Genetic Flip Helped Organisms Go From One Cell to Many

Posted on January 7, 2016May 24, 2020 by admin

The New York Times, January 7, 2016

Narwhals and newts, eagles and eagle rays — the diversity of animal forms never ceases to amaze. At the root of this spectacular diversity is the fact that all animals are made up of many cells — in our case, about 37 trillion of them. As an animal develops from a fertilized egg, its cells may diversify into a seemingly limitless range of types and tissues, from tusks to feathers to brains.

The transition from our single-celled ancestors to the first multicellular animals occurred about 800 million years ago, but scientists aren’t sure how it happened. In a study published in the journal eLife, a team of researchers tackles this mystery in a new way.

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Scientists unearth bacteria from stomach of 5,300-year-old iceman

Posted on January 7, 2016May 24, 2020 by admin

STAT, January 7, 2016

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In 1991, a German couple hiking in the Alps came across the body of a middle-aged man lying face down in a snowfield. It took days for a recovery team to hack him out of the ice and haul him by helicopter and truck to a lab in Austria. There, scientists determined the man had died 5,300 years ago.

Ötzi, as the man was nicknamed (after the nearby Ötztal Valley), has kept scientists very busy for the past 24 years. They’ve even built an entire research center — the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, Italy — to house Ötzi and study him. They’ve slowly extracted one clue after another about how Ötzi died and, more importantly, how he lived.

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Seeking the Gears of Our Inner Clock

Posted on December 28, 2015June 25, 2020 by Lori Jia

The New York Times, December 28, 2015

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Throughout the day, a clock ticks inside our bodies. It rouses us in the morning and makes us sleepy at night. It raises and lowers our body temperature at the right times, and regulates the production of insulin and other hormones.

The body’s circadian clock even influences our thoughts and feelings. Psychologists have measured some of its effects on the brain by having people take cognitive tests at different times of day.

As it turns out, late morning turns out to be the best time to try doing tasks such as mental arithmetic that demand that we hold several pieces of information in mind at once.

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Science in 2016: Separating the hype from the promise

Posted on December 23, 2015December 11, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

STAT, December 23, 2015

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In science, the future is a treacherous place.

Each time researchers publish an exciting new study, we’re all too tempted to extrapolate far beyond the initial findings to imagine all sorts of tremendous benefits very soon. In medicine, these giddy predictions can be downright cruel. They may offer false hope to people grappling with all-too-real disorders.

Yet the future isn’t going to leave us high and dry. Researchers are unquestionably making important advances in their understanding of how our bodies work — advances that might indeed someday change the practice of medicine. As we round the corner toward the start of 2016, here’s what we may reasonably expect in a couple of high-profile biomedical fields.

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