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The implications of this research could redefine the boundary between life and death. ================================================================= About five years ago, Yale School of Medicine neuroscientist Zvonimir Vrselja, Ph.D., and his colleagues shocked the medical community with a groundbreaking experiment. They removed a slaughterhouse pig’s brain from its head and deprived it of oxygen at room temperature for four hours. Then, they hooked it up to their resuscitation machine and revived it—to an extent. A living brain’s vasculature, or network of blood vessels, carries oxygenated, nutrient-rich blood to the brain through arteries and capillaries. So, the researchers used their machine, called BrainEx, to...

Joe Biden on Wednesday delivered remarks at the White House Conference on Women’s Health Research. Biden told the attendees that doctors opened up the top of his head twice and couldn’t find a brain. Joe Biden had multiple brain surgeries in the 1980s after suffering two brain aneurysms. “I have been a beneficiary of a lot of the research that’s been done. I had two cranial aneurysms; I had two nine-hour operations — they took the top of my head off twice and couldn’t find a brain the first time.” WATCH:

University of Tokyo researchers have created a mathematical framework for cellular death, offering new tools to study and potentially control life-death transitions in biological systems. Researchers are redefining the criteria that determine whether a cell is considered alive or dead. Cellular death is a fundamental concept in biological sciences. Despite its importance, its definition varies depending on the context in which it occurs and lacks a general mathematical definition. Researchers from the University of Tokyo propose a new mathematical definition of death based on whether a potentially dead cell can return to a predefined “representative state of living,” which are...

Normal Fire Department (NPD) crews battled a blaze at the Rivian plant parking lot Saturday night. NFD spokesperson Matt Swaney said fire crews were called to Rivian’s Normal plant just before 9:45 p.m. for a reported vehicle fire. He said there is an unspecified number of vehicles damaged by the incident. Witnesses outside the plant said they reportedly saw the fire as early as 9:50 p.m. The EV assembly plant was not affected by the fire, Swaney said.

"Using a combination of ultrafast chemical fixation and cryogenic storage, it is the first demonstration that near­ perfect, long-term structural preservation of an intact mammalian brain is achievable," the Brain Preservation Foundation wrote in a news release. The team, led by recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate Robert McIntyre, filled the vascular system of the rabbit brain with chemicals that prevent decay and allow it to be cooled to -211 degrees Fahrenheit. When thawed, the brain was found to have all of its synapses, cell membranes, and intracellular structures intact. "Every neuron and synapse looks beautifully preserved across the entire...

Man Pleads Guilty to Stealing Human Brains from Medical Museum A 23-year-old Indiana man pleaded guilty on Wednesday to breaking into a medical museum and stealing preserved human brains and other tissue that he then sold online, authorities said. David Charles, of Indianapolis, pleaded guilty to six charges including receiving stolen property, and burglary in a Marion County court where Magistrate Amy Barbar sentenced him to one year of home detention and two years of probation, county prosecutor spokesman Anthony Deer said. Charles on multiple occasions broke into the Indiana Medical History Museum to steal jars of brains and other...

Vice President Biden addressed Ukrainian legislators Tuesday in a committee room of the Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, where he began his remarks by thanking the legislators for "making me feel relevant again." Biden is in Ukraine to show support for the Ukrainian government as that country faces continued pressure and threats from Russia. Biden's "relevant" comments were a reference to his time as a legislator in the United States: I want to thank my colleagues for bringing me back home. For 36 years I sat in our legislature, and I used to actually have this seat in our -- I...

Speaking at the White House National Conference on Mental Health on Monday, Vice President Joe Biden told a sometimes serious and sometimes jocular story about the two brain surgeries he needed in 1988 to deal with cranial aneurysms. Biden told the White House audience “they take a saw and they cut your head off” and “they literally had to take the top of my head off.” He also recounted that as he was being wheeled into surgery he asked the neurosurgeon, “What are my chances of getting off this table completely normal?” The surgeon told Biden he had a better...

A Staten Island couple is suing New York City after the shocking discovery that their dead son's brain was on display in a jar at a city morgue. Jesse Shipley was 17 when he died in a car crash in 2005. Andre and Korisha Shipley said they had no idea his brain was removed during an autopsy until some of the teen's classmates at Port Richmond High School visited a morgue on a field trip. While on the tour, the kids, who were members of a forensic science club, came across a jar with a brain floating inside and their...

Peru museum has diseases on the brain Wed Mar 8, 1:04 PM ET LIMA (AFP) - Thousands of human brains float in jars of formaldehyde at a unique museum that gives visitors to Lima an up-close view of brain diseases, from trichinosis to stroke. More than 2,500 brains are on display in a modest museum in Lima sponsored by the National Institute of Neurological Sciences (INCN). Visitors can see brains of persons felled by AIDS, Alzheimers, clots, hemorrhages, heart attacks and a myriad of tumors. The museum is the proud owner of a brain that died of Creutzfeld-Jacob disease, the...

NAPPANEE, Ind. -- The high cost of gasoline may have driven them to do it. Picking the wrong fuel pump cut short their getaway. Two men who tried to steal gasoline from a construction company instead filled the tank of their car with off-road-grade diesel fuel Sunday, police said. An employee of Beer & Slabaugh spotted the men on the company property near Nappanee, about 20 miles southeast of South Bend, as they were siphoning fuel out of the car's tank, Elkhart County deputies said. The two told the employee that a friend had put the wrong fuel into the...