Ever since Dolly the sheep was cloned eighteen years ago, scientists have been trying and failing to use that same technique to create cloned human embryos from adult cells. Now, they’ve finally succeeded, in what could a major step toward personalized organ transplants and other therapies that rely on a pool of stem cells.
Staying healthy is a lot like medieval warfare. Cells vs viruses. There are cells defending their castles and viruses trying to break through. If a sneaky virus manages to attack a cell, the cell fights it and notifies all the other castles about what to build to defend it. Man, learning about biology is so much easier when you have cute animations like this making it look like Game of Thrones.
Coral sex is a wonder to behold. On a summer night, always around a full moon, corals somehow all know to release billions of sperm and eggs into the sea, turning the water into a pink miasma of sex. This spawning relies on precise environmental cues, which could get scrambled in climate change. That’s why researchers are trying to get them to spawn in the lab.
If you can’t raise a plant to save your life you know the appeal of terrariums, which can sustain themselves for months on end without being watered. But a retiree in the UK says he sealed up his bottle garden in 1972—and hasn’t watered it since.
In the otherwise barren space 220 miles above Earth’s surface, a capsule of life-sustaining oxygen and water orbits at 17,000 miles per hour. You might know this capsule as the International Space Station (ISS), currently home to six humans—and untold billions of bacteria. Microbes have always followed us to the frontiers, but it’s only now that scientists at NASA and elsewhere are seriously investigating what happens when we bring Earth’s microbes into space.
It might look positively adorable in this image, but don’t be fooled: this pathogen, known as Entamoeba histolytica, eats human intestines alive, cell by cell.
Masses of products—from cosmetics to clothing—now contain nanoparticles, to kill microbes, lengthen shelf life or provide other wonderful properties. But new research from MIT and Harvard suggests they could also be damaging your DNA.
A team of researchers from the University of Virginia just made scientific history: They figured out how to turn stem cells into full blown fish embryos. In other words, scientists can now control embryonic development, a key to being able to grow organs and even entire organism from stem cells.
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Depending on the type of donation, the DNA stays for a short time, a long while—or maybe even forever.
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This amazing 3D piece of silicone dotted with electronics looks like something out of the future—because it is. In fact, this potential pacemaker replacement fits over the human heart and is capable of monitoring and, soon, responding to, its vital signs.
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