Researchers have discovered that chromosomes play an active role in animal cell division. This occurs at a precise stage – cytokinesis – when the cell splits into two new daughter cells.

It was observed by a team of researchers including Gilles Hickson, an assistant professor at the University of Montreal’s Department of Pathology and Cell Biology and researcher at the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Centre, his assistant Silvana Jananji, in collaboration with Nelio Rodrigues, a PhD student, and Sergey Lekomtsev, a postdoc, working in the group led by Buzz Baum of the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology at University College London.

Youth from low-income families who succeed academically and socially may actually pay a price when it comes to their health, because relentlessly pursuing goals can undermine health.

Researchers have uncovered further evidence of a system in the brain that persistently maintains memories for long periods of time.

Paradoxically, it works in the same way as mechanisms that cause mad cow disease, kuru, and other degenerative brain diseases. 

In four papers published in Neuron and Cell Reports, the laboratory of Eric Kandel at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) show how prion-like proteins - similar to the prions behind mad cow disease in cattle and Creutzfeld-Jakob disease in humans - are critical for maintaining long-term memories in mice, and probably in other mammals. 

Currently recommended daily allowances of vitamin D may be insufficient in children, according to researchers at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.  Vitamin D is present in a few foods, milk is usually fortified with it and with enough exposure to sunlight the body naturally produces it.

Metals, which conduct electricity, and insulators, which don’t, are polar opposites.

At least that’s what we’ve believed until now.

But we have discovered that a well-known insulator can simultaneously act like a conductor in certain measurements. We don’t yet know the reason for this mysterious behaviour but it is likely due to new and exciting quantum effects.

Pain treatment researchers have discovered thousands of new peptide toxins hidden deep within the venom of just one type of Queensland cone snail. The scientists hope the new molecules will be promising leads for new drugs to treat pain and cancer.