In a paradoxical discovery, scientists have found that a tumor suppressor protein known as PML appears to be the factor that enables leukemia initiating cells to maintain their quiescence -- the inert state that protects them from being destroyed by cancer therapies.

A new study finds that restricted nutrient availability prevents muscle stem cells from growing into mature muscle cells. The research provides exciting new information about how developing muscle cells sense and respond to nutrient levels.

The sun has powered almost everything on Earth since life began, including its climate. The sun also delivers an annual and seasonal impact, changing the character of each hemisphere as Earth's orientation shifts through the year. Since the Industrial Revolution, however, new forces have begun to exert significant influence on Earth's...

The Agricultural Research Service and the Apiary Inspectors of America have conducted a combined survey of beekeepers to get a snapshot of how well managed colonies made it through the winter of 2007-08. Surveyed beekeepers reported a total loss of about 36.1 percent of their honey bee colonies, up about 13.5 percent from the previous...

Medical researchers have discovered a key step in the mechanism by which cells destroy themselves. In this process, called "apoptosis," certain proteins cause the cell to self-destruct by puncturing its "power plant." How the proteins do this has now been clarified. The discovery is an important step towards the identification of targets for drugs designed to regulate cell...

Scientists in Louisiana are reporting development and successful testing of a new cost-effective system to kill unwanted plants and animals that hitch a ride to the United States in the ballast water of merchant ships. These so-called "invasive species," such as the notorious zebra mussel, devastate native organisms and infrastructure and cost taxpayers billions of dollars...

A mutated gene has been discovered as the key behind epilepsy and mental retardation specific to women. The new discovery, published in Nature Genetics, shows that although men carry the 'bad' gene, only women are affected.

A free, e-mail-based service that translates text into Braille and audio recordings is helping to bridge the information gap for blind and visually impaired people, giving them quick and easy access to books, news articles and web pages. Developed by European researchers, the RoboBraille service offers a unique solution to the problem of converting text into Braille and audio without the need for...

A team of students led by a chemical engineering professor are working with a New Jersey inventor to advance a new solar thermal collector. The engineering students pointed out that this is the first truly new solar thermal system in more than three decades, and the company stated that it is unique among renewable energy technologies as it is cost effective without any government...

A new method of magnetic resonance imaging, much faster, more selective -- able to distinguish even among different target molecular species -- and many thousands of times more sensitive, has just been developed. The new technique has the capacity to choose among targets by slight adjustments in...

DNA analysis of residents of Druze villages in Israel suggests these ancient religious communities offer a genetic snapshot of the Near East as it was several thousands of years ago. The Druze harbor a remarkable diversity of mitochondrial DNA types or lineages that appear to have separated from each other many thousands of years ago, according to a new study by multinational...

The radioactive carbon-14 produced by above-ground nuclear testing in the 1950s and '60s has helped researchers determine that the number of fat cells in a human's body, whether lean or obese, is established during the teenage years. Changes in fat mass in adulthood can be attributed mainly to changes in fat cell volume, not an increase in the actual number of fat...

Scientists have discovered a fast and effective way to investigate important aspects of human aging: a gene in fruit flies that means flies can now be used to study the effects aging has on DNA. The researchers found that flies with damage to this gene share important features with people suffering from the rapid aging condition Werner...

The COMT gene -- known already for its role in schizophrenia -- has been found to play a role in preeclampsia, according to a report in Nature. The study further suggests that a steroid molecule, 2-ME, may serve as both a diagnostic marker and therapeutic supplement for the treatment of this dangerous pregnancy...

Most female frogs don't call; most lack or have only rudimentary vocal cords. A typical female selects a mate from a chorus of males and then -- silently -- signals her beau. But the female concave-eared torrent frog, Odorrana tormota, has a more direct method of declaring her interest: She emits a high-pitched chirp that to the human ear sounds like that of a...

The search for genes associated with alcohol dependence has recently been extended to the tachykinin receptor 3 gene, located within a broad region on chromosome 4q. Researchers have found that seven of the nine single nucleotide polymorphisms -- DNA sequence variations -- in the 3' region of TACR3 have a significant association with AD as well as cocaine...

Three hot-air balloons dropped asphalt shingles, lumber, sticks, leaves and pine needles onto a north Alabama landfill, so scientists could gather data needed to improve tornado warnings. The payloads dropped by the balloons were similar to the types of debris thrown into the air by tornados that touch the ground. Scientists hope the Doppler radar data collected will be a first step toward...

Hospital cleaners should watch out because the toilet police are patrolling with their new secret weapon: invisible markers. A team of Canadian scientists using a lotion which glows under ultraviolet light have shown that up to a third of patient toilets are not properly cleaned. Their findings, also show that spores from the nasty bacteria Clostridium difficile (C. difficile) linger in the loo...

At first, fruit flies eat like horses. Hatching inside over-ripe fruit where they were laid, they feed wildly in the sugar-rich environment until nature sends them an offer they can't refuse. To survive, they must leave the fruit, wander off and burrow into the earth where they avoid food as if it were poison. Only then can the larvae grow and hatch into flies that will take wing to lay their own...

Scientists have discovered how to keep one's tomatoes from wilting -- the answer lies at the molecular level. Farmers and fellow agriculturalists are continuously battling the ability of plant pathogens to co-evolve alongside their host's immune system. In agriculture, the most environmentally friendly way to combat the evolutionary change in plant diseases is to make use of the innate immune...

Scientists used to think that hermaphrodites, due to their low position in the evolutionary scale, did not have sufficiently developed sensory systems to assess the "quality" of their mates. A new work has shown, however, that earthworms are able to detect the competition by fertilizing the eggs that is going to find its sperm, tripling its volume when there is rivalry. This ability is even more...

Recognizing the distinction between healthy and cancerous cells has traditionally been up to the eye of highly-trained cytologists and pathologists. While the majority of the resulting diagnoses are accurate, new technology can enhance the accuracy and alleviate the physical strain on the human observer. Now scientists have developed an automatic method based on vibrational microspectroscopy that...

Now that the genome of humans and many other organisms have been sequenced, biologists are turning their attention to discovering how the many thousands of structural and control genes -- the "worker bees" of living cells that can turn genes on and off -- function.

Researchers have discovered how an antibiotic works to modulate the activity of a neurotransmitter that regulates brain functions, which eventually could lead to therapies to treat Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, epilepsy, stroke, dementia and malignant gliomas.