Medicine & Physiology
47 articles
Rewiring the Body: The Rise of Non-Neural Electroceuticals
By manipulating the bioelectric networks of ordinary cells, researchers are unlocking new paradigms for tissue regeneration, cancer treatment, and morphological repair.
Psychedelics May Rewire Plasticity Through 5-HT2A—But the Human Mechanism Remains Unsettled
New work strengthens the link between psychedelic signaling and neural plasticity, while exposing how much remains unknown about translating cellular change into durable therapy.
When the Body’s Clocks Fall Out of Time
Research increasingly shows that clocks in the liver, pancreas, muscle, and fat help set metabolic health—and that mistimed light, meals, and sleep can disrupt them.
Germ Theory: How Pasteur and Koch Made Disease Visible
By turning decay, fermentation, and infection into experiments, two nineteenth-century scientists transformed disease from fate into an investigable biological process.
Autophagy: The Cell’s Recycling System—and Its Neurodegenerative Test
A cellular housekeeping pathway discovered in the age of electron microscopy is now at the center of a difficult question: can damaged neurons be rescued by improving how they clean house?
Exerkines: How Exercise Sends Molecular Messages Across the Body
Muscle, liver, fat, bone, and brain communicate during physical activity through a rapidly expanding network of exercise-responsive signals.
Vagal Threads: How Gut-to-Brain Afferents Shape Mood and the Next Wave of Therapies
New molecular maps and mechanistic experiments are turning the vagus from a vague conduit into a specific sensory highway linking microbes, gut cells and mood.
Walter Cannon and the Fight-or-Flight Response: How a Century-Old Insight Still Shapes Medicine — and Is Being Remapped
Cannon's discovery that acute threats mobilize a coordinated sympathetic surge remains foundational, but modern data from neuroendocrinology, autonomic medicine and epidemiology are refining what 'stress' really does to the body.
Cutting Out the Old: Senolytic Therapies and the Hidden Path to Healthspan
Removing a handful of dysfunctional cells may reshape late-life resilience — but the approach is subtler, riskier, and more interesting than headlines admit.
How Walter Cannon’s ‘Fight-or-Flight’ Still Shapes 21st‑Century Medicine
A century after Cannon framed the acute stress response, modern medicine still builds on—and is revising—the physiology he described.
Silent Conversations: Vagal Afferents, the Gut–Brain Axis, and the Biology of Mood
How the vagus nerve translates the chemistry and chatter of the gut into feeling, resilience, and — sometimes — depression.
When the Liver's Clock Misfires: How Peripheral Circadian Clocks Drive Metabolic Disease
Beyond the brain’s master clock, local timekeepers in liver, fat, muscle and pancreas quietly gate metabolism — and their misalignment is a hidden engine of metabolic disease.