Category Archives: News & Archives

Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, have isolated a human monoclonal antibody that in a mouse model "markedly reduced" infection by the Zika virus. The antibody, called ZIKV-117, also protected the fetus in pregnant mice infected with the virus, the researchers reported in the journal…

Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have greater numbers of harmful mutations in their mitochondrial DNA than family members, report Zhenglong Gu of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and colleagues, in a study published October 28th, 2016 in PLOS Genetics. Increasingly, studies point to malfunctions in mitochondria -- the powerhouses of the cell…

Of the 4,000 Americans waiting for heart transplants, only 2,500 will receive new hearts in the next year. Even for those lucky enough to get a transplant, the biggest risk is the their bodies will reject the new heart and launch a massive immune reaction against the foreign cells. To combat the problems of organ…

The Americas are now free of measles, the first region in the world to achieve that goal, the Pan American Health Organization announced this week. The success is credited to the effectiveness of mass vaccination programs over the past 22 years. Yet measles remains a significant problem in other parts of the world, public health…

New research finds genetic differences that help to explain why some babies are born bigger or smaller than others. It also reveals how genetic differences provide an important link between an individual's early growth and their chances of developing conditions such as type 2 diabetes or heart disease in later life. The large-scale study, published…

The star closest to the sun hosts a planet that may be very much like Earth, a new study reports. Astronomers have discovered a roughly Earth-size alien world around Proxima Centauri, which lies just 4.2 light-years from our own solar system. What's even more exciting, study team members said, is that the planet, known as Proxima…

Can the woolly mammoth be brought back from the dead? Scientists say it's only a matter of time. In fact this year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature issued its first official set of guidelines on resurrecting extinct species. What's more, university research labs and non-governmental agencies have projects in motion to bring back…

In the biology lab-based equivalent of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, researchers from the University at Buffalo have uncovered the human body’s internal fountain of eternal youth, in the form of a gene called NANOG. When expressing this gene in aged stem cells, the team found that it reactivated certain processes that had become…

Three weeks after the scientific world marked the 20th anniversary of the birth of Dolly the sheep new research, published by The University of Nottingham, in the academic journal Nature Communications has shown that four clones derived from the same cell line—genomic copies of Dolly—reached their 8th birthdays in good health. The video can be…

This mouse may not look like anything special, but it’s the first of its kind. The egg cell used to create the rodent didn’t come from the ovaries of an adult mother, but were developed in a dish from egg precursor cells of a mouse fetus. To observe how sperm and egg cells form, researchers have…