Patrick Barry

All Stories by Patrick Barry

  1. Health & Medicine

    Phoenix Heart: Replacing a heart’s cells could ease transplants

    Scientists removed all the cells from a dead rat heart, injected new heart cells, and produced a beating heart, paving the way for eventually growing organs for transplantation in humans.

  2. Earth

    Switchgrass may yield biofuel bounty

    Making ethanol from switchgrass yielded more than 5 times more energy than needed to grow the crops in a large-scale farming trial.

  3. Positive Signal: Lone protons carry messages between cells

    In roundworms, protons carry signals from cells in the intestine to muscle cells, raising the possibility that protons might act as neurotransmitters in mammal brains.

  4. Life from Scratch

    Conjuring life in the lab from nothing but nonliving molecules may sound far-fetched, but the first synthetic life forms may soon be a reality.

  5. Reading the Repeats: Cells transcribe telomere DNA

    Scientists have discovered that human cells make RNA transcripts of telomeres, the repetitive DNA at the ends of chromosomes, a finding that could have implications for understanding aging and cancer.

  6. Health & Medicine

    Keeping metabolic syndrome at bay

    Chromium supplements reduced some of the unhealthy effects of a sedentary lifestyle in rats.

  7. Milking performance from damaged brains

    A compound found in milk can mitigate damage to people's brains caused by stroke or diseases such as Alzheimer's.

  8. Limiting Damage: Fragile X symptoms modulated in mice

    Reducing activity of a gene in mice alleviates many of the symptoms of fragile X syndrome, a genetic defect that causes mental retardation in people.

  9. Pulling Together: Mitotic ring self-assembly revealed

    A ring of proteins forms around the "waistlines" of cells to contract and split the cells in two, and scientists have now discovered how that ring self-assembles.

  10. Cells’ innards may share origin

    Many of the internal structures of a cell may have evolved from an ancient, simpler compartment.

  11. Escaping flatland

    Growing cells in gelatinous materials gains in popularity as more researchers realize how the three-dimensional arrangement of cells influences cell behavior—and increases the relevance of experiments.

  12. Cell’s core pore structure solved

    Scientists working in yeast have deciphered the structure of the complex cluster of proteins that regulates access to the nucleus of cells.