Big Blasts May Set Veterans' Aging Clocks Running Fast
Not every cost of service leaves a mark anyone can see. In some veterans, the force of one powerful blast may be tied to cells that age faster, by a route no one has traced.
Medicine & Health
Retrained Cells Wiped Out the Body's Grudge Against Its Own Joints
What if an immune system could forget a grudge but keep its vaccines? In six patients, something like that appears to have happened.
Two Drugstore Staples Matched Antibiotics on Gum Disease. The Effect Outlasted the Pills.
Whatever omega-3 and aspirin set in motion inside diseased gums kept working long after the final dose. The researchers are still tracing how.
Growing Hair Switches On Ancient Viral DNA in the Follicle
Every time a hair starts to grow, the follicle switches on retroviruses parked in the genome for millions of years. Usually nothing happens. Usually.
Your Brain May Prefer a Familiar Threat to a Kind Surprise
Why would a mind push away exactly what it needs? Freud and the forecasting-brain model may have spotted the same stubborn habit from opposite ends.
Mouse Eyes Take Out the Trash Through a Back Door
Nearly every organ in the body has a drain for its waste. The eye's rear seemed to be the exception. Then glowing tracers found the exit.
Britain's Wartime Sugar Ration Still Shows Up in Its Babies' Brains
A shortage these people were too young to remember may have followed their brains for a lifetime. Most of what carried it that far is still unaccounted for.
A Black Mold With a Taste for Brains Is Turning Up More Often
Where this fungus waits, how it gets in and why one lab started catching it far more often are all still open questions.
A Vanished Human Protein Is Haunting Mouse Brains
Mouse brains copied a human disease protein down to the atom, tangles and all. Yet mice like these seem healthy. So what exactly are those tangles doing?
A Dying Man's Brain Waves Were Recorded. They Looked Like Memory.
The EEG kept recording after his heart stopped. What it caught has no settled explanation, and researchers spent years looking for a second case to compare it to.
The Blockage in Her Gut Had Legs. Fourteen of Them.
An 82-year-old's intestinal blockage was hiding a passenger. It was alive, and it wanted out.
Bacteria Crossed Continents With Us. Industrialization Derailed the Journey.
Some gut bacteria may have ridden along on humanity's longest walk. Why are so many of them missing from the people reading this?
These Failing Rat Hearts Run Partly on Spinach
A leaf's energy machinery can run inside heart muscle. Getting it there, and keeping it lit through a human chest, is unsolved.
The Eye's Light Catchers Died. Its Couriers Got Retrained.
The cells meant only to pass messages along took on a second job. How much sight they can deliver, and for whom, is an open question.
This Nanomaterial Scrubs In for Brain Surgery. Then It Stays for Cleanup.
One wavelength of light, two jobs inside a brain. The second one runs on something the tumor makes for itself.
A Human Brain Gene Jumped Into a Wart Virus
Jumping genes that land a steady job in the body usually stop wandering. This one never settled down, and nobody knows what a skin virus wants with it.
Fruit Fly Gut Cells Have a Slimy Survival Test
Feed a fruit fly sugars and amino acid lookalikes it cannot digest and its gut cells still act as if the meal was rich. Nobody knows how a cell takes that measure.
Two Big Aging Events Happen Decades Apart
A program that never knew a single donor's age sorted tissues into three aging schedules, then caught two organs keeping step with each other. The pairing surprised even its authors.