Biosingularity

Genomic data will soon become a commodity; the next challenge — linking human genetic variation with physiology and disease — will be as great as the one genomicists faced a decade ago, says J. Craig Venter. via Multiple personal genomes await : Article : Nature.

Two new studies add to evidence that older people with low levels of vitamin D may be more likely to suffer from cognitive impairment. The hope is that vitamin D supplements may be able to slow mental decline — an intervention that one research team plans to put to the test this summer. Vitamin D [...]

Why does a commercial dairy cow produce four times as much milk as most other mammals? Why do we look like our cousins? Why do roses come in so many different colors? The answers to these and other questions about the diversity of living things involve processes that occur at the level of genes. Essentials [...]

IF a lover breaks your heart, tissue engineers can’t fix it. But if sticks and stones break your bones, scientists may be able to grow custom-size replacements. Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, a professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia University, has solved one of many problems on the way to successful bone implants: how to grow new bones [...]

Television’s Six Million Dollar Man foresaw a future when man and machine would become one. New research at Tel Aviv University is making this futuristic “vision” of bionics a reality. Prof. Yael Hanein of Tel Aviv University’s School of Electrical Engineering has foundational research that may give sight to blind eyes, merging retinal nerves with [...]

Like many people, rats are happy to gorge themselves on tasty, high-fat treats. Bacon, sausage, chocolate and even cheesecake quickly became favorites of laboratory rats that recently were given access to these human indulgences—so much so that the animals came to depend on high quantities to feel good, like drug users who need to up [...]

specialized nanoparticle filled with an RNA-based cancer therapy can successfully target human cancer cells and silence the target gene, according to results from an early clinical trial. The research, published today in the journal Nature, is the first to demonstrate this type of tissue targeting and gene-silencing in humans. Researchers haven’t yet revealed the clinical [...]

Stem-cell researchers have puzzled over why reprogrammed cells taken from adult tissues are often slower to divide and much less robust than their embryo-derived counterparts. Now, a team has discovered the key genetic difference between embryonic and adult-derived stem cells in mice. If confirmed in humans, the finding could help clinicians to select only the [...]

The Easter Bunny might lower your chances of having a heart problem. According to a new study, small doses of chocolate every day could decrease your risk of having a heart attack or stroke by nearly 40%. German researchers followed nearly 20,000 people over eight years, sending them several questionnaires about their diet and exercise [...]

Men at an above-normal risk of prostate cancer may be able to reduce their risk of developing the disease by taking a drug already on the market. In research reported Wednesday, the drug dutasteride, currently used to shrink enlarged prostates, was found to reduce the risk of prostate cancer by about a quarter in high-risk [...]

One of the persistent frustrations in cancer treatment has been the way that tumors can evade our immune systems as they grow and multiply inside our bodies. Even though cancer cells have special surface markers, known as antigens, the body often doesn’t seem to be able to mount a full-fledged attack against the tumors, and [...]

Replacements for some diabetics’ missing insulin-producing cells might be found in the patients’ own pancreases, a new study in mice suggests. Alpha cells in the pancreas can spontaneously transform into insulin-producing beta cells, researchers from the University of Geneva in Switzerland report online in Nature April 4. The study, done in mice, is the first [...]

In an office park in Woburn, MA, a volunteer presents his fingertip for a quick finger stick. A phlebotomist wicks up the small drop of blood with a specially made square of plastic, then snaps the plastic into a credit-card sized microfluidics cartridge and feeds it into a special reader. Fifteen minutes later, the device [...]

Since the 1920s, scientists have known that cancer cells generate energy differently than normal cells, a phenomenon dubbed the “Warburg effect” after its discoverer, German biochemist Otto Warburg. However, the field of cancer-cell metabolism has been largely ignored since the 1970s, when researchers flocked to study newly discovered cancer-causing genes. Now a new generation of [...]

The medicine cabinet of the future could help make sure patients take their medications on time via a myriad of smart technologies. There are already pill bottles that wirelessly report to a computer when a cap has been opened, and devices for automatically dispensing medicine at the right time, and for reminding patients to take [...]

Patients who fail current hepatitis C virus HCV treatments have few other options except trying the same drugs again, but an experimental antiviral drug is poised to change that.When the drug telaprevir was added to standard treatment with peginterferon alfa and ribavirin, which are also antivirals, about half of patients who had failed previous treatment [...]

Every now and then, there’s a bit of science that’s a combination of brute force and tour de force. Examples that spring to mind mostly come from the world of small, manageable experimental animals, like the mapping of every single cell division of the worm C. elegans, a feat that won John Sulston a Nobel [...]

Last year marked a first for engineered antibodies–the European Commission approved a new cancer drug called Removab catumaxomab, an antibody specially designed to grab both cancer cells and immune cells in such a way that the immune cell can kill the cancer cell. The drug is undergoing testing for U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval. [...]