Slow Synchronisation Keeps Heart Cells Beating in Time
If you dance cheek-to-cheek with a partner, your rhythms soon synchronise, so you move smoothly across the floor. Heart cells that beat – cardiomyocytes – are the same. If you...
An Essential Balancing Act: Neurons Adapt to Stay Steady
A new study of lab-grown neurons by the Weizmann Institute of Research reveals a new regulatory mechanism for keeping the On-Off switches in our brain in balance Our brain has...
The Hunger Games: Uncovering the Secret of the Hunger Switch in the Brain
Being constantly hungry, no matter how much you eat – that’s the daily struggle of people with genetic defects in the brain’s appetite controls, and it often ends in severe...
When the Beads Line Up
Our body’s proteins are largely the same as those of apes and monkeys, and the similarities extend even to the less human-like creatures: We share roughly 90 percent of our...
Mouse Embryos Grown Outside the Uterus
A new method is set to reveal the hidden first stages of embryonic development – from a tiny ball of cells to organ growth – this unique research is from...
Bacteria May Aid Anti-Cancer Immune Response
Cancer immunotherapy may get a boost from an unexpected direction: bacteria residing within tumour cells. In a new study published in Nature, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science and...
How Bushfire Smoke Travelled Around the World
A new study has uncovered how some Australian fires produced a spreading stratospheric haze rivalling that of a volcanic eruption. It’s not just how hot the fires burn – it’s...
Killing Them Softly – with Proteasomes
A collaborative research effort at the Weizmann Institute of Science has revealed that deadly malaria parasites’ are a pre-invasion strategy for softening up red blood cells. Red blood cells are...
How ‘Great’ was the Great Oxygenation Event?
Around 2.5 billion years ago, our planet experienced what was possibly the greatest change in its history: According to the geological record, molecular oxygen suddenly went from non-existent to becoming...
Uncovering the Anti-Myeloma Resistance Files
Multiple myeloma patients live much longer today than in the past, thanks to new targeted anti-myeloma drugs, but ultimately most develop resistance to the medications, and in some the disease...
Study Could Help Develop New Antibacterial Therapies
Bacteria that cause life-threatening infections sometimes resort to the nastiest ploy of all: Stealing the human body’s defence weapons and exploiting them to their own advantage. Researchers at the Weizmann...
Research on Stress Reveals New Cells and Drug Targets
Research at the Weizmann Institute of Science and Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, focused on uncovering the activities organs, tissues and cells responsible for our body’s stress response has revealed...
A Brain Mechanism Underlying ‘Vision’ in the Blind Revealed
Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have observed slow spontaneous fluctuations in the brain’s visual centres preceding visual hallucinations in blind people. Some people lose their eyesight, but continue...
Plastic’s Just Blowing in the Wind
As the plastic in our oceans breaks up into smaller and smaller bits without breaking down chemically, the resulting microplastics are becoming a serious ecological problem. Now, a new study...
How Cancers Hurt Themselves to Hurt Immune Cells More
A study of melanoma cells explains a puzzling response they exhibit to ward off T cell attacks. Cancers like melanoma are hard to treat, not least because they have a...
The Mass of Human-Made Materials Now Equals the Planet’s Biomass
A new study at the Weizmann Institute of Science shows that we are doubling the mass of the human-made ‘anthropogenic’ part of the world every twenty years and the curve...
A New Look at the Social Brain
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 5 Communication with others – verbal and...
Digital Aromas on the Horizon
Fragrances – promising mystery, intrigue and forbidden thrills – are blended by master perfumers, their recipes kept secret. In a new study on the sense of smell, Weizmann Institute of...
Mystery Molecule in Bacteria Is Revealed to Be a Guard
Peculiar hybrid structures called retrons that are half RNA, half single-strand DNA are found in many species of bacteria. Since their discovery around 35 years ago, researchers have learned how...
Ice Could Exist Near the Lunar Surface
New collaborative research from the United States and the Weizmann Institute of Science shows that micro cold traps near the Moon’s poles could contain a ready supply of water ice....