Health

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  • Birth of new brain cells induced in birds

    Stem cells that are naturally present in the brains of finches were induced to replace lost cells and restore the birds’ ability to sing their distinctive song. “Our results represent…

  • Understanding how fish swim

    The pattern is hard to see at first because the movement seems to happen in the blink of an eye.

  • Unlocking the mystery of artistic taste

    “Unlike infants, who share innate preferences about shapes and colors, preschoolers already differ in their artistic tastes,” says Kim Sheridan, a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.…

  • Treating advanced lung cancer with light

    Photodynamic, or light, therapy was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in December 1998. The FDA has also approved using lasers for treatment of advanced stages of cancer of…

  • Shadow proteins in thymus may explain how immune system gets to know its own body

    Researchers recently identified a protein that appears to work by turning on in the thymus, which lies beneath the breast bone, the production of a wide array of proteins from…

  • Researchers switch cancer off and on in mice

    An antibiotic added to the drinking water of mice stops the progress of leukemia. Harvard researcher Claudia Huettner cannot do the same thing in humans, unfortunately, but through such experiments…

  • Oldest known flowering plants identified by genes

    Flowering plants now number 250,000 different species, including virtually all the vegetables and grains we eat, as well as most of the food of the animals that we consume. “It’s…

  • ‘Take two aspirin and call me manana’

    Harvard Medical School is attempting to bridge the language barriers that sometimes arise in medical settings. A set of three medical phrasebooks was first offered in 1999 in three different…

  • Jolie-Pitt Foundation Donates $2 Million to Global Health Committee to Fight HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis in Ethiopia

    The Global Health Committee (GHC) has announced it will receive $2 million dollars from the Jolie-Pitt Foundation to bring life-saving medicines to Ethiopians suffering from HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. The money…

  • Paying attention to attention: How active is hyperactive?

    McLean Hospital researcher Martin Teicher and his team believe that the surest way to separate youngsters who have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) from those with other problems is to…

  • Diving into the gene pool

    Maryellen Ruvolo, professor of anthropology, specializes in the analysis of human and primate family trees using DNA data, a subfield of molecular evolution. She is probably best known for her…

  • Electromagnets used in treating depression

    Recent studies by Harvard researchers at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., have enlarged the body of knowledge about a promising, though still experimental, treatment for a variety of psychiatric disorders.…

  • Aging Brains Lose Less Than Thought

    It’s considered a dreaded inevitability of growing old—you lose thousands of brain cells every day. This idea has been a centerpiece of scientific dogma and popular lore for 40 years.…