Lab-Grown Brain Cells Know How Old They Are
Scientists spent five years watching a dish of stem cells grow like an actual human organ. Then they tried to reset part of it. Something unexpected came along for the ride.
Medicine & Health
The Song Stuck in Your Head Leaves a Readable Trace in Your Brain
Ten people imagined familiar melodies without making a sound. What their neural activity revealed was detailed enough for researchers to reconstruct the actual notes.
A Deadly Hospital Fungus Hides in Hair Follicles
This superbug isn't hiding from your immune defenses. It's borrowing them. What researchers found changes how we understand why it's nearly impossible to clear from the skin.
Your Teeth Know Something Your Oncologist Didn't
The cancer survival gap was nearly two years, and it had something to do with tooth count, but nothing to do with chewing.
The Brain Tumor Is in the Skull. The Fight Against It Is in the Neck.
The tumor is in the skull. So why does removing the immune response from the neck make the treatment stop working?
Your Midlife Brain Swaps Out Its Immune Cells for Angrier Ones
Something in your head has been quietly changing crews since your 50s. Nobody vetted the new hires, and researchers just got their first real look at who showed up.
Your Sweet Tooth Is 4 Million Years Old
New research says the modern brain wasn't built on meat alone. Fruit and honey may have paid nearly as much of the bill.
Reducing the Deadliest Ovarian Cancer by Nearly 80% Doesn't Require Removing Ovaries
Surgeons have been in the room with the answer for decades. What took so long, and what still stands between knowing and doing?
The Dunning-Kruger Effect Has It Backwards
Everyone assumed the loudest person in the room was proof. Turns out the math was lying, and the most skilled people may be the most deluded about their limits.
Mescaline Threw a Brain Party. The Cerebellum Crashed It.
Used in ceremony for 5,700 years, and neuroscience only just looked inside. What turned up wasn't on anybody's map.
A Mental Disorder and Lung Disease Share a Genetic Link
One of psychiatry's most debated diagnoses just turned up sharing DNA with a completely unrelated organ system. Diagnostic categories, it turns out, are not how biology actually sorts itself.
Your Brain Has a Secret Drain. Aging Is Slowly Closing It.
Cerebrospinal fluid escapes through microscopic holes in a skull bone near your nose. The passage narrows over decades, but a nasal spray restored full flow in older mice.
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.
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.