Ultimately, Charles Darwin’s “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” can be boiled down to a scant 20 or so amino acids, the basic building blocks of life. From this parsimonious palette, nature paints the proteins that make up the wild diversity of life on earth, from the simple...

A team of particle physicists from Rockefeller University watched intently as the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, collided protons at a record energy of 7 teraelectron volts (TeV) yesterday, officially marking the start of the LHC research pr...

Ensuring that every child worldwide has an education sounds like a worthy goal. But as access to public education remains scarce in many parts of the world, a new book by Rockefeller University’s Joel E. Cohen steps back and asks what people want to accomplish through universal basic and seconda...

Infectious diseases are not always caused by infection. In work reported in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, researchers at Rockefeller University reveal that patients who suffer from a rare autoimmune disorder that makes them vulnerable to yeast infections produce antibodies that target and...

The journey from embryonic stem cell to a fully developed liver, heart or muscle cell requires not only the right genes, but genes that are turned on and off at the right time — a job that is handled in part by DNA-packaging proteins known as histones. But it turns out that not all histones are c...

Stress can literally warp your brain, reshaping some brain structures that help cope with life’s pressures. In the short term, the stress response can be helpful — i.e., fight or flight — but over time it leads to a wear and tear that can cause disease in both the brain and other parts of ...

Every day, about 10 billion cells in a human body commit suicide. Cells infected by virus, that are transformed or otherwise dysfunctional altruistically sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Now, new imaging experiments have revealed a previously unseen order to this process, showing close...

Although it’s typically considered an adolescent curse, ADHD actually affects about five percent of adults as well. New research in a mouse model of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder suggests that the root of the psychiatric disorder might be the over-activity of a protein that regulate...

Scientists have identified a gene they say is a strong candidate for involvement in premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) and other maladies associated with the natural flux in hormones during the menstrual cycle. In a paper to be published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sci...

Enzymes that travel along DNA to copy or transcribe it — the crucial processes underlying cell replication and protein production — aren’t coordinated by a central dispatcher. In fact, they often collide. Now, Rockefeller University researchers have discovered that when DNA-copying machine...