Category Biology/Biotechnology

A new brain-imaging study has studied the brain activity of jazz guitarists during improvisation to show that creativity is, in fact, driven primarily by the right hemisphere in musicians who are comparatively inexperienced at improvisation. However, musicians who are highly experienced at improvisation rely primarily on their left hemisphere.

This suggests that creativity is a “right-brain ability” when a person deals with an unfamiliar situation but that creativity draws on well-learned, left-hemisphere routines when a person is experienced at the task.

By taking into consideration how brain activity changes with expe...

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have succeeded in restoring mobility and sensation of touch in stroke-afflicted rats by reprogramming human skin cells to become nerve cells, which were then transplanted into the rats’ brains. The study has now been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“Six months after the transplantation, we could see how the new cells had repaired the damage that a stroke had caused in the rats’ brains,” says Professor Zaal Kokaia, who together with senior professor Olle Lindvall and researcher Sara Palma-Tortosa at the Division of Neurology is behind the study.

Several previous studies from the Lund team and others have shown that it is possible to transplant nerve cells derived from human stem cells or from reprog...

Scientists have developed a precise, nanotechnology-based treatment to alleviate the pain and fertility problems associated with endometriosis, a common gynecological condition in women of childbearing age.

Research led by Oleh Taratula of the Oregon State University College of Pharmacy and Ov Slayden of the Oregon National Primate Research Center at Oregon Health & Science University used photo-responsive nanoparticles loaded with dye to find and remove the lesions associated with the disorder.

The endometrium is the innermost layer of the uterus, and endometriosis occurs when endometrium-like tissue forms lesions outside of the uterine cavity—usually involving the ovaries, the fallopian tubes and the tissue lining the pelvis.

On rare occasions, en...

Tiny biohybrid robots on the micrometer scale can swim through the body and deliver drugs to tumors or provide other cargo-carrying functions. The natural environmental sensing tendencies of bacteria mean they can navigate toward certain chemicals or be remotely controlled using magnetic or sound signals.

To be successful, these tiny biological robots must consist of materials that can pass clearance through the body’s immune res...