Harvard
It takes a spleen to mend a broken heart -- that's the conclusion of a surprising new report from researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Center for Systems Biology, directed by Ralph Weissleder, MD, PhD.
A study published this week in the journal Nature offers an explanation for the origin of dwarf spheroidal galaxies. The research may settle an outstanding puzzle in understanding galaxy formation.
To learn from experience, it is essential to know whether a past action was associated with a desired outcome. Now, scientists have demonstrated how this information can be coded by a single cell.
New research has uncovered an early disruption in the process of memory formation in older humans who exhibit some early brain changes associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD) but show little or no memory impairment.
BOSTON--Researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have shown that they can engineer mouse and human cells to produce brown fat, a natural energy-burning type of fat that counteracts obesity. If such a strategy can be developed for use in people, the scientists say, it could open a novel approach to treating obesity and diabetes.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- If you've ever felt doomed to repeat your mistakes, researchers at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory may have explained why: Brain cells may only learn from experience when we do something right and not when we fail.
Cambridge, Mass. -- July 28, 2009 -- As the climate warms in the coming decades, atmospheric scientists at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and their colleagues expect that the frequency of wildfires will increase in many regions. The spike in the number of fires could also adversely affect air quality due to the greater presence of smoke.
A new multisite study by UCLA and RAND Corp. researchers and colleagues has found that 7 percent of fifth-graders and their families have experienced homelessness at some point in their lives and that the occurrence is even higher -- 11 percent -- for African American children and those from the poorest households.
BOSTON -- The androgen receptor -- a protein ignition switch for prostate cancer cell growth and division -- is a master of adaptability. When drug therapy deprives the receptor of androgen hormones, thereby halting cell proliferation, the receptor manages to find an alternate growth route.
BOSTON, Mass. (July 26, 2009) -- Crack open the latest medical textbook to the chapter on type 2, or adult-onset, diabetes, and you'll be hard pressed to find the term "immunology" anywhere. This is because metabolic conditions and immunologic conditions are, with a few exceptions, distant cousins.
BOSTON, Mass. (July 26, 2009) -- High-throughput sequencing has turned biologists into voracious genome readers, enabling them to scan millions of DNA letters, or bases, per hour. When revising a genome, however, they struggle, suffering from serious writer's block, exacerbated by outdated cell programming technology.
The presumption of racial profiling of African Americans is systematically based on the motivation of police officers' racial prejudice; a number of sociological theories (Engel et al, 2002; Romero, 2002; Delgado, 1995; Delgado, 2002) have explored if this presumption has validity.
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- A study led by researchers at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute reveals how late-stage, hormone-independent prostate tumors gain the ability to grow without need of hormones.
Researchers appear to have a new way to fix a broken heart. They have devised a method to coax heart muscle cells into reentering the cell cycle, allowing the differentiated adult cells to divide and regenerate healthy heart tissue after a heart attack, according to studies in mice and rats reported in the July 24th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication.
A team of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) physicians has developed a new general anesthetic that may be safer for critically ill patients.
