The enteric nervous system (ENS) is the largest component of the autonomic nervous system, with neuron numbers surpassing those present in the spinal cord. The ENS has been called the ‘second brain’ given its autonomy, remarkable neurotransmitter diversity and complex cytoarchitecture. Defects in ENS development are responsible for many human disorders including Hirschsprung disease (HSCR). HSCR is caused by the developmental failure of ENS progenitors...
Tag Archives: human
Anthropology: Hand of the gods in human civilization
Cross-cultural experiments find that belief in moralistic, knowledgeable and punishing gods promotes cooperation with strangers, supporting a role for religion in the expansion of human societies.
Nature doi: 10.1038/nature16879
Chinese company unveils a drone so big it can carry a human – but is it a drone?
Look! Up in the air! It’s a drone, it’s a plane, it’s … Super-Quadcopter! Droves of drones were unveiled this week at the International CES show in Las Vegas, but the one that made the biggest splash was arguably the...
The human migration out of Africa left its mark in mutations
(credit: Wikimedia Commons)
When it comes to evolution, people tend to focus on the big driving force of natural selection, which latches on to helpful mutations while purging the harmful ones. But there are other processes that change the frequencies of mutations—everything from random drift to the founding of small isolated populations.
Looking at our own species'...
Human Inc. raises $700K to change how we experience sound, use headphones
Benjamin Willis and Joe Dieter want to change the way we listen to audio. The Seattle-based entrepreneurs recently raised $ 700,000 for their new company, Human Inc., which employs 15 inside the old Rainier Brewery building just south...
Holocene shifts in the assembly of plant and animal communities implicate human impacts
Understanding how ecological communities are organized and how they change through time is critical to predicting the effects of climate change. Recent work documenting the co-occurrence structure of modern communities found that most significant species pairs co-occur less frequently than would be expected by chance. However, little is known about how co-occurrence structure changes through time. Here we evaluate changes in plant and animal...
Disentangling type 2 diabetes and metformin treatment signatures in the human gut microbiota
In recent years, several associations between common chronic human disorders and altered gut microbiome composition and function have been reported. In most of these reports, treatment regimens were not controlled for and conclusions could thus be confounded by the effects of various drugs on the microbiota, which may obscure microbial causes, protective factors or diagnostically relevant signals. Our study addresses disease and drug signatures...
Barcoding reveals complex clonal dynamics of de novo transformed human mammary cells
Most human breast cancers have diversified genomically and biologically by the time they become clinically evident. Early events involved in their genesis and the cellular context in which these events occur have thus been difficult to characterize. Here we present the first formal evidence of the shared and independent ability of basal cells and luminal progenitors, isolated from normal human mammary tissue and...