"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." When people say “grow a backbone,” they usually don’t mean it literally. But scientists at The Francis ...

One of the most dramatic phases of fetal development occurs as previously unstructured collections of rapidly dividing precursor cells begin forming the embryo's spine. When this process goes well, it ...

How cells shape complex tissues and organs during embryo development, which makes us what we are, has many mysteries. New research has examined one such process which leads to the formation of ...

It's no small feat to create a spinal column. In humans, 33 interlocking bones must come together to protect the spinal cord. These vertebrae are interconnected and have delicate attachments to ...

A model embryo helps researchers model human congenital spine diseases. Plus, hints of how cochlear implants help hearing and a pivotal year for working scientists.

Scientists are exploring ways to mimic the origins of human life without two fundamental components: sperm and egg. They are coaxing clusters of stem cells – programmable cells that can transform into ...

Janet Rossant is president of the Gairdner Foundation, and senior scientist emeritus at The Hospital for Sick Children, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. The first few weeks of a human embryo’s ...

Scientists have officially grown a notochord—the tissues that act as the “GPS for the developing embryo” by guiding the formation of the spine and nervous system. Previous attempts to create a ...

Those discs that form the spine originate in embryonic blueprint segments called somites. As the embryo body elongates in all vertebrate species, it is cut into somites by a “biological clock knife.” ...