The world's first optical pacemaker is described in an article published today in Optics Express, the Optical Society’s open-access journal. A team of scientists at Osaka University in Japan show that powerful, but very short, laser pulses can help control the beating of heart muscle cells.

Dutch researchers at University Medical Center Utrecht and the Hubrecht Institute have succeeded in growing large numbers of stem cells from adult human hearts into new heart muscle cells. A breakthrough in stem cell research. Until now, it was necessary to use embryonic stem cells to make this happen. The findings are published in the latest issue of the journal Stem Cell Research.

Scientists have long thought that the cells that ultimately give rise to the heart all respond to the same cue before turning into the muscle tissue of this vital organ.

When human heart muscle cells derived from embryonic stem cells are implanted into a rat after a heart attack, they can help rebuild the animal's heart muscle and improve function of the organ, scientists report in the September issue of Nature Biotechnology.

The prevalence of heart failure continues to increase in the Western world, making it one of the biggest killers in this region. It is characterized by loss of the muscle cells of the heart (cardiomyocytes).

A tiny snippet of RNA, a chemical cousin of DNA, controls damage to the heart under several types of stress, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have found.