A team of researchers working with colleagues from the Botswana National Museum shed new light on the questions of when cattle were brought to southern Africa and from where. A domestic cow bone, dated to about 2000 years ago was excavated from a site at Toteng, located in the Kalahari Desert of northern Botswana. This bone, dated by the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon technique, provides the oldest directly dated evidence of cattle in southern Africa.

Scientists at Stanford University have developed a new laser therapy that destroys cancer cells but leaves healthy ones unharmed. The new, non-invasive treatment is described in a study published in the Aug. 1 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

University of Florida scientists used a healthy human gene to prevent blindness in mice with a form of an incurable eye disease that strikes boys.

Writing in the August issue of Molecular Therapy, scientists from the UF Genetics Institute describe how they successfully used gene therapy in mice to treat retinoschisis, a rare genetic disorder that is passed from mothers, who retain their sight, to their sons.

A new study of 60 beaches in Southern California suggests that water pollution varies with the lunar cycle, reaching the highest levels when tides are ebbing during the new and full moon. The findings could help beachgoers and managers better assess the potential risk of swimming.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that a protein called NF-Ya activates several genes known to regulate the development of hematopoietic stem cells (HSC), or blood-producing stem cells, in bone marrow. Knowing the details of this pathway may one day lead to new treatments for such blood diseases as leukemia, as well as a better understanding of how HSCs work in the context of bone-marrow and peripheral-stem-cell transplantation.

When cancer spreads, people often die. That's why a lot of cancer research and drugs focus on the metabolic pathways that allow cancer to metastasize -- to spread from one part of the body to another.

Cornell University researchers have now furthered understanding of how these pathways work. Their insights might aid future research on drug therapies that disrupt the sequence of events that lead to metastasis.

Genetics researchers have developed a customized gene chip to rapidly scan tumor samples for specific DNA changes that offer clues to prognosis in cases of neuroblastoma, a common form of children's cancer. Rather than covering the entire genome, the microarray focuses on suspect regions of chromosomes for signs of deleted genetic material known to play a role in the cancer.

For a person with allergies or asthma, breathing in pollen can be a very bad thing. Within minutes of inhalation by someone sensitive to their effects, these tiny particles can trigger severe inflammation of the respiratory passages, producing uncontrollable sneezing, coughing, or extreme shortness of breath -- symptoms agonizingly familiar to those who suffer from allergy and asthma attacks.

The recent surge in the number of microbial genome sequences available to the scientific community is allowing researchers to address interesting ecological questions and to observe how various genomic, evolutionary, and ecological forces interact to define an organism's role in the environment. Today, Dr. Jennifer Wernegreen's group from the Marine Biological Laboratory presents new data that support a fascinating model for genome evolution in bacteria that live inside insects.

An international group of researchers has characterized the proteome of the human cornea. In doing so, they have identified 141 distinct proteins, 99 of which had not been previously recognized in mammalian corneas. The details of their findings appear in the August/September issue of Molecular and Cellular Proteomics, an American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology journal.