Biosingularity

BGI, the world’s largest genomic organization, announced that an international team of researchers from Korea, China and USA, for the first time, demonstrated the physiology and longevity of the naked mole rats (NMR) in terms of genomics and transcriptomics. The results, published online today in the international journal Nature, provide an excellent opportunity to better [...]

New York University biologists have identified a new mechanism for regulating color vision by studying a mutant fly named after Frank (‘Ol Blue Eyes) Sinatra. Their findings, which appear in the journal Nature, focus on how the visual system functions in order to preserve the fidelity of color discrimination throughout the life of an organism. [...]

The brain learns through changes in the strength of its synapses — the connections between neurons — in response to stimuli. Now, in a discovery that challenges conventional wisdom on the brain mechanisms of learning, UCLA neuro-physicists have found there is an optimal brain “rhythm,” or frequency, for changing synaptic strength. And further, like stations [...]

Broken biological clocks in blood vessels may contribute to hardened arteries, even if the main timer in the brain works fine. The finding, from transplant experiments with mice, suggests that throwing off the daily rhythms of the body’s organs can have serious health consequences. A wealth of evidence shows that skimping on sleep and working [...]

Fewer women are dying from breast cancer, largely because of advances in screening and treatment. Poorer women, however, are seeing a slower and later decline in their risk of dying from breast cancer, in part because they don’t have as much access to these life-saving advances. In 2008, 51.4% of poor women aged 40 and [...]

Johns Hopkins scientists investigating chemical modifications across the genomes of adult mice have discovered that DNA modifications in non-dividing brain cells, thought to be inherently stable, instead underwent large-scale dynamic changes as a result of stimulated brain activity. Their report, in the October issue of Nature Neuroscience, has major implications for treating psychiatric diseases, neurodegenerative [...]