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Nathaniel Heintz, James and Marilyn Simons Professor and head of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, and Stanislas Leibler, Gladys T. Perkin Professor and head of the Laboratory of Living Matter, have been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. They are among 84 new national and 21 ne...

Aging takes its toll on the brain, and the cells of the hippocampus—a brain region with circuitry crucial to learning and memory—are particularly vulnerable to changes that can lead to Alzheimer’s disease or cognitive decline. With the hope of counteracting the changes that can lead to these t...

Scientists solve CRISPR's 'Energizer Bunny' problem   "'It works beautifully,' Tessier-Lavigne said. With standard CRISPR-Cas9, 6 percent to 35 percent of the edits were clean, without random insertions and deletions due to Cas9’s repeated cuts, but with their upgrade, the percentage of clean e...

More than half of our brains are made up of glial cells, which wrap around nerve fibers and insulate them—similarly to how the plastic casing of an electric cable insulates the copper wire within—allowing electrical and chemical impulses to travel faster. In the past, neuroscientists considered ...

Some cells are meant to live, and some are meant to die. The linker cell of Caenorhabditis elegans, a tiny worm that is a favored model organism for biologists, is among those destined for termination. This cell helps determine the shape of the gonad in male worms—and then it dies, after two days...

All animals, including humans, love sweet food. But if you’re someone who never turns down dessert under normal circumstances, try wolfing down six donuts as a scientific experiment. Even the moistest, most velvety piece of chocolate cake will seem a lot less appetizing—and you will likely eat l...

Mapping a Genetic Strategy to Fight the Zika Virus "Aware of the new technology, Dr. Vosshall floated the idea of a new Aedes map on Twitter: 'The Aedes aegypti mosquito is infecting millions with #Zika and #Dengue,' she wrote on Jan. 28, 'but we still haven’t put all the pieces of its genome tog...

To learn what different cells do, scientists switch them on and off and observe what the effects are. There are many methods that do this, but they all have problems: too invasive, or too slow, or not precise enough. Now, a new method to control the activity of neurons in mice, devised by scienti...

Jeffrey Friedman, Marilyn M. Simpson Professor and head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics, has won the 2016 Harrington Prize for Innovation in Medicine. The award, given by the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Harrington Discovery Institute, recognizes physician-scientist...

Congratulations to our latest award winners: Cori Bargmann has won the 2016 Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience, an award given by the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT to recognize outstanding advances in the field. She is being honored for her work on the genetic and neural mech...