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It's not a cure for baldness. But it might eliminate crow's feet and laugh lines by telling the tissues in your face how to remember their more elastic youth.

It might lead to ways for older people to exercise for a few minutes and get the results of an hour. And it could lead to new medicines that would teach your body's immune system to target drug-resistant melanoma cancer cells and kill them.

It's called cell memory, and it's the focus of research by Ning Wang, a Northeastern University professor of bioengineering and director of the Institute for Mechanobiology.

A host of cells, along with the neurons in the brain, already have recall. "Memory T cells" or "T lymphocytes" in the blood, for example, remember past infections in the body and are part of the body's adaptive immune system, which attacks foreign cells.

But Wang and his co-authors have found that many other cells have this so-called "mechanical memory," which is the ability to remember that a physical force was recently applied and continue to react as if the force is still there.

When a force from exercise or other energy stimulation is applied to cells, their inner workings kick into gear, and they cook up a host of proteins that affect the body, such as telling it to build more muscle. The reaction is not permanent, lasting a short while, but what's important is that the reaction in the cell wasn't thought to continue at all, Wang said.

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