Although HIV can now be effectively suppressed using anti-retroviral drugs, it still comes surging back the moment the flow of drugs is stopped. Latent reservoirs of HIV-infected cells, invisible to the body’s immune system and unreachable by pharmaceuticals, ensure that the infection will rebound after therapy is terminated.

Human cells make new copies of their DNA billions of times each day, a crucial process upon which life itself depends. However, scientists do not fully understand how cells unzip the double-stranded DNA molecule before replicating both halves of it. New work at Rockefeller may help change that.

About seven days after conception, something remarkable occurs in the clump of cells that will eventually become a new human being. They start to specialize. They take on characteristics that begin to hint at their ultimate fate as part of the skin, brain, muscle or any of the roughly 200 cell types that exist in people, and they start to form distinct layers.

Anesthesia makes otherwise painful procedures possible by derailing a conscious brain, rendering it incapable of sensing or responding to a surgeon’s knife. But little research exists on what happens when the drugs wear off.

When it comes to the brain, wiring isn’t everything. Although neurobiologists often talk in electrical metaphors, the reality is that the brain is not nearly as simple as a series of wires and circuits. Unlike their copper counterparts, neurons can behave differently depending on the situation.

Microbes are not only a rich source of disease, but also a rich source of medicines, and experts think many life-saving compounds produced by as-yet-unnamed bacteria are awaiting discovery. But they don’t always give up their secrets easily. Researchers must know where to look to find promising bacteria, and how to get them to grow in the lab, the traditional route to identifying potentially valuable molecules they produce.