There’s a small fire isolated in your kitchen. If you had the right tool, you might be able to put it out. But before you can, the sprinklers turn on and flood your entire house. An automatic response to an issue has now damaged everything you own. That’s akin to what happens in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s: Amyloid plaques, sticky protein clumps that build up in the brain, are the fire in the kitchen. Microglia, the brain’s resident immune cells, are the sprinklers. A mechanism designed to protect the body ends up hurting it.

A neuroprosthetic system has helped a man with paralysis move his hand and feel touch again following a spinal cord injury, reports research published in Nature Medicine.

Researchers have uncovered a novel biological pathway that can lead to seizures when disrupted.

One of the biggest challenges in cancer research has been linking the “big picture” seen in medical scans with the microscopic biology that drives tumor growth and dictates how patients respond to treatment.