As people age, their brains pay the price — inflammation goes up, levels of certain neurotransmitters go down, and the result is a plethora of ailments ranging from memory impairment and depression to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. But in a long-term study with implications to treat these and ot...

Fifty years have passed since the United States Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Army invented DEET to protect soldiers from disease-transmitting insects (and, in the process, made camping trips and barbecues more pleasant for the rest of us civilians). But despite decades of research, scie...

Tonsils are a source of sore throats and an excuse for ice cream. But they also provide an important protective service, their immune-cell-rich tissue acting as the body’s first defense against the germs about to be swallowed or inhaled. Researchers have known that tonsils are packed with B cells...

Emil C. Gotschlich, head of Rockefeller University’s Laboratory of Bacterial Pathogenesis, is one of three winners of this year’s Dart/NYU Biotechnology Achievement Awards. Administered by the Biotechnology Study Center of New York University School of Medicine, the Dart/NYU Awards recognize the...

In biology, as in construction, it’s all about having tools that fit the job. Researchers at Rockefeller University have now created a tiny tool, more than 10,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair, capable of encasing single membrane proteins from living cells. The new system, which...

Every minute, 30,000 of our outermost skin cells die so that we can live. When they do, new cells migrate from the inner layer of the skin to the surface of it, where they form a tough protective barrier. In a series of elegant experiments in mice, researchers at Rockefeller University have now d...

Just as cells inherit genes, they also inherit a set of instructions that tell genes when to become active, in which tissues and to what extent. Now, Rockefeller University researchers have built a device that, by allowing scientists to turn genes on and off in actively multiplying budding yeast ...

Evolution moves in fits and starts, shaping species through random genetic mutations that can help them survive or even hasten their death. But although the mutations occur by chance, the process can create surprisingly similar results. Now, in a startling twist, new research has provided an exam...

A new study of psoriasis patients shows that a recently discovered immune cell, called Th17, appears to be a key player in the disease and occurs in far higher concentrations in their skin than occurs in skin of healthy individuals. Rockefeller University researchers James Krueger, D. Martin Cart...

Vitamin D isn’t just for bones anymore. Researchers at ÐÓ°É Hospital have begun a clinical study to explore a possible connection between vitamin D deficiency and insulin resistance. The hypothesis, that raising blood vitamin D levels in an obese, insulin-resistant populatio...