Health

A new study has identified the first common gene variants associated with an increased incidence of hypertension — a significant risk factor for heart attack, stroke, and kidney failure. The…

Computer-based systems that allow clinicians to prescribe drugs electronically are designed to automatically warn of potential medication errors, but a new study reveals clinicians often override the alerts and rely instead on their own judgment.

Harvard statistics professor Samuel Kou, now 34, grew up in Lanzhou, a city in China’s mountainous northwest near the border with Inner Mongolia. The altitude there is higher than Denver’s storied mile, and earthquakes rumble through town several times a year.

Called the North Pond Basin, the site — researchers at Harvard and beyond believe — can provide a window onto a vast world of subterranean microscopic life that extends kilometers below the Earth’s surface and which, according to rough estimates, could rival life above the surface in both diversity and sheer mass.

Genetics may play a surprisingly small role in determining the precise wiring of the mammalian nervous system, according to painstaking mapping of every neuron projecting to a small muscle mice use to move their ears. These first-ever mammalian “connectomes,” or complete neural circuit diagrams, reveal that neural wiring can vary widely even in paired tissues on the left and right sides of the same animal.

Computer-based systems that allow clinicians to prescribe drugs electronically are designed to automatically warn of potential medication errors, but a new study reveals clinicians often override the alerts and rely…

Genetics may play a surprisingly small role in determining the precise wiring of the mammalian nervous system, according to painstaking mapping of every neuron projecting to a small muscle mice use to move their ears.

The largest study ever completed of genetic factors associated with heart attacks has identified nine genetic regions — three not previously described — that appear to increase the risk for early-onset myocardial infarction. The report from the Myocardial Infarction Genetics Consortium, based on information from a total of 26,000 individuals in 10 countries, was given early online release today by Nature Genetics.

What do Julie Andrews and Mozart have in common? And what links Hillary Clinton, Che Guevara, and Cameron Diaz? The former have absolute or perfect pitch; the latter are tone-deaf. How our brains differ to create these disparities was one of the subjects of “Crossing the Corpus Callosum,” a first-of-its-kind symposium held Jan. 10 at the Merck Research Laboratories-Boston.

Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE).

Small is beautiful. Small may also be powerful. Judging from a copy on display at Harvard’s Houghton Library, the book that changed the world is only 8 inches high and 5 1/2 inches wide.

Researchers have reported the first clinical evidence that gene therapy reduces symptoms in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), an important milestone for this promising treatment . Described in the February issue of the journal Human Gene Therapy, the findings stem from a study of two patients with severe rheumatoid arthritis conducted in Germany and led by an investigator at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC).

The Blavatnik Family Foundation, headed by Len Blavatnik, M.B.A. ’89, has given Harvard University two gifts totaling $10 million in support of its scientific and technological research. Half the gift will go to the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT to support cancer vaccine research, and half will go to the Harvard University Technology Development Accelerator Fund, which seeds highly promising early-stage research in the life sciences.

Despite the striking aromatic differences between coffee, peppermint, and pine, a new mapping of the nose’s neural circuitry suggests a haphazard patchwork where the receptors for such disparate scents are as likely as not to be neighbors.

Medical School Professor Bruce Walker has been selected as the founding director of a unique new $100 million effort to finally develop a vaccine that can halt the global HIV/AIDS pandemic that, if it continues unchecked, is predicted to claim an additional 70 million lives by 2020.

What’s involved when a musician sits down at the piano and plays flurries of notes in a free fall, without a score, without knowing much about what will happen moment…

Harvard Medical School professor Bruce Walker, M.D. has been selected as the founding director of a unique new $100 million effort to finally develop a vaccine that can halt the…

A research team at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center has uncovered a vast new class of previously unrecognized mammalian genes that do…

“After eight years of political ostracism, stem-cell scientists like Harvard’s Douglas Melton are coming back into the light — and making discoveries that may soon bring lifesaving breakthroughs. Scientific inspiration…

Harvard Medical School researchers have succeeded in developing a topical treatment that, in mice, wipes out herpes virus, one of the most intractable sexually transmitted human diseases. Judy Lieberman, professor…

A group of hospitals in eight cities around the globe has successfully demonstrated that the use of a simple surgical checklist during major operations can lower the incidence of deaths…

When babies develop a fever high or abrupt enough to cause a seizure, frightened parents often rush them to the emergency room, where their workup frequently includes a lumbar puncture…

The discovery more than a decade ago of leptin, an appetite-suppressing hormone secreted by fat tissue, generated headlines and great hopes for an effective treatment for obesity. But hopes dimmed…

Children of mothers who took acid-suppressive drugs during pregnancy had a 1.5 times higher incidence of asthma when compared with children who were not exposed to the drugs in utero,…

Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) scientist Kevin Eggan today was cited by President George W. Bush for his work in advancing the field of stem cell science on both scientific…

Children of mothers who took acid-suppressive drugs during pregnancy had a 1.5 times higher incidence of asthma when compared with children who were not exposed to the drugs in utero, finds a large population-based study by researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston. The findings, accompanied by an editorial, appear online this week in “Early View” in the journal Clinical & Experimental Allergy. (They will be formally published online on Jan. 19 and will appear in the journal’s February print edition.)

A large international consortium has made significant inroads into uncovering the genetic basis of obesity, adding six new genetic variants to the two already linked to higher body mass index (BMI) in previous studies. Most of the newly discovered genes had never before been suspected of having a role in body weight and, curiously, many of the genes are active in the central nervous system, suggesting they may exert their effects via the brain. The study, from the Genetic Investigation of Anthropometric Traits (GIANT) consortium, appeared online in Nature Genetics on Dec. 14.

Researchers at Harvard University have discovered that our experience of pain depends in part on whether we think someone caused the pain intentionally. Participants in a study who believed they were getting an electrical shock from another person on purpose, rather than accidentally, rated the shock as more painful than those receiving the same shock thinking it was an accident. Participants seemed to get used to shocks that were delivered unintentionally, but those given on purpose had a fresh sting every time.

A new type of highly sensitive microscopy developed by Harvard researchers could greatly expand the limits of modern biomedical imaging, allowing scientists to track the location of minuscule metabolites and…

The number of physicians with board certification in emergency medicine is unlikely to meet the staffing needs of U.S. emergency departments in the foreseeable future, if ever.  In the December…