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-- In 1973, a young scientist by the name of Ralph Steinman became the first person to identify and describe an unusual immune cell called the dendritic cell. At a time when immunology was dominated by research on cell types known as B cells and T cells,…

-- Are there other planets like Earth out there? Could they be places that future generations could eventually live? Is our Solar System somehow special? Current research on exoplanets – planets orbiting stars other than our own – aims to answer these…

-- As reported in a recent issue of the Flash, in the 1990s scientists found they could extend lifespan in yeast and roundworms through caloric restriction, providing the bare minimum set of nutrients necessary for survival. Other groups extended these…

-- On a Monday morning, as he was sorting through Petri dishes of Staphylococci he had left on his laboratory bench before going on vacation, Dr. Alexander Fleming noticed one that had become contaminated with mold. Fungal contamination was not…

-- Every organism is an incredibly complex machine whose biological processes benefit from 3.6 billion years of refinement through natural selection. Thus, it should not be surprising that designing biological systems is still difficult for scientists…

Scientists have shown that resveratrol and resveratrol-like molecules may prolong life, but how might they do this?

-- Despite the fact that sleep is essential to our health, its function and what makes it necessary have remained mysterious. Over the years, scientists have accumulated data showing that sleep, or the lack thereof, affects the brain. Most of this work…

-- The idea that we could grow fuel from a renewable resource is incredibly exciting. Researchers have been hard at work developing biofuels that will allow us to run our society using easily renewable resources. These efforts have gained a lot of media…

-- In the last decade or so, various fields with the suffix –omics have risen in biological and biomedical sciences. The oldest and most well-known is genomics, the high throughput study of all the genes in the genome. Together with other emerging fields…

-- Despite major advances in healthcare and disease prevention in the last hundred years, some of the most painful and serious non-infectious human diseases have eluded a cure. These are the so-called genetic diseases, in which a problem in a person’s…