When brain cells start oozing too much of the amyloid protein that is the hallmark of Alzheimer's disease, the astrocytes that normally nourish and protect them deliver a suicide package instead, researchers report. Amyloid is excreted by all neurons, but rates increase with aging and dramatically accelerate in Alzheimer's. Astrocytes, ...

(Phys.org) -- Biologists have long been familiar with luminescence in organisms, where plants and animals produce visible light, but more intriguing perhaps is the newer field of study centered around biophotons, whereby cells in organisms produce photons, but in numbers that are too few to be seen. How they do ...

In a world first, scientists have grown new, healthy heart muscle cells using skin cells from heart failure patients. Writing about their work in a paper published online this week in the European Heart Journal, the Israel-based team explain how the new heart muscle cells are capable of ...

Blocking a protein in the heart that is produced under stressful conditions could be a strategy to prevent cardiac damage that results from chemotherapy, a new study suggests. Previous research has suggested that up to a quarter of patients who receive the common chemotherapy drug doxorubicin are at risk of ...

A team of scientists from the National University of Singapore's (NUS) Department of Biological Sciences and Mechanobiology Institute have discovered how a drug-lead compound - a compound that is undergoing preclinical trials as a potential drug - can deprive cancer cells of energy and stop them from growing into a ...

The anterior insular cortex is a small brain region that plays a crucial role in human self-awareness and in related neuropsychiatric disorders. A unique cell type - the von Economo neuron (VEN) - is located there. For a long time, the VEN was assumed to be unique to humans, great ...

Antibodies that help to stop the HIV virus have been found in breast milk. Researchers at Duke University Medical Center isolated the antibodies from immune cells called B cells in the breast milk of infected mothers in Malawi, and showed that the B cells in breast milk can generate neutralizing ...

(NIH/National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke) Researchers have shown in mice how immune cells in the brain target and remove unused connections between brain cells during normal development. This research, supported by the National Institutes of Health, sheds light on how brain activity influences brain development, and highlights the ...

AUGUSTA, Ga. When brain cells start oozing too much of the amyloid protein that is the hallmark of Alzheimer's disease, the astrocytes that normally nourish and protect them deliver a suicide package instead, researchers report. Amyloid is excreted by all neurons, but rates increase with aging ...

An inexpensive "orphan drug" used to treat sleep disorders appears to be a potent inhibitor of cancer cells, according to a new study led by scientists at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

One of the most important structures in a cell is the nuclear pore complex — a tiny yet complicated channel through which information flows in and out of the cell’s nucleus, directing all other cell activity.

A substance in human mesenchymal stem cells that promotes growth appears to spur restoration of nerves and their function in rodent models of multiple sclerosis (MS), researchers at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have found. Their study is published in the online version of Nature Neuroscience. In animals ...