Science

As a retrovirus, HIV literally writes itself into the genome of the people it infects, which in turn programs a person’s cells to make more viruses and thus remain infected. But a new human genome-editing technique has eradicated the virus from a human cell for the first time, in what could eventually function as an Continue Reading →

Scientists have developed a new blood test that can predict who will develop Alzheimer’s disease a year after having mild memory problems—and it could be in clinical use within two years. Researchers from King’s College London have developed a test which identifies 10 proteins in blood that can predict who will develop Alzheimer’s. It’s around Continue Reading →

One of the biggest problems with printing human meat was the creation of blood vessels and ventricles. Making a solid mass of flesh was easy but adding a way to pump blood and other nutrients through the flesh was more difficult. Now researchers at the University of Sydney, Harvard, Stanford and MIT, have solved some Continue Reading →

Researchers from King’s College London just announced a new approach to fixing cavities that requires no injections, no drills, and no pain. It’s just a little blast of electric current that encourages the tooth to self-repair. And they say it’ll be on the market in three years. The new technique sounds confusingly simple. Cavities form Continue Reading →

MIT’s CSAIL lab has just taken its very cool but kinda creepy WiFi motion tracking to a new level: monitoring your vital signs from another room. Last we saw, the same researchers bounced low-powered WiFi signals (100x less than a home router) off of individuals to finely track their position behind a wall. The resulting Continue Reading →

The tangled highway of blood vessels that twists and turns inside our bodies, delivering essential nutrients and disposing of hazardous waste to keep our organs working properly has been a conundrum for scientists trying to make artificial vessels from scratch. Now a team from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) has made headway in fabricating blood Continue Reading →

Imperial physicists have discovered how to create matter from light – a feat thought impossible when the idea was first theorised 80 years ago. In just one day over several cups of coffee in a tiny office in Imperial’s Blackett Physics Laboratory, three physicists worked out a relatively simple way to physically prove a theory Continue Reading →

People who use mobile phones intensively appear to have a higher risk of developing certain types of brain cancer, French scientists have said, reviving questions about phone safety. Individuals who used their mobiles for more than 15 hours each month over five years on average had between two and three times greater risk of developing Continue Reading →

For the first time ever, scientists have 3D printed a cancer tumor in order to study how to kill it. Growing cancer cells in a laboratory is nothing new—it’s often how new drugs are tested before they hit clinical trials. But those cultures are grown on petri dishes, where they’re unable to become actual “tumors” Continue Reading →

In a series of papers released on Sunday, researchers showed that it’s possible to reduce many of the problems with age, including declines in memory and loss of muscle strength, simply by supplying older mice with blood plasma from younger ones. The work even identified a specific protein, GDF11, that mediates many of the effects. Continue Reading →