New research advances the possibility of regenerating cardiac tissue after a heart attack. Once the heart is fully formed, the cells that make up heart muscle, known as cardiomyocytes, have very limited ability to reproduce themselves. After a heart attack, cardiomyocytes die off; unable to make new ones, the heart instead forms scar tissue. Over time, this can set people up for heart failure.

New work published April 17th in Nature Communications advances the possibility of reviving the heart’s regenerative capacities using microRNAs – small molecules that regulate gene function and are abundant in developing hearts.

In 2013, Da-Zhi Wang, PhD, a cardiology researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital an...

Scientists have used the tiny distortions imprinted on the cosmic microwave background by the gravity of matter throughout the universe, recorded by ESA’s Planck satellite, to uncover the connection between the luminosity of quasars – the bright cores of active galaxies – and the mass of the much larger ‘halos’ of dark matter in which they sit. The result is an important confirmation for our understanding of how galaxies evolve across cosmic history.

Most galaxies in the universe are known to host supermassive black holes, with masses of millions to billions of times the Sun’s mass, at their cores...

Professor Thomas Gervais of Polytechnique Montréal and his students Pierre-Alexandre Goyette and Étienne Boulais, in partnership with the team led by Professor David Juncker of McGill University, have developed a new microfluidic process aimed at automating protein detection by antibodies. This work, the topic of an article in Nature Communications, points to the arrival of new portable instruments to accelerate the screening process and molecule analysis in biological laboratories to accelerate research in cancer biology.

Microfluidics refers to the manipulation of fluids in microscale devices...

Physicists at the University of Zurich have developed an amazingly simple device that allows heat to flow temporarily from a cold to a warm object without an external power supply. Intriguingly, the process initially appears to contradict the fundamental laws of physics.

If you put a teapot of boiling water on the kitchen table, it will gradually cool down. However, its temperature is not expected to fall below that of the table. It is precisely this everyday experience that illustrates one of the fundamental laws of physics – the second law of thermodynamics – which states that the entropy of a closed natural system must increase over time...