Biosingularity

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that seems to have been around from about the time of the very first nerves. Every animal we’ve looked at, including some that branched off prior to the Cambrian, seems to express the dopamine signaling machinery in its nerves. So you might expect that eliminating dopamine entirely would be a fatal [...]

Toxoplasmosis is a serious disease when transmitted from a pregnant mother to the unborn fetus, potentially resulting in stillbirth, brain damage, or long-term eye damage that can lead to blindness. Even worse, it’s extremely common in a most common animal, the house cat—and it’s easily transmissible from cats to humans. The parasite that causes it, [...]

When cells are exposed to life-threatening stresses, they take quick action to save themselves. Among other defenses, they start manufacturing proteins that perform critical tasks such as repairing DNA. Researchers at MIT and the University of Albany have now discovered one way that cells boost production of such proteins. In the Dec. 16 issue of [...]

Women with metastatic breast cancer who have no tumor cells circulating in their blood after the first round of treatment live longer than those who do, French researchers report.Circulating tumor cells, or CTCs, are cells that break off from a tumor and escape into the bloodstream. These cells can travel to other organs and establish [...]