Your Mother's Cells Are Living Inside Your Brain
Your brain contains cells that aren't yours, and may never have been. What exactly your mother's DNA is doing in there remains, somehow, an open question.
Medicine & Health
Joy to the World, Then the ER: The Rare Syndrome Where Happiness Breaks Your Heart
Devastating news and the best day of your life can trigger the exact same cardiac emergency. Here's the biology behind celebrations that land people in the ICU.
Two Strangers Are Living in Your DNA
The part of your genome scientists called uniquely human just turned out to harbor someone else. Two unknown ancestors. No fossils. No names. Still in you.
Shocking Way to Make Adult Brain Cells Act Young
Adult brain cells aren't supposed to change anymore. Shock therapy may be quietly overriding that rule, and the mechanism breaks something neuroscientists thought was locked shut.
Every Egg You'll Ever Have. Except Maybe That's Wrong.
The biology fact you never questioned, that women are born with all the eggs they'll ever have, may be resting on a 70-year-old assumption that's starting to crack.
A CRISPR Enzyme That Recognizes Cancer and Shreds It From the Inside
Cancer cells give off a molecular signature no drug has ever been able to touch. This one doesn't bother being gentle with it.
Tissue Frozen at Age 10 Woke Up 16 Years Later and Made Sperm
A boy's testicle was frozen in 2008 and forgotten for over a decade. Then doctors put it back.
Nerve Fibers the Body Wrote Off Are Growing Back
A genetic "off switch" inside your neurons decides, somewhere around month five of fetal development, that nerve fiber regrowth is done. What if it could be flipped back?
A Poop Transplant Gave Old Mice Their Young Brains Back
Lazy eye treatment only works on brains still able to rewire themselves. So how did a gut microbiome switch that ability back on in animals long past it?
A $20 Fish Tank Helped Grow the First Human Lung Outside a Body
A donor organ, washed of all its cells, reduced to a ghostly scaffold. Then rebuilt from scratch using the patient's own biology.
Your Skin Cells Fire Electrical Spikes When You're Injured. They Work Nothing Like a Nerve.
A wound sets off a wave of activity that races across nearby tissue for over an hour, using signaling biology assumed reserved for neurons. What it's actually communicating is still unclear.
A Bat Sat on a Sleeping Boy's Face. He Had No Bite Marks. He Died of Rabies.
A bat lands on a sleeping kid's face. No bite. No scratch. No reason to worry. The family was wrong, and the reason why is something most people still don't know.
The Twelfth Key to Our Last-Resort Antibiotic Turned Up in Freshwater Mud
A resistance gene capable of defeating one of medicine's final options just surfaced in ordinary river-bottom muck, not a hospital, not a farm. What kept it there might be the more unsettling part.
Older Adults Took a Placebo Knowing It Was Fake. Their Memory Improved Anyway.
A study gave people pills they knew were fake. Memory improved. Stress dropped. Physical performance went up.
Scientists Turned a Parasitic Worm Into a Living Drug Factory
Scientists engineered a hookworm to manufacture and deliver medicine inside a living host. What the parasite spent millions of years perfecting, researchers just learned to program.
No One Born Blind Has Ever Been Diagnosed With Schizophrenia
75 years of searching psychiatric wards worldwide, and researchers still can't find a single blind person with schizophrenia. What does a zero tell us about how the mind constructs reality?
The Sleeping Pandemic That Shadowed the Spanish Flu
A second pandemic shadowed the Spanish Flu, stranger, quieter, and just as deadly. A century of science still can't explain what it was or whether it could come back.
Humans Have a Third Set of Teeth. A New Drug Could Make Them Grow.
Your mouth has been keeping a secret: dormant tooth buds, a latent third set, held in reserve. A Japanese drug trial is asking whether they can finally be switched on.