Stem cells have been coaxed into creating everything from liver cells to beating heart tissue. Recently, these versatile cells were even used to make fertile mouse sperm, suggesting that stem cell technology might eventually be able to play a role in the treatment of human infertility. Now two types of stem cells have been turned [...]

Four-legged stowaways hitched a ride aboard the wooden 10th- and 11th-century Viking ships that braved the northern seas. The probably numerous passengers aboard hailed from Mus musculus domesticus, the small, fleet-of-foot rodent otherwise known simply as the house mouse. Opportunistic hangers-on have accompanied human migrations throughout history. From the louse to the mouse, scientists have [...]

Lung cancer affects both smokers and nonsmokers, killing more than half of the people who get it within five years. It has been notoriously hard to treat, frequently resulting in widespread resistance and nasty side effects from high doses of drugs. Delivering anti-cancer drugs and compounds to suppress resistance more directly to the lungs via [...]

While second nature to many of us, driving a car is actually a fairly complex process. At its most stripped down version, first you sit in the driver’s seat, then you start the engine, then you shift into gear, and then you must simultaneously steer while keeping your foot on the gas pedal. That doesn’t [...]

My high school biology teacher once told me that nothing was binary in biology except for alive and dead, and pregnant and not pregnant. Any other variation, he said, existed along a continuum. Whether or not the claim is technically accurate, it serves to illustrate an important feature of biological life. That is, very little [...]

The recent talk of ultrasonic tarsiers reminded me of a post I wrote a couple years ago. You see, tarsiers aren’t the only animal to communicate at a sound frequency beyond the level of human hearing: mice do as well. But, for some reason, some mice actually chatter in such a way that they can [...]