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Magazine
In the July 6 SN: Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, stone tool dates face scrutiny, ocean plastic goes deep, records of Inca taxation, erosion spurred plate tectonics and more.
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News
Mice lack stem cells in the heart needed for self-repair
12/19/2018 - 10:53 CellsThere’s some bad news for people who have suffered heart attacks: Healing may not come from within.
Researchers have debated for years whether hearts have their own stem cells. If they existed, those cells could produce new heart muscle cells and might help the organ repair itself after injury. Now that debate may finally be over. After following the fate of dividing cells in the hearts...
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News
Tumor ‘organoids’ may speed cancer treatment
12/17/2018 - 12:00 Cancer, Biomedicine, CellsSAN DIEGO — Collecting cancer cells from patients and growing them into 3-D mini tumors could make it possible to quickly screen large numbers of potential drugs for ultra-rare cancers. Preliminary success with a new high-speed, high-volume approach is already guiding treatment decisions for some patients with recurring hard-to-treat cancers.
“Believe it or not, for some rare cancers...
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News in Brief
Biologists are one step closer to creating snake venom in the lab
12/11/2018 - 14:08 CellsSAN DIEGO — Labs growing replicas of snakes’ venom glands may one day replace snake farms.
Researchers in the Netherlands have succeeded in growing mimics of venom-producing glands from multiple species of snakes. Stem cell biologist Hans Clevers of the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht, the Netherlands, reported the creation of these organoids on December 10 at a joint meeting of the...
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News in Brief
Getting goose bumps could boost hair growth
12/11/2018 - 06:00 CellsSAN DIEGO — Getting goose bumps doesn’t just make hairs stand on end; it may also help hair grow.
Nerves and muscles that raise goose bumps also stimulate stem cells in the skin to make hair follicles and grow hair. Ya-Chieh Hsu, a stem cell researcher at Harvard University, reported the unpublished findings December 9 at the joint meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology and the...
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News
These new tweezers let scientists do biopsies on living cells
12/03/2018 - 11:00 Cells, TechnologyIt’s like the world’s smallest game of “Operation.” A new set of nanotweezers can extract DNA and other single molecules from a living cell without killing it.
Examining the molecular contents of a single cell has traditionally required killing the cell by bursting it open. But that process provides only a single snapshot of the cell’s molecular makeup at the time of its death. The new...