After studying global data from the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, researchers have discovered a strong correlation between severe vitamin D deficiency and mortality rates.

All humans start out from a single cell which then divides to eventually form the embryo. Depending on the signals sent by their adjacent cells, these divided cells are then developed or differenti...

The virus SARS coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the known cause of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The "spike" or S protein facilitates viral entry into host cells.

All biological activity in the body produces waste that needs to be removed. This is also true for the brain. Previous research has shown that mouse brains have their own cleaning system, which is...

It was surprisingly simple. University of California, Berkeley, scientists inserted a gene for a green-light receptor into the eyes of blind mice and, a month later, they were navigating around...

Infants and young children have brains with a superpower, of sorts, say Georgetown University Medical Center neuroscientists. Whereas adults process most discrete neural tasks in specific areas in...

When the brain forms a memory of a new experience, neurons called engram cells encode the details of the memory and are later reactivated whenever we recall it. A new MIT study reveals that this...

A US-based lab has unveiled a portable test that can tell if someone has COVID-19 in as little as five minutes, it said in a statement Friday.

Mice have been and will continue to be good base models for human medicinal advances. However, their size and some of their physiological differences leave them lacking in important areas of human...

Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for discovering the liver-ravaging hepatitis C virus, a breakthrough that led to cures for the deadly disease and tests to keep the scourge out...

Neuroregeneration entails not only neurogenesis, but also regrowth of lost connections and birth of non-neuronal cells. While adult neurogenesis in humans is only known to occur definitively in a few...

Chronic wounds are a major health problem for diabetic patients and the elderly—in extreme cases they can even lead to amputation. Using electric stimulation, researchers in a project at Chalmers...

A team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Harvard Medical School has found evidence that suggests meditating daily may slow brain aging. In their paper published in the...

Why is it that you can remember the name of your childhood best friend that you haven't seen in years yet easily forget the name of a person you just met a moment ago? In other words, why are some...

In the past few years, artificial intelligence models of language have become very good at certain tasks. Most notably, they excel at predicting the next word in a string of text; this technology...

When we experience a new event, our brain records a memory of not only what happened, but also the context, including the time and location of the event. A new study from MIT neuroscientists sheds...

Xiang-Dong Fu, Ph.D., has never been more excited about something in his entire career. He has long studied the basic biology of RNA, a genetic cousin of DNA, and the proteins that bind it. But a...

The first human corneas have been 3-D printed by scientists at Newcastle University, UK.

One of the main natural components of ayahuasca tea is dimethyltryptamine (DMT), which promotes neurogenesis —the formation of new neurons—according to research led by the Complutense University of...

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Germany and one in Canada has found that it is possible to reprogram heart muscle to repair damaged tissue. In their paper published in...

The new coronavirus is quickly destroyed by sunlight, according to new research announced by a senior US official on Thursday, though the study has not yet been made public and awaits external...

Our brains have an upper limit on how much they can process at once due to a constant but limited energy supply, according to a new UCL study using a brain imaging method that measures cellular...

In experiments in mice, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers say they have found additional evidence that Parkinson's disease originates among cells in the gut and travels up the body's neurons to the...

Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have demonstrated that stem cells derived from the placenta known as Cdx2 cells can regenerate healthy heart cells after heart attacks in...

Prolonged sleep deprivation can lead to severe health problems in humans and other animals. But why is sleep so vital to our health? A UCLA-led team of scientists has answered this question and shown...

Just as the brain is a privileged organ, so too are the eyes. Often poetically called the windows to the soul, a unique set of studies has begun to regard the eyes in another way. Like the brain, the...

You may perceive the world the way your friends do, according to a Dartmouth study finding that friends have similar neural responses to real-world stimuli and these similarities can be used to...

Three researchers from the United States and Britain on Monday shared the Nobel Medicine Prize for research into how human cells sense and adapt to changing oxygen levels, opening up new strategies...

New research shows how the depth of sleep can impact our brain's ability to efficiently wash away waste and toxic proteins. Because sleep often becomes increasingly lighter and more disrupted as we...

We may have been taught that milk does a body good, but when it comes to the ability of our tendons and ligaments to withstand the stresses of walking, running and injury, Secreted Protein Acidic and...

Two virus researchers in China are recommending security measures after seven Russian farm workers became infected with a crossover flu virus last year. In their Perspectives piece published in the...

Human and animal brains can represent events in time and space in fascinating ways, for instance, by accessing a chronology of events that happened in the past via stimuli perceived by the senses. In...

Despite the remarkable successes of immune-based treatments for cancer, not everyone responds to these approaches and relapses do occur. Researchers around the world are racing to find ways to...

Some of the most important tools in the toolbox of modern cell biologists are special chunks of DNA that act like spies, reporting on the cell's function. The markers, known as reporter genes, allow...

Contrary to popular belief, cartilage in human joints can repair itself through a process similar to that used by creatures such as salamanders and zebrafish to regenerate limbs, researchers at Duke...

New research, published today in Nature, reveals how increasing brain stiffness as we age causes brain stem cell dysfunction, and demonstrates new ways to reverse older stem cells to a younger,...

The Human Genome Project was an ambitious initiative to sequence every piece of human DNA. The project drew together collaborators from research institutions around the world, including MIT's...

Neurons communicate with each other via electrical impulses, which are produced by ion channels that control the flow of ions such as potassium and sodium. In a surprising new finding, MIT neurosci...

In a world first, Melbourne scientists have discovered a new type of anti-cancer drug that can put cancer cells into a permanent sleep, without the harmful side-effects caused by conventional cancer...

Before the pandemic, the lab of Stanford University biochemist Peter S. Kim focused on developing vaccines for HIV, Ebola and pandemic influenza. But, within days of closing their campus lab space as...

The T cells, along with antibodies, are an integral part of the human immune response against viral infections due to their ability to directly target and kill infected cells. A Singapore study has...

In hopes of developing a possible treatment for COVID-19, a team of MIT chemists has designed a drug candidate that they believe may block coronaviruses' ability to enter human cells. The potential...

From the time of early infancy, humans are endowed with the capacity to approximate the number of objects in their visual field, an ability that continues throughout life and may underlie the...

Our brains are incredibly good at processing faces, and even have specific regions specialized for this function. But what face dimensions are we observing? Do we observe general properties first,...

A Duke University research team has found a small area of the brain in mice that can profoundly control the animals' sense of pain.

Scientists have discovered an earlier origin to the human language pathway in the brain, pushing back its evolutionary origin by at least 20 million years.

One of the most pressing shortages facing hospitals during the Covid-19 emergency is a lack of ventilators. These machines can keep patients breathing when they no longer can on their own, and they...

Two drugs approved decades ago not only counteract brain damage caused by Alzheimer's disease in animal models, the same therapeutic combination may also improve cognition.

Eighteen scientists from some of the world's most prestigious research institutions are urging their colleagues to dig deeper into the origins of the coronavirus responsible for the global pandemic.

What happens in the hippocampus even before people attempt to form memories may impact whether they remember.

University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine scientists today announced a potential vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus causing the COVID-19 pandemic. When tested in mice, the vaccine,...

As more Covid-19 cases appear in the United States and around the world, the need for fast, easy-to-use diagnostic tests is becoming ever more pressing. A startup company spun out from MIT is now...

For just the second time ever an HIV patient is in sustained remission from the virus in what was hailed by experts Tuesday as proof that the AIDS-causing condition could one day be curable.

By any measure, carbon-based life originates from carboxylation. That is to say, the coupling of atmospheric carbon dioxide to sugar. Carboxylation is also critical for mitochondria to function....

A newly developed light-sensing protein called the MCO1 opsin restores vision in blind mice when attached to retina bipolar cells using gene therapy. The National Eye Institute, part of the National...

Northwestern University researchers have developed a new injectable therapy that harnesses "dancing molecules" to reverse paralysis and repair tissue after severe spinal cord injuries.

A team of researchers working at the University of New Mexico Health Science Center has found some success in creating a cancer vaccine by coating cancer cells in silica and injecting them into test...

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered a way to regenerate, in mice and human tissue, the cushion of cartilage found in joints.

Researchers and entrepreneurs have developed an implant made of collagen protein from pig's skin, which resembles the human cornea. In a pilot study, the implant restored vision to 20 people with...

A trio of researchers at Oxford University has found that honey is a better treatment for upper respiratory tract infections (URTIs) than traditional remedies. In their paper published in BMJ...

The brain's neural activity—long implicated in disorders ranging from dementia to epilepsy—also plays a role in human aging and life span, according to research led by scientists in the Blavatnik ...

Two scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for their discoveries into how the human body perceives temperature and touch, revelations that could lead to new ways of treating pain or...

In a new study that could improve the therapeutic efficacy of deep-brain stimulation (DBS) for psychiatric disorders such as depression, a team of scientists shows that, when DBS is applied to a...

When Marie Antoinette was captured during the French Revolution, her hair reportedly turned white overnight. In more recent history, John McCain experienced severe injuries as a prisoner of war...

A team of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, has taken another step toward the development of a computer able to decipher speech in the human mind. In their paper published...

A research team led by scientists at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center has discovered a molecule that inhibits the growth and metastasis of pancreatic cancer cells through the iron metabolism...

Russia said Saturday that its scientists had detected the world's first case of transmission of the H5N8 strain of avian flu from birds to humans and had alerted the World Health Organization.

We often think of our brains as being at the centre of complex motor function and control, but how 'smart' is your spinal cord?

Scientists have peered inside the brain to show how taking DMT affects human consciousness by significantly altering the brain's electrical activity.

Two immunologists, James Allison of the US and Tasuku Honjo of Japan, won the 2018 Nobel Medicine Prize for research into how the body's natural defences can fight cancer, the jury said on Monday.

A team of researchers working in China has created several transgenic rhesus monkeys by adding a human gene involved in brain growth to the monkey's genome. In their paper published in the National...

When you enter a room, your brain is bombarded with sensory information. If the room is a place you know well, most of this information is already stored in long-term memory. However, if the room is...

Mind wandering occurs when a person's attention shifts from things that are happening in her present environment to internal thought processes. For instance, while cooking or attending a lesson, one...

Students of physiology are invariably taught that the primary function of myelin is to insulate nerves. In particular, to make action potentials more efficient by increasing the thickness of the...

Until recently, work on biological clocks that dictate daily fluctuations in most body functions, including core body temperature and alertness, focused on neurons, those electrically excitable cells...

A pair of psychologists at Goldsmiths, University of London has found that embedding primes in a person's speech and gestures can influence people's decision-making. In their paper published in...

Past research has consistently highlighted the crucial role of dopamine neurons in reward learning. Reward learning is a process through which humans and other animals acquire different information,...

Scientists from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and Naval Medical Research Center partnered with researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Acuitas Therapeutics to develop a novel...

Does sugar directly feed cancers, boosting their growth? The answer seems to be 'Yes' at least in mice according to a study led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and Weill Cornell Medici...

Doctors for the first time have used a form of gene therapy to restore partial vision in a blind person, according to findings announced Monday.

In the most comprehensive study of COVID-19 pediatric patients to date, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Mass General Hospital for Children (MGHfC) researchers provide critical data showing...

The new coronavirus can live in the air for several hours and on some surfaces for as long as two to three days, tests by U.S. government and other scientists have found.

Thousands of words, big and small, are crammed inside our memory banks just waiting to be swiftly withdrawn and strung into sentences. In a recent study of epilepsy patients and healthy volunteers,...

The year 2021 marks the 100th anniversary of a fundamental discovery that's taught in every biochemistry textbook. In 1921, German physician Otto Warburg observed that cancer cells harvest energy...

The tooth fairy is a welcome guest for any child who has lost a tooth. Not only will the fairy leave a small gift under the pillow, but the child can be assured of a new tooth in a few months. The...

Medical University of South Carolina researchers report in Current Biology that the brain uses similar visual areas for mental imagery and vision, but it uses low-level visual areas less precisely...

The body's ability to adapt to changing conditions and shifting physiologic demands is essential to survival. To do so, each cell must be able to dispose of damaged or unnecessary proteins—a qualit...

The "Star-Spangled Banner" stirs pride. Ed Sheeran's "The Shape of You" sparks joy. And "ooh là là!" best sums up the seductive power of George Michael's "Careless Whispers."

The attentional control that organisms need to succeed in their goals comes from two abilities: the focus to ignore distractions and the discipline to curb impulses. A new study by MIT neuroscienti...

If an opinion poll were taken for the most popular component of mammalian cells, the result probably would be a 50-50 split: Half of respondents would likely vote hands down for the nucleus and the...

For our social life and our profession we must be able to deal with our environment and other people. Executive functions, meaning the basic intellectual abilities that control human thought and...

When the Human Genome Project was completed, in 2003, it opened the door to a radical new idea of health—that of personalized medicine, in which disease risk and appropriate treatment would be...

Human immune cells in blood can be converted directly into functional neurons in the laboratory in about three weeks with the addition of just four proteins, researchers at the Stanford University...

Doctors in Japan have successfully transplanted liver cells derived from embryonic stem cells into a newborn baby, in a world first that could provide new treatment options for infants.

Researchers at McMaster University have developed a promising new cancer immunotherapy that uses cancer-killing cells genetically engineered outside the body to find and destroy malignant tumors.

Multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), believed to be linked to COVID-19, damages the heart to such an extent that some children will need lifelong monitoring and interventions, said...