The beginning of the end of HIV? New antiretroviral treatment puts HIV remission on the table—and the possibility of an eventual cure more likely. For decades, treating HIV has meant a daily battle against a virus that never truly leaves the body. Antiretroviral drugs can suppress HIV to undetectable levels, but a missed dose or... View Article The post Clinical Trials appeared first on Seek.| Seek
Everything we see, feel, and remember—every surprise, habit, joy, decision, and memory—emerges from bursts of electricity pulsing through the brain. Yet scientists have long struggled to track these patterns at the scale, resolution, and speed at which they happen. Only recently have new technologies made it possible to observe brain-wide neural activitty at the cellular... View Article The post A new way to look at neurons appeared first on Seek.| Seek
One of the greatest achievements in AI was inspired by the human brain itself. Starting in the 1980s, computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton and physicist John Hopfield developed artificial neural networks by training machines to process data using principles discovered in the visual system of the brain. That work, for which Hinton and Hopfield received the... View Article The post Biomedical science in the age of AI appeared first on Seek.| Seek
Charting the Uncharted How an atlas of unconventional peptides could help spur treatments for novel virus strains and hard-to-treat infections When a virus, bacteria, fungus, or other pathogen enters a person’s body, the immune system mobilizes in two phases. The body’s first line of defense is innate immunity, a general and rapid response present from... View Article The post Transformative Tools appeared first on Seek.| Seek
I n the early days of 2020, Rockefeller buzzed with its usual quiet intensity. Graduate students hunched over benches and racks of tubes. Postdocs scribbled diagrams onto glass whiteboards. And in his spartan office at the back of a sprawling lab, Thomas Tuschl was preoccupied with molecules that much of the world had barely heard... View Article The post The key to better antivirals appeared first on Seek.| Seek
Mosquitoes, fleas, ticks, lice: Such humble creatures have played an outsized role in human history. During the Middle Ages, fleas carrying the bacterium that causes plague wiped out a third of Europe’s population. The Anopheles mosquito helped shape the course of the Revolutionary War, laying waste to British troops with its malarial payload. Overall, vector-borne... View Article The post Taming the Threat appeared first on Seek.| Seek
W hen The Rockefeller University was founded in 1901, the average life expectancy in the U.S. was less than 50 years. A century of scientific advancements later, that average lifespan has increased by more than three decades. This dramatic shift is due in no small part to the enormous progress scientists have made in the... View Article The post Gaining the upper hand appeared first on Seek.| Seek
Were modern humans the first hominids capable of complex spoken language? If so, how did this unique capability evolve? New research by Robert B. Darnell and Erich D. Jarvis helps answer both of those questions, and could further our understanding of language and developmental disorders. Darnell, who specializes in studying how RNA-binding proteins regulate gene... View Article The post Finding our human voice appeared first on Seek.| Seek
Little bluestem, sea oats, butterfly weed, coneflowers, asters—Rockefeller’s lush campus is dotted with a host of colorful perennials. But these plants aren’t just beautiful; each one was carefully chosen by our landscaping team because it’s hearty enough to thrive in the campus’s fluctuating East River microclimate, where saline air and brisk winds can be tough... View Article The post A polinator’s oasis appeared first on Seek.| Seek
Bacteria have evolved powerful defenses against the viruses that prey on them. The most famous such defense, CRISPR-Cas9—a kind of molecular scissor that can snip away at viral DNA—was adapted to create the first FDA-approved genetic editing tool. But Luciano Marraffini, who helped identify CRISPR’s potential for genetic engineering, keeps finding more. Most recently, Marraffini... View Article The post There’s more to CRISPR than we knew appeared first on Seek.| Seek