Most people notice that they naturally experience different levels of sleepiness and alertness throughout the day, but what causes these patterns? Sleep is regulated by two body systems: sleep/wake homeostasis and the circadian biological clock . When we have been awake for a long period of time, sleep/wake homeostasis tells us that a need for sleep is accumulating and that it is time to sleep. It also helps us maintain enough sleep throughout the night to make up for the hours of being awake...

Nanoparticles known as Cornell dots, or C dots, have shown great promise as a therapeutic tool in the detection and treatment of cancer. Now, the ultrasmall particles – developed more than a dozen years ago by Ulrich Wiesner, the Spencer T. Olin Professor of Engineering – have shown they can do something even better: kill cancer cells without attaching a cytotoxic drug. A study led by Michelle Bradbury, director of intraoperative imaging at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and associ...

Researchers have discovered that a protein found naturally in cells that provides some protection from viruses is responsible for creating mutations that drive resistance to tamoxifen treatment in breast cancer. Because the protein, known as APOBEC3B, is found in elevated quantities in other kinds of cancer cells, the finding explains differential responses to treatment and opens the door to boosting the effectiveness of tamoxifen and related breast cancer therapies that inhibit the ability of e...

Photoswitches are a family of small-molecules designed to photo-modulate the activity of specific signaling proteins: One color turns the protein ‘on’; a different color turns it ‘off’. Photoswitches were conceived at the Nanomedicine Development Center for the Optical Control of Biological Function at UC Berkeley Light-sensitive proteins are changing the way scientists study how new drug candidates affect critical properties of heart and nerve cells. The proteins, discovered by Max Planck re...