Biosingularity

Laughter is regularly promoted as a source of health and well being, but it has been hard to pin down exactly why laughing until it hurts feels so good.RSS Feed Get Science News From The New York Times »The answer, reports Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford, is not the intellectual pleasure of cerebral [...]

A gene responsible for chronic pain has been identified, with scientists saying this could lead to drugs for treating long-lasting back pain.Writing in the journal Science, University of Cambridge researchers removed the HCN2 gene from pain-sensitive nerves in mice.Deleting the gene stopped any chronic pain but did not affect acute pain. via BBC News – [...]

Each taste, from sweet to salty, is sensed by a unique set of neurons in the brains of mice, new research reveals. The findings demonstrate that neurons that respond to specific tastes are arranged discretely in what the scientists call a “gustotopic map.” This is the first map that shows how taste is represented in [...]

Like explorers mapping a new planet, scientists probing the brain need every type of landmark they can get. Each mountain, river or forest helps scientists find their way through the intricacies of the human brain. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have developed a new technique that provides rapid access to [...]

Engineers from the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois recently reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences using small changes in the optical properties of  single living cells to measure their growth. “Determining the growth patterns of single cells,” the researchers write, “offers answers to some of the most elusive questions [...]

Multiple lifestyle factors such as obesity and alcohol consumption increase a person’s risk of diabetes. But new research suggests that a person’s odds of developing the disease may decrease for each positive lifestyle change they make. Lifestyle factors that can influence the risk of developing type 2 diabetes include diet, weight, physical activity, smoking, and [...]

Researchers at the University of Leeds have discovered a pain-free way of tackling dental decay that reverses the damage of acid attack and re-builds teeth as new. The pioneering treatment promises to transform the approach to filling teeth forever. Tooth decay begins when acid produced by bacteria in plaque dissolves the mineral in the teeth, [...]

We make decisions all our lives—so you’d think we’d get better and better at it. Yet research has shown that younger adults are better decision makers than older ones. Some Texas psychologists, puzzled by these findings, suspected the experiments were biased toward younger brains. So, rather than testing the ability to make decisions one at [...]

A team of scientists from The Scripps Research Institute have successfully reengineered an important antibiotic to kill the deadliest antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The compound could one day be used clinically to treat patients with life-threatening and highly resistant bacterial infections. The results were published in an advanced online issue of the Journal of the American Chemical [...]