Over 100 scientists worldwide publish joint study in Science

More than 100 scientists from Australia, Asia, Europe and the US have been probing the genome of the mouse in a joint study lasting several years. Their results in some aspects have completely overturned geneticists' traditional assumptions. The findings are available in the prestigious journal Science on 2nd September. The general conclusion of the study is that the genome of mammals is much more complex than was hitherto supposed.

Nanospheres could help dentists fill the tiny holes in our teeth that make them incredibly sensitive, and that cause severe pain for millions of adults and children worldwide.

China's spectacular economic growth during the last decade has brought many benefits - and some challenges. Global atmospheric mapping of nitrogen dioxide pollution performed by ERS-2's GOME and Envisat's SCIAMACHY reveals the world's largest amount of NO2 hanging above Beijing and northeast China, as reported in Nature this week.

Fewer antibiotic prescriptions leads to fewer "superbugs." That's the take-home message behind a new study in the Oct. 15 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, now available online. The study found that reducing antibiotic use for pediatric respiratory tract infections resulted in lower rates of carriage of drug-resistant bacteria.

Prostate cancer is a cruel disease. Left untreated, prostate cancer cells often metastasize, or spread, to bone where they form fracture-prone tumors that are extremely painful.

Could be target to block CNS infectionA single molecular anchor that allows bacteria to invade the nervous system may hold the key to treating many types of bacterial meningitis, a University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine study has found.

Scientists from the University of Delaware have made a significant advance in the study of small ribonucleic acids (RNAs), discovering 10 times more small RNAs in the plant Arabidopsis than previously had been identified. The advance is reported in the Sept. 2 issue of Science magazine.

Increased summer precipitation apparently helping to spread spores of pathogen

Biologists studying a lethal blight of lodgepole pines in northwestern British Columbia present strong evidence in the September issue of BioScience that climate change is to blame for the outbreak. The blight, caused by the fungus Dothistroma septosporum, causes trees to lose their needles and, in the case of the British Columbia outbreak, eventually die. D. septosporum has long been recognized as a pathogen of pines, but although it is considered a serious disease of exotic plantations in the Southern Hemisphere, it has until now been considered a minor threat to northern temperate forests. Lodgepole pines are an economically important species, being used in construction and for pulp.