General

Does the adult mammalian body contain naturally pluripotent stem cells, capable for forming any other cell type, given the right stimuli? Over the past twenty years various groups have argued that it does, but none of those scientists have produced evidence that is both compelling and easily replicated. If they […]

Psychological stress appears to modestly accelerate some measures of aging, though most of the evidence for this correlation comes from animal studies. Evidence points to chronic inflammation, and the immune system in general, as an important factor in this correlation. Separately, chronic inflammation in brain tissue is known to be important in neurodegenerative conditions, and […]

Biomedical Engineering Professor Corey Neu and Benjamin Seelbinder wanted to answer two fundamental questions. How do cells adapt to their environment and how does a mechanical environment influence a cell? What they discovered during their more than six years of research has the potential to tackle major health obstacles and advance […]

A few strategies offer the possibility of growing additional redundant blood vessels, though this is far from rigorously proven. Intermittently provoking hematopoietic stem cells to leave the bone marrow via CXCL12 upregulation, for example. Humans are not completely uniform in their major blood vessel networks, there are variant populations with […]

Skoltech researchers and their colleagues have come one step closer to a working optoacoustic endoscopic probe — a device that could slip inside a blood vessel and analyze atherosclerotic plaques by shining laser light on them to make them wobble like a loudspeaker membrane and betray their chemical composition with […]

A range of convincing data shows correlations between the presence of airborne particulates, such as those in wood smoke, and raised late-life mortality due to cardiovascular disease and respiratory disease. The likely mediating mechanism is an increased burden of chronic inflammation, due to the effects of particulates on lung tissue. […]

TLR4 is one of a number of cell surface receptors that mediate innate immune cell reactions to molecules indicative of damage in the body. Some fraction of the chronic inflammation of aging is caused by increases in damage-associated molecular patterns that trigger receptors of this nature, and consequent maladaptive reactions […]

Investigation reveals unknown changes in nerve tissue of patients. What changes occur in parts of the brain affected by neurodegenerative disease? How does the structure of the neurons change? Some pathological changes in the tissue are easy to identify using standard microscopy. For example, the protein deposits known as “plaques”, […]