Damage to the spinal cord is often permanent because injured nerve cells fail to regenerate due to scar tissue of their long nerve fibers.

Nerve cells are wire-like conductors that transmit and receive signals in the form of electrical impulses. This function can be impaired by accidents or disease. Whether or not the affected nerves can recover largely depends on their location: for instance nerve cells in the limbs, torso and nose can regenerate to some degree and regain some or all of their function. 

A new app for finding and mapping chromosomal loci uses multicolored versions of CRISPR/Cas9. The labeling system, developed by  the University of Massachusetts Medical School, could be a key to understanding the spatial and temporal regulation of gene expression by allowing researchers to measure the precise linear distance between two known points on different chromosomes or two locations on the same chromosome in live human cells. 

Why men have more heart disease than premenopausal women has been unclear, but a new study shows that the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen alter cardiovascular risk factors in a way that raises a man's risk of heart disease. Results of the study will be presented Saturday at the Endocrine Society's 97th annual meeting in San Diego.

Men have higher testosterone and lower estrogen levels than premenopausal women. Therefore, doctors have suspected that testosterone may promote cardiovascular disease or that estrogen may protect against it, or both, according to Elaine Yu, MD, MSc, the study's lead investigator and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, Boston.

A new study has found that high levels of blood lipids such as cholesterol and triglycerides can keep Vitamin E, an essential micronutrient, tied up in the blood stream, and prevent vitamin E from reaching the tissues that need it. That means measuring only blood levels may offer a distorted picture of whether or not a person has adequate amounts of the vitamin, and that past methods of estimating tissue levels are flawed.

A team of researchers can detect how taste is encoded in patterns of neural activity in the human brain.

That means they can basically read your mind when it comes to food.

Tastants in the mouth activate specific receptors on the tongue corresponding to each of the basic tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and savory (umami). The signal is then transduced further to the brain. How the peripheral signal is used by the central nervous system to encode taste quality is largely unknown.

An important food resource has been disappearing from streams without anyone noticing until now.

In a new study published March 6 in the journal Science, a team of researchers led by University of Georgia ecologists reports that nutrient pollution causes a significant loss of forest-derived carbon from stream ecosystems, reducing the ability of streams to support aquatic life.

The findings show that the in-stream residence time of carbon from leaves, twigs and other forest matter, which provide much of the energy that fuels stream food webs, is cut in half when moderate amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus are added to a stream.