UCL School of Life and Medical Sciences

A coherent pathway which starts from no more than rocks, water and carbon dioxide and leads to the emergence of the strange bioenergetic properties of living cells has been traced for the first time in a major hypothesis paper in Cell this week.

Today's Health Survey for England reveals more than 14 million sufferers of chronic pain - pain which has lasted for more than three months. The study found that pain is more common among some groups than others, pain incurs significant costs and has serious mental health and wellbeing implications.

23 postdoctoral researchers from 14 different countries have been awarded Marie Curie Individual Fellowships. The awards will enable researchers to spend up to two years working with research teams across all schools at UCL.

More than two hundred gene locations have now been identified for the chronic bowel condition Crohn's Disease, in a study that analysed the entire human genome.

UCL and the Japanese pharmaceutical company Eisai, have entered into a new agreement to establish a major drug discovery and development collaboration today.

Source: Press release from the Wellcome Trust

Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL researchers have discovered how the brain assesses confidence in its decisions. The findings explain why some people have better insight into their choices than others.

Congratulations to Professors Dmitri Rusakov (UCL Institute of Neurology), Robin Ali (UCL Institute of Ophthalmology) and Patrick Haggard (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience), who have all recently been awarded European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grants. These highly competitive research grants are among the most sought after Principal Investigator awards offered from the ERC, and as stated on the ERC’s website: “allow exceptional established research leaders of any nationality and any age to pursue ground-breaking, high-risk projects that open new directions in their respective research fields or other domains.”

Congratulations to Professor David Colquhoun (UCL Pharmacology), who was joint-winner of the 2012 UK Science Blog Prize.

The number of babies born before 27 weeks’ gestation who survive and leave hospital increased between 1995 and 2006, but the proportion who experience serious health problems into childhood remained largely unchanged, according to new research published in the British Medical Journal.

Training human volunteers to control their own brain activity in precise areas of the brain can enhance fundamental aspects of their visual sensitivity, according to a new study in the Journal of Neuroscience.