Science

The conventional wisdom about placebos has held for decades: they only work if the patient doesn’t know. Deception, the thinking goes, is essential to the effect. A study published March 21 in the International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology challenges that assumption with data from 90 healthy older adults. Researchers at Universita Cattolica del […]

Daniel J. Baker had a problem that vexed CAR T cell researchers for years: among the thousands of proteins on the surface of cancer cells, which one could serve as a universal target across the many forms the disease takes? The answer, published June 25 in Cell, came not from a decade of painstaking laboratory […]

A human brain begins as a single cell. Nine months later, it contains roughly 170 billion cells, neurons and glia, each in the correct place, each performing the right function. How that staggering increase in scale does not lead to chaos is one of developmental biology’s oldest questions. The classical answer, proposed by Lewis Wolpert […]

A study published June 16 in Genomic Psychiatry by researchers at Tel Aviv University demonstrates that the amount of drug reaching the brain can vary dramatically depending on where a woman is in her menstrual cycle, and that this variability may have been masking real drug efficacy for decades. The researchers, led by Jason Blatt […]

Neisseria gonorrhoeae has developed resistance to virtually every antibiotic ever deployed against it. Even the newest oral drugs, zoliflodacin and gepotidacin, the first new classes in over 30 years, are expected to face resistance within 5 to 10 years. A study published June 17 in Science Translational Medicine from the lab of James J. Collins […]