Work has implications for repairing human heart muscle after heart attacks

Experiments on zebrafish provide important clues that could eventually lead to the ability to regenerate damaged human heart muscle, say researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Children’s Hospital Boston. Reporting in the Dec. 13 issue of Science, a team led by HHMI investigator Mark T. Keating, MD, senior associate, department of Cardiology, showed for the first time that zebrafish can reg

Using a powerful new instrument at the South Pole, a team of cosmologists has produced the most detailed images of the early Universe ever recorded. The research team, which was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), has made public their measurements of subtle temperature differences in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. The CMB is the remnant radiation that escaped from the rapidly cooling Universe about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. Images of the CMB provide researchers

Scientists all over the world hunt for anti-mutagens, substances protecting against mutations. Where they can find them? It was suggested and later proved that most anti-mutagens are located in those organs and biological liquids, which are connected with the process of reproduction. The latter is the key point in the life cycle, in which genome disorders should be minimal. Anti-mutagens were found in seeds, spores, eggs, and sperm. It was also established that anti-mutagens are formed in certain bac

In stunning color images using time-lapse microscopy, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have for the first time captured the very earliest stages of HIV infection in living cells.

The researchers filmed individual HIV particles as they traveled to the nucleus of a human cell and began taking over its genetic machinery — the first step in the destruction of the body’s immune system that leads to AIDS.

The movies not only offer tantalizing glimpses of HIV in acti

The simple worm has at least one talent that could benefit most Americans.

It can convert Omega-6 — a group of fatty acids abundant in the Western diet with the potential to promote inflammation – into Omega-3, another class of fatty acids that decreases inflammation, helping keep vessel walls smooth and blood free-flowing.

The question one Medical College of Georgia researcher is asking is whether the enzyme these C. Elegans, or nematodes, use can work the same magic in peo

Using clusters of gold atoms and a microscopic lever, University of Toronto chemists have created a tiny circuit critical to the future of electronic engineering.

“When things are this small, they are fantastically sensitive,” says Professor Al-Amin Dhirani. “Such a circuit could make possible a bio-sensor that is activated by the reaction of just one molecule.” This has the potential for detecting important biological molecules including DNA, he notes.

Dhirani found that when the