemplar of the biology of fame. Consider some recent scientific findings regarding the substantial genetic uniqueness […]

When talking about our health, we tend to refer breezily to “the immune system,” as if it were as simple as an electric fence keeping out invaders. And there’s certainly an electric fence component: The innate immune response is an ancient, relatively nonspecific kind of defense that triggers inflammation and the deployment of attack cells […]