The last woolly mammoth roamed the vast arctic tundra 4,000 years ago. Their genes still live on in a majestic animal today—the Asian elephant.
With...
Transforming human stem cells into embryo-like structures was previously unthinkable.
Yet seemingly overnight, multiple teams published initial results that reach towards this goal. Each team...
Seven mice just joined the pantheon of offspring created from same-sex parents—and opened the door to offspring born from a single parent.
In a study...
The human brain is a master of computation. It’s no wonder that from brain-inspired algorithms to neuromorphic chips, scientists are borrowing the brain’s playbook...
Nearly a decade ago, mini-brains shot onto the neuroscience scene with a hefty promise: understanding the developing brain and restoring injured brains.
Known as brain...
Genes are like Egyptian hieroglyphs. Thanks to advances in whole-genome sequencing, it’s increasingly easy to read each DNA letter. But the strings of A,...
The baby mice popcorning around their cages looked utterly normal. But in fact, they’re a technological wonder: they were born from bioengineered eggs matured...
Few things in science freak people out more than human-animal hybrids. Named chimeras, after the mythical Greek creature that’s an amalgam of different beasts,...
The little pigs bouncing around the lab looked exceedingly normal. Yet their adorable exterior hid a remarkable secret: each piglet carried two different sets...
It’s not often that a twitching, snowman-shaped blob of 3D human tissue makes someone’s day.
But when Dr. Sergiu Pasca at Stanford University witnessed the...
Two and a half years ago, a study published in Science Advances detailed how the gene editing tool CRISPR/Cas-9 repaired genetic mutations related to...
Neurons are a collective bunch. Although each neuron receives, processes, and passes on information individually, the electrical spikes only make sense when melded together...
Regenerative medicine and stem cells are often uttered within the same breath, for good reason.
In animal models, stem cells have reliably reversed brain damage...
The energy and transportation industries are being aggressively disrupted by converging exponential technologies.
In just five days, the sun provides Earth with an energy supply...
Dr. George Church, the legendary godfather of synthetic biology, just made another push towards massively editing life’s base code.
Since the inception of gene editing,...
Stem cell therapy is highly attractive in its intuitive simplicity: you clean out injured cells, plop down a gang of healthy replacements, sit back,...
The longevity field is bustling but still fragmented, and the “silver tsunami” is coming.
That is the takeaway of The Science of Longevity, the behemoth...
The human brain is a biological wonder with considerable skills. Regeneration, unfortunately, isn’t one of them.
Save for one tiny V-shaped region within the hippocampus,...
Last month, a team of British scientists successfully made healthy, fertile mice from pseudo-egg cells that resembled fertilized embryos. The story made waves: compared...
It might be time to rethink fertility treatment.
Here’s the scoop: scientists at Northwestern University 3D printed a functional ovary out of Jello-like material and...
Aging insidiously leaves its mark on our brains.
With age, our well-oiled neuronal machinery slowly breaks down: gene expression patterns turn wacky, the nuclear membrane...
New research has found a way to develop the malleable stem cells using a much simpler method than the one that earned the 2012 Nobel Prize. In a paper published in Nature, researchers from Harvard University and Japan’s RIKEN Center show that by simply giving an adult cell an acid bath, they can convert it into a stem cell.
Since the development of induced pluripotent stem cells in 2006, scientists have managed to use the manufactured stem cells like seeds to grow a wide range of tissues and rudimentary organs. But different tissue types have not proven equal, and researchers are still struggling to coax stem cells to take on certain roles: Lung cells have proved difficult to create. Columbia University researchers recently managed to develop functional lung and airway cells from human iPSCs.
Adults lose teeth due to poor hygiene, aging, disease or accidents. Traditionally, prosthetics are used to replace part or all of a lost tooth. But wouldn’t it be better if we could simply regrow lost or damaged teeth? Approaches using stem cells, while still in their infancy, may eventually do exactly that. Researchers led by Dr. Duanqing Pei, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, have reported a potential method for growing teeth from stem cells obtained in urine.
Researchers led by Takanori Takebe, MD and Hideki Taniguchi, MD, of Yokohama City University in Japan recently reported the first 3D vascularized organ derived from stem cells in the journal Nature. Though it is still years away from clinical trials in humans, the approach, used to generate human liver cell buds in mice, has implications for future transplantations of liver and potentially other organs in humans.
