When Karin Danzer's team at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases began sorting through brain tissue from more than 80 deceased ALS patients, they were looking for patterns inside a disease that has, so far, refused to yield any.
Mar 12, 2026
Right now, somewhere along your vagus nerve, signals are travelling from your intestine to your hippocampus.
Mar 11, 2026
The cell death program is almost ostentatiously thorough. Once a cell commits to apoptosis, the internal machinery fires in sequence: the mitochondria fragment…
Mar 11, 2026
A target, it turns out, can be two entirely different things. It can be the finish line (the point at which you stop and declare success). Or it can be a waypoint, a necessary passage on a longer road whose end you cannot yet see clearly.
Mar 11, 2026
The powder is an implausible colour. Chlorophyll-dense, almost fluorescent, it turns water the shade of a well-lit aquarium when you whisk it in.
Mar 11, 2026
Three percentage points. In a presidential election decided by margins thin enough to fit inside a rounding error, three percentage points is not a trivial number.
Mar 10, 2026
The cells responsible for your grip strength don't live in your arms. Some of them, it turns out, live in your gut.
Mar 10, 2026
Cathy Sharp found the first one in January 2013, growing out of decomposed herbivore dung in the rocky, mixed-deciduous woodland of the Matobo Hills in southern Zimbabwe.
Mar 10, 2026
Inside every cell, tiny molecular machines are running more or less continuously, churning out a molecule called adenosine triphosphate.
Mar 10, 2026
Every protein in your bloodstream has a shape. Not just a composition, a shape: a tightly folded three-dimensional structure that changes depending on the molecular environment around it.
Mar 10, 2026
The appointment goes something like this. A man has been diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer.
Mar 10, 2026
For decades, SMAD7 had a reputation. It was an inhibitor, a brake pedal in the cellular signalling network, a protein whose job was to dampen down the TGF-beta pathway and keep tissue growth under control.
Mar 10, 2026
The needle goes in at a point called Shenshu, 5 millimetres to the side of the second lumbar vertebra, roughly at the small of the back.
Mar 9, 2026
The spectrogram tells the story before your ears do. On the left, a waveform dense with harmonic structure, the coloured bands of a human voice in song, each vowel a warm smear of overlapping frequencies.
Mar 9, 2026
