Category Archives: News & Archives

Molecular biologist David Sinclair wants to revolutionize the way people age. Sinclair is 46, but he’s been obsessed with what he calls “the gravity of life” since he was 4 years old. A professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the university’s Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for the Molecular Biology of Aging,…

An international team of scientists led from Sweden's Karolinska Institutet has for the first time mapped all the genes that are activated in the first few days of a fertilized human egg. The study, which is being published in the journal Nature Communications, provides an in-depth understanding of early embryonic development in human -- and…

Scientists have not been able to understand and predict how cells evolve in our bodies, and this process is important because evolving cell populations are at the core of drug-resistant infections and cancer development. Now a research team led by Gábor Balázsi, PhD, of Stony Brook University, has developed a synthetic biological model that validates…

Rice University scientists have made a living circuit from multiple types of bacteria that prompts the bacteria to cooperate to change protein expression. The subject of a new paper in Science, the project represents the first time the Rice researchers have created a biological equivalent to a computer circuit that involves multiple organisms to influence…

Global life expectancy has risen by more than six years since 1990 as healthy life expectancy grows; ischemic heart disease, lower respiratory infections, and stroke cause the most health loss around the world. People around the world are living longer, even in some of the poorest countries, but a complex mix of fatal and nonfatal…

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have met with enormous public opposition over the past two decades. Many peoplebelieve that GMOs are bad for their health – even poisonous – and that they damage the environment. This is in spite of overwhelming scientific evidence that proves that GMOs are safe to eat, and that they bring environmental…

Scientists from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson (Janssen) have found a way to induce antibodies to fight a wide range of influenza subtypes -- work that could one day eliminate the need for repeated seasonal flu shots. "This study shows that we're moving in the right…

Cancer researchers dream of the day they can force tumor cells to morph back to the normal cells they once were. Now, researchers on Mayo Clinic's Florida campus have discovered a way to potentially reprogram cancer cells back to normalcy. The finding, published in Nature Cell Biology, represents "an unexpected new biology that provides the…

Don't look now, but the pronoun "I" is becoming obsolete. Recent microbiological research has shown that thinking of plants and animals, including humans, as autonomous individuals is a serious over-simplification. A series of groundbreaking studies have revealed that what we have always thought of as individuals are actually "biomolecular networks" that consist of visible hosts…

Life is thought to have originated spontaneously on Earth about 3.5 billion years ago, but some scientists are think life may have come to Earth from elsewhere in the universe. But if finding the origins of life on Earth has been difficult, searching for them in the sky seems nearly impossible. For supporters of the…