Florida State University paleobiologist Gregory M. Erickson sliced up some ancient dinosaur bones uncovered in China to help an international team of scientists identify a new genus and species. Despite striking skeletal differences and only subtle similarities, the FSU researcher determined that the two remarkably intact specimens were cousins of North America's hulking Tyrannosaurus rex.

The social avoidance that normally develops when a mouse repeatedly experiences defeat by a dominant animal disappears when it lacks a gene for a memory molecule in a brain circuit for social learning, scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have discovered. Mice engineered to lack this memory molecule continued to welcome strangers in spite of repeated social defeat. Their unaltered peers subjected to the same hard knocks became confirmed loners – unless the researchers treated them with antidepressants.

A new, more robust analysis of recently derived human gene trees by Alan R. Templeton, Ph.D, of Washington University in St Louis, shows three distinct major waves of human migration out of Africa instead of just two, and statistically refutes –strongly – the 'Out of Africa' replacement theory.

The scientists replaced a single atom from the molecular structure of vancomycin aglycon, a glycopeptide antibiotic that attacks the bacteria by inhibiting cell wall synthesis, significantly increasing the drug's spectrum of activity. In recent years, a number of the most common strains of enterococci have become resistant to vancomycin and use of the antibiotic has been under scrutiny. This re-engineering effort could help make the drug more effective in treating infections produced by vancomycin resistance enterococci (VRE), a serious and growing problem in the nation's hospitals.

An innovative method of categorizing myosin--one of three molecular "motors" that produce movement within the cells of the body--has dramatically increased the amount of information available about these essential proteins, laying groundwork for development of treatments for conditions ranging from certain kinds of blindness and kidney disease to neurodegenerative disorders and parasitic diseases such as malaria.

The temperature of the northern hemisphere has increased over a larger area in the last century than at any time in the past millennium a report published in Science reveals this week.

Interaction between prostate cancer cells and immune cells called macrophages may be a source of inflammatory signals capable of impacting the effectiveness of androgen antagonists, the most common and effective treatment for prostate cancer, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine.

Biologists at Purdue University have taken a "snapshot" of a Velcro-like protein on a cell's surface just after it attached to the dengue virus, a linkup thought to initiate the early stages of infection.