Why do Hydra end up with just a single head?

Often considered immortal, the freshwater Hydra can regenerate any part of its body, a trait discovered by the Geneva naturalist Abraham Trembley nearly 300 years ago. Any fragment of its body containing a few thousands cells ...

How sperm stem cells maintain their numbers

The steady production of sperm relies on the number of sperm stem cells in the testis remaining constant. Researchers including Assistant Professor Yu Kitadate and Professor Shosei Yoshida (developmental biologists at the ...

Scientists discover how mechanical strain shapes plants

Scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) and Carnegie Mellon University in the U.S. have discovered how mechanical forces can influence the shapes of plant leaves and flower petals.

Poxvirus hijacks cell movement to spread infection

Vaccinia virus, a poxvirus closely related to smallpox and monkeypox, tricks cells it has infected into activating their own cell movement mechanism to rapidly spread the virus in cells and mice, according to a new UCL-led ...

Skin gel allows wounds to heal without leaving a scar

A team of researchers at Huazhong University of Science and Technology has developed a silk protein-based gel that they claim allows for skin healing without scarring. In their paper published in the journal Biomaterials ...

Beta cells from love handles

Researchers at ETH Zurich have managed to use a synthetic genetic program to instruct stem cells taken from fatty tissue to become cells that are almost identical to natural beta cells. This brings them a major step closer ...

Severe water stress likely in Asia by 2050, study finds

Economic and population growth on top of climate change could lead to serious water shortages across a broad swath of Asia by the year 2050, a newly published study by MIT scientists has found.

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