In the aftermath of a stroke or traumatic brain injury (TBI), a group of amino acids that typically support brain function contribute significantly to the brain destruction that can follow both these injuries, scientists report.

The new study provides for the first time the surprising evidence that four common nonexcitatory amino acids that usually make proteins which are essential to brain function, instead cause irreversible, destructive swelling of both the astrocytes that support neurons and the neurons themselves, says Dr. Sergei Kirov, neuroscientist in the Department of Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine at the Medical College of Georgia.

“There are many ways to kill neurons...

Antiferromagnets have zero net magnetization and are insensitive to external magnetic field perturbations...

A collection of photos of genetically unrelated lookalikes, along with DNA analysis, revealed that strong facial similarity is associated with shared genetic variants. The work appears August 23rd in the journal Cell Reports.

“Our study provides a rare insight into human likeness by showing that people with extreme lookalike faces share common genotypes, whereas they are discordant at the epigenome and microbiome levels,” says senior a...

Wooden objects are usually made by sawing, carving, bending or pressing. That’s so old school! Today, scientists will describe how flat wooden shapes extruded by a 3D printer can be programmed to self-morph into complex 3D shapes. In the future, this technique could be used to make furniture or other wooden products that could be shipped flat to a destination and then dried to form the desired final shape.

The researchers will present their results at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

In nature, plants and some animals can alter their own shapes or textures...