New keys to understanding the evolution of life on Earth may be found in the microbes and minerals vented from below the ocean floor, say scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The UCSB scientists are making new contributions to this field of inquiry in their studies of seafloor hydrothermal fluid discharge into the Earth's oceans, which has been occurring ever since the oceans first formed four billion years ago. Conditions below the sea floor may most closely mimic the environment when life began.

Ever since the 1970s, scientists have been trying to establish the cause of a repulsive force occurring between different electrostatically charged molecules, such as DNA and other biomolecules, when they are very close to each other in aqueous media. This force became know as hydration force.

Jordi Faraudo, a researcher for the Department of Physics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and Fernando Bresme of the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College London have studied this mysterious force in detail and have discovered where its origins lie.

In the same way that a flag flutters in the direction the wind is blowing, at a microscopic level water molecules are gently attracted towards the direction in which an electric field is pointing. However, when the water is in contact with surfaces that create small electric fields, such as chemical compounds like those found in many detergents, this is no longer the case: the water molecules have a remarkable capacity to organise themselves into complex structures that are strongly orientated in such a way as to cancel out the electric field, and on some occasions, to reverse it. This abnormal behaviour was discovered by the same researchers and published in Physical Review Letters in April 2004.

In a study published in the journal Blood, Yale scientists identify the molecular triggers that stimulate Cutaneous T Cell Lymphoma (CTCL) cells to clonally expand into large populations of malignant lymphocytes.

CTCL is the most common adult malignancy of T lymphocytes, the white blood cells of the immune system. Finding CTCL triggering factors has been a major goal of Richard L. Edelson, M.D., Director of the Yale Cancer Center, and professor and chair of dermatology at Yale, since he and his colleagues at the National Cancer Institute first identified CTCL as a separate category of lymphoma thirty years ago.

UCL scientists have found a protein that could unlock the secret to quicker, more effective treatment of TB by waking TB bacteria in the body. Once the TB bacteria are active again, the disease becomes treatable using common drugs like antibiotics. Scientists believe that uncovering the molecular structure of this protein will lead the way to designing drugs which enable treatment of dormant and multidrug resistant TB.

You could say that the Human Genome Project missed 99 percent of the genes in the adult body. That's because it didn't sequence genes belonging to the vast communities of bacteria that normally live on and in us.

Now a $1.45 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to researchers at the School of Medicine will help fill this gap by funding a study to develop new approaches for isolating, sequencing and analyzing the genomes of "friendly" bacteria that inhabit the intestine and identifying the natural metabolic products that they synthesize in their native gut habitats.

In experiments with mice, a team of scientists from the United States, Sweden and Japan has discovered that having a double dose of one protein is sufficient to change the normal balance of cells within the lining of the colon, thereby doubling the risk that a cancer-causing genetic mutation will trigger a tumor there. Roughly 10 percent of people have this double protein dose as well.

In the Feb. 24 online version of Science, the researchers report that mice engineered to have a double dose of insulin-like growth factor 2 (IGF2) develop more so-called precursor cells within the lining of the colon than normal mice. When these mice also carried a colon-cancer-causing genetic mutation, they developed twice as many tumors as those with normal IGF2 levels, the researchers report.

Scientists have found that the bacterium that causes dysentery uses a 'sword and shield' approach to cause infection.

According to research published today in Science, the team from Imperial College London and Institut Pasteur, Paris, found that shigella, the bacteria which causes dysentery, is able to invade cells, while stopping any response from the immune system.

They found that shigella was able to infect cells by using a secretion system to inject proteins into human cells, (the sword), while lipopolysaccharide (LPS) on the surface of the bacteria acts as a shield to protect the dysentery bacterium from being destroyed by the body's immune system.

Mount Sinai School of Medicine researchers demonstrated that a gel applied in the vagina provides protection from both the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the herpes simplex Virus. The study, presented at the 12th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, is the first to show that a gel can retain anti-viral activity within the human vagina.

The study, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) investigated the efficacy of PRO 2000, a topical microbicide under development by Indevus Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Scientists know that injecting iron into some major regions of the oceans can stimulate the growth of diatoms and other phytoplankton, but something odd occurs as these tiny marine plants continue to grow. They begin to starve in the midst of plenty, acting as though iron, an essential nutrient, still is in short supply. Why this happens is unclear, but the answer could be that iron sets off a kind of chemical warfare in the marine ecosystem, according to University of Maine oceanographer Mark Wells. And diatoms may not always come out on top.

In collaboration with a large Japanese research program, Wells and a team of scientists from UMaine and other universities are studying the fate of iron in marine waters. Their findings could help determine the fate of something else, a controversial proposal to address the threat of global warming. The National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy are providing financial support.

The DNA tumor virus simian virus 40 produces the Large T antigen which inactivates two of the cell's most important cancer-preventing proteins, p53 and pRb. In a study published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center report the discovery of an additional target for T antigen--a protein called Fbw7.

The Fbw7 gene is located in a chromosomal region that is deleted in up to 30% of human tumors. "Fbw7 is itself an important tumor suppressor which makes it an attractive choice for inactivation by Large T," explained Dr. Markus Welcker, the study's first author.

The research appears as the "Paper of the Week" in the March 4 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, an American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology journal.

Scientists at Joslin Diabetes Center have discovered one reason why infants with low birth weight have a high potential of developing type 2 diabetes later in life. In studies of mice, the researchers found that poor prenatal nutrition impairs the pancreas's ability to later secrete enough insulin in response to blood glucose.

"The bottom line is that if you don't have delivery of enough nutrients from the mother to the baby, the baby's pancreatic cells will be programmed abnormally," said principal investigator Mary-Elizabeth Patti, M.D., Assistant Investigator in Joslin's Research Section on Cellular and Molecular Physiology and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. "The effect doesn't show up until later on -- usually not until adolescence or adulthood.

Were I've been, you're asking yourself? Between fixing a computer (the power supply blew up), installing a new one (hint : AMD64 have a nice feature, Data Execution Prevention, which is supposed to prevent viruses from executing; however, when it cause the Windows XP installer to reboot without warning, I was a sad panda. Took me 5 hours to identify the problem and find a way to disable DEP), my parents visiting us, a concert with my girlfriend, restaurant, shopping... I found no time at all to update! I'm quite tired now, but don't worry, we still have enough energy to post news :)

A team of Fox Chase Cancer Center scientists led by immunologist Dietmar J. Kappes, Ph.D., has identified the genetic mutation that keeps a mouse strain from developing white blood cells, or lymphocytes, called helper T cells. The report by Kappes and his colleagues appears in the Feb. 24 issue of Nature.

Kappes' laboratory first discovered the mice with this naturally occurring defect in Fox Chase's laboratory animal facility in 1997. Known as "helper deficient" or HD mice, they are proving to be useful for exploring the pathways of lymphocyte development, according to Kappes.

Early Alzheimer's disease may be precipitated by a "traffic jam" within neurons that causes swelling and prevents proper transport of proteins and structures in the cells, according to new studies by Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers.

In mouse models of Alzheimer's disease and in human brain samples from people with the disease, researchers observed a characteristic breakdown in neurons that appears to prevent the normal movement of critical proteins to the communications centers of the nerve cells. In a vicious cycle, the traffic jam also could increase production of an abnormal protein that clogs neurons, leading to their failure and eventual death.

The researchers said their findings could provide information that might be used to develop drugs to preserve the molecular transport system and thus the viability of brain cells otherwise lost in Alzheimer's. The findings also could ultimately lead to distinctive markers of early Alzheimer's disease that could be used in early diagnostic tests for the disorder, they said.

The research team led by Lawrence S. B. Goldstein, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), reported their findings in the February 25, 2005, issue of the journal Science. Goldstein and his colleagues at UCSD collaborated on the studies with a researcher at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Discovery that termites use vibrations to choose the wood they eat may provide opportunities to new methods of reducing infestations in homes and also may provide insights into the "cocktail party effect" of signal processing – how to ignore most noise but have some signals that trigger attention – that may prove useful in artificial intelligence.

CSIRO entomologist Theo Evans says laboratory experiments have found that termites use their ability to detect vibrations to determine which food source is most suitable. The termites can also detect how the vibrations are made. This ability could be likened to a form of sonar.

Dr Evans says different termite species are known to prefer eating particular sizes of wood; certain drywood termites prefer small blocks, presumably to avoid competition. With Professor Joseph Lai and his students from the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy, Dr Evans investigated how the blind insects measured pieces of wood.

UCLA investigators reviewed pharmaceutical ads in American medical journals and found that nearly one-third contained no references for medical claims; while the majority of references to published material was available, only a minority of company data-on-file documents were provided upon request; and the majority of original research cited in the ads was funded by or had authors affiliated with the product's manufacturer.

In one of the largest studies of its kind, UCLA investigators reviewed pharmaceutical ads in American medical journals to determine what materials are cited in support of medical claims and if those references are available to physicians. Researchers also determined the funding sources of research cited in the ads.

The study is published in the Feb. 15 issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Structural biologists at Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School have shown how a key part of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) changes shape, triggering other changes that allow the AIDS virus to enter and infect cells. Their findings, published in the Feb. 24 issue of the journal Nature, offer clues that will help guide vaccine and treatment approaches.

The genome sequence of the parasitic amoeba Entamoeba histolytica, a leading cause of severe diarrheal disease in developing countries, includes an unexpectedly complex repertoire of sensory genes as well as a variety of bacterial-like genes that contribute to the organism's unique biology.

The report, which appears in the February 24 issue of Nature, presents the first genome-wide study of an amoeba. It is also the first genome sequence to be published from this class of amitochondrial human pathogens.

The retreat of Antarctic ice shelves is not new according to research published this week (24 Feb) in the journal Geology by scientists from Universities of Durham, Edinburgh and British Antarctic Survey (BAS).

A study of George VI Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula is the first to show that this currently 'healthy' ice shelf experienced an extensive retreat about 9500 years ago, more than anything seen in recent years. The retreat coincided with a shift in ocean currents that occurred after a long period of warmth. Whilst rising air temperatures are believed to be the primary cause of recent dramatic disintegration of ice shelves like Larsen B, the new study suggests that the ocean may play a more significant role in destroying them than previously thought.

Research on adult stem cells found in the skin hints at a new class of genes, according to a study from investigators at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. These genes – dubbed pangenes – can both govern a stem cell's fate and put a hold on future differentiation until the time is right. Understanding the molecular control of these genes has implications for therapies that involve tissue regeneration.

The researchers found that Pax3, a gene critical in embryonic development of melanocytes – cells that make and store the pigments in the skin and hair – is also expressed in adult stem cells in the skin.

New research from Rice University's Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology finds that nanoparticles of gold and palladium are the most effective catalysts yet identified for remediation of one of the nation's most pervasive and troublesome groundwater pollutants, trichloroethene or TCE.

The research, conducted by engineers at Rice and the Georgia Institute of Technology, will appear next month in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, a publication of the American Chemical Society.

A newly discovered plant protein complex that apparently switches on plants' growth machinery, has opened a scientific toolbox to learn about both plant and animal development, according Purdue University scientists.

The protein complex triggers communication between molecules along a pathway that leads to the creation of long protein strings, called actin filaments, that are necessary for cellular growth, said Dan Szymanski, agronomy associate professor and lead author of the study. Knowledge of the biochemical reactions involved in this process eventually may allow researchers to design plants better able to protect themselves from insects and disease.

"These genes and their proteins are required for normal development and for normal cell-to-cell adhesion," Szymanski said. "They affect the growth of the whole plant and also the shape and size of types of cells in the plant."

When the most common adult leukemia in the United States was last reviewed by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in 1995, it was seen through the eyes of theories that dated back to the 1960s. As such, the journal recently invited three of the world's foremost experts on chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) to write an authoritative update covering the transformation in the scientific community's knowledge of CLL that has occurred over the past decade. The review appears in the February 24 issue.

A cellular enzyme appears to play a crucial role in the manufacture of a protein needed for long-term memory, according to a team of researchers led by scientists at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health.

The protein is known as mBDNF, which stands for mature brain-derived neurotrophic factor. In an earlier study, another team of NICHD researchers had shown that mBDNF is essential for the formation of long-term memory, the ability to remember things for longer than a day.

Two soil-dwelling strangers – a friend and a foe – approach a plant and communicate with it in order to enter a partnership. The friend wants to trade nitrogen for food. The foe is a parasite that wants to burrow in and harm the plant.

In a new finding published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at North Carolina State University have found that the two strangers communicate with the plant in very similar ways. The plant's responses to both friend and foe are also remarkably similar.

For the first time, scientists have replicated hepatitis C virus (HCV) in the laboratory. The ability to replicate HCV in cell culture will allow researchers to better study the life cycle and biology of this virus and to test potential antiviral compounds, which may lead to new therapies for the liver disease that results from infection with HCV. Scientists at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), conducted the study, which appears in the Feb. 15, 2005 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Scientists have uncovered new information that may help guide design of vaccines for HIV-1, the virus that causes AIDS. A new detailed structural analysis of the complex formed by an anti-HIV antibody called 4E10 and its specific target provides insight into why this particular antibody is so broadly effective, a rare characteristic for HIV discovered thus far. The research is published in the February issue of Immunity.

With an incredible lifespan of up to 250 years the deep sea tube worm, Lamellibrachia luymesi is among the longest-lived of all animals, but how it obtains sufficient nutrient – in the form of sulfide - to keep going for this long has been a mystery. In a paper just published in the premier open-access online journal PLoS Biology, Erik Cordes and colleagues now provide a solution: by releasing its waste sulfate not up into the ocean but down into the sediments, L. luymesi stimulates the growth of sulfide-producing microbes, and ensures its own long-term survival.

In a new study, researchers present a “cautionary tale” about what may go wrong when using the fledgling science of proteomics to devise a diagnostic test for cancer.

In the February 16 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, researchers from The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center detail why an experimental test intended to identify early ovarian cancer from a small sample of blood is unlikely to lead to a reliable clinical test right away.

After conducting repeated checks of the data that supported the test’s effectiveness, the researchers say their findings indicate that claims about the experimental protein-based assay are not biologically plausible.

Researchers have discovered three previously unknown species of a bacterium by scanning a publicly available data bank, reveals a study published today in the journal Genome Biology. The finding highlights the value of making unanalysed data from large-scale genome sequencing projects openly available online.

Steven Salzberg from The Institute for Genomic Research in Maryland and colleagues identified three new species of the bacterium Wolbachia from the genome sequences of the fruit fly Drosophila that are stored in the Trace Archive.

Tastes and smells are evocative and play a crucial role in finding food for many animals. A new study of smell perception in honeybees published in the freely-available online journal PLoS Biology now explains how bees react to a suite of scents, and reveals an olfactory map that shows remarkable correspondence to brain activity.

Leaping tall buildings in a single bound may be out of the question, but the genetically engineered "supermice" in Ormond MacDougald's laboratory at the University of Michigan Medical School are definitely stronger than average. With bone mass up to four times greater than ordinary mice, these research animals could hold the secret to new drugs for preventing or treating osteoporosis and other human diseases.

The secret appears to be a secreted signaling protein called Wnt10b. Known to inhibit the development of adipose tissue in mice, Wnt10b also stimulates the growth of bone cells, according to a new study that will be published February 21 in the Online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers at the University of Bath have won a £261,000 grant to use the latest software to produce a blueprint of a designer drug that could stop influenza and some other diseases from replicating in humans.

The announcement of the grant comes at a time when fears are rising that an influenza outbreak developing from Asian chickens could kill thousands of people.

Professor Ian Williams, of the Department of Chemistry, will begin work in April on a project that could help pharmaceutical companies develop a better drug that could be taken by people coming down with flu to stop the disease developing.

The destruction of habitat by human activity and the extinction of species around the world is more than a looming environmental catastrophe, warns a Canadian zoologist. This ecological damage also endangers human health by turning parasites into "evolutionary land mines."

Dr. Daniel (Dan) Brooks, a parasitologist at the University of Toronto, says the decline of global biodiversity is linked to the emergence of new human and wildlife diseases such as West Nile Virus and avian flu.

In the battle against insect pests, new research indicates that it may all come down to the sense of smell. A group of Rockefeller University scientists who had previously identified a key gene essential for the sense of smell in fruit flies now shows that this gene's function appears to be evolutionarily conserved across very different insect species.

All recent Ebola virus outbreaks in humans in forests between Gabon and the Republic of Congo were the result of handling infected wild animal carcasses, according to a study by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and its regional partners. Appearing in the February edition of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, the study found that many animal carcasses tested for Ebola between 2001 and 2003 produced positive results, and found direct links between the deadly disease in animal populations and humans.

Food of animal origin, contaminated with E.coli, can lead to urinary tract infections in women, according to a team of bacteriologists.

“We found out that UTIs may be caused by ingesting food contaminated with E. coli,” said Chobi DebRoy, director of Penn State’s Gastroenteric Disease Center. Previously, this link was not established, she noted.

Senior author, Dr. Lee W. Riley, University of California-Berkeley, found that E.coli strains isolated from patients with UTIs were genetically related to E.coli strains from cows that were in the collection of strains at the Gastroenteric Disease Center. Riley and DebRoy reported their findings in a recent issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases.

A widely-used class of drugs that keep the HIV-virus infection from progressing to AIDS may cause serious and potentially lethal heart rhythm disturbances in some patients. The finding of a Mayo Clinic-led investigation appears in the current edition of The Lancet.

In collaboration with colleagues from the HIV Program of Hennepin County Medical Center, Minneapolis; the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and University of Wisconsin, Madison, the Mayo Clinic researchers made the discovery about a class of prescription drugs known as "HIV protease inhibitors." Drugs in this class go by the generic names of lopinavir, nelfinavir, indinavir, ritonavir and saquinavir. Brand names include Kaletra, Viracept, Crixivan, Norvir and Fortovase.

How do pollen particles provoke allergic reactions? A new study in the February 21 issue of The Journal of Experimental Medicine puts some of the blame on bioactive molecules that are released from pollen. These molecules bind to immune cells and cause them to launch a typical allergy-promoting immune response. Pollen from plants exposed to air pollutants produce more of these allergy-provoking compounds than do pollen from unpolluted areas, possibly explaining why allergies are more prevalent in places with high levels of car exhaust emissions.

After the completion of a draft sequence of the Chinese hybrid rice genome, which was published in the Journal Science in 2002, CAS researchers have recently finished the fine map of the rice genome. In an article published by the recent issue of PLoS Biology (Vol.3 Issue 2, 2005), scientists led by the Beijing Institute of Genomics (BIG) reported a "much improved, near-complete genome analysis of the indica and japonica subspecies of O. sativa."

The fine maps of the rice genome sequences will lay a solid foundation for studying the differences among strains of rice and shed insight into mechanisms of hybrid advantages at a new level, according to BIG researchers.