It’s hard to focus after a bad night’s sleep and by using mice and flashes of light, scientists have found why; just a few nerve cells in the brain may control the switch between internal thoughts and external distractions.

The study  may be a breakthrough in understanding how a critical part of the brain, called the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN), influences consciousness. 

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease) is in the popular media because celebrities are dumping buckets of ice on their heads to raise awareness. Researchers probably wish they would donate money to research rather than raising awareness and hoping someone else donates money rather than dumping water on their heads too, but all medical outreach is good medical outreach.

Researchers at Mayo Clinic and The Scripps Research Institute in Florida have done something a little more practical; they developed a new therapeutic strategy to combat the most common genetic risk factor for ALS and frontotemporal dementia. 

Scientists have altered key biological events in red blood cells, causing the cells to produce a form of hemoglobin normally absent after the newborn period.

Because this hemoglobin is not affected by the inherited gene mutation that causes sickle cell disease, the cell culture findings may give rise to a new therapy for the debilitating blood disorder. Their approach uses protein-engineering techniques to force chromatin fiber, the substance of chromosomes, into looped structures that contact DNA at specific sites to preferentially activate genes that regulate hemoglobin. 

The cytoplasm of mammalian cells is a viscous fluid, with organelles and proteins jiggling against one another and drifting at random.

Yet a new biophysical study finds that those drifting objects are subject to a very different type of environment than what we have thought.

The cytoplasm is actually an elastic gel, it turns out, so it puts up some resistance to simple diffusion. But energetic processes elsewhere in the cell—in the cytoskeleton, especially—create random but powerful waves in the cytoplasm, pushing on proteins and organelles alike. Like flotsam and jetsam buffeted by the wakes of passing ships, suspended particles scatter much more quickly and widely than they would in a calm sea.

Tokyo is a city of more than 13 million people and they are no strangers to earthquakes. The city, like much of Japan, has been devastated by earthquakes in the past and likely will be again - but when?

Ongoing slow-slip earthquakes can't usually be felt at the surface but they play a role in relieving or building up geological stress and recent research examining plate movements under Tokyo has found that, since the massive magnitude-9 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, recurrence intervals for non-damaging slow-slip quakes beneath Japan's capital have shortened. 

This has led some seismologists to wonder if this aseismic creep could be signaling a countdown to Tokyo's next "big one."

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) are adult stem cells isolated from blood or bone marrow that can renew themselves and differentiate into a variety of specialized cells. They give rise to all other blood cell types but their development has long remained a mystery.

In a new paper, researchers elaborate upon a crucial signaling pathway and the role of key proteins, which may help clear the way to generate HSCs from human pluripotent precursors, similar to advances with other kinds of tissue stem cells.