Organic farming has long been touted as an environmentally friendly alternative to conventional agriculture. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) provides strong evidence to support that claim.

Engineering the "Fc" region of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) increases their toxicity to cancer cells, potentially improving the utility of targeted cancer therapies, according to research conducted at Xencor, which will be published in the March 14 print issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Staph infections resistant to antibiotics, previously only associated with hospitalization or prior contact with the healthcare system, are now widespread in the community and coming home.

By stimulating the frontal cortex in adults, researchers have shown that this part of the brain is essential for understanding other people's actions.

Jan Amend sampling shallow marine vent fluids in 2005 at Ambitle Island, Papua, New Guinea.Curiosity about the microbial world drove Jan Amend, Ph.D., associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, to Vulcano Island, Italy, a shallow hydrothermal Shangri-la near Sicily.

A 14 year behavioral and genetic study of a population of wild capuchin monkeys has shown that fathers almost never mate with their daughters, even though alpha males sire the majority of offspring produced by females unrelated to them. The findings suggest that psychological or other sophisticated behavioral barriers have evolved in this primate species to prevent inbreeding within individual populations.

Photo Credit: Susan HealyBy observing rufous hummingbirds revisiting flowers that refill with nectar at regular intervals, researchers have found that these birds can remember when they last visited individual flowers. This so-called "interval timing" is an ability that has received much attention in the laboratory, where it has been shown that animals can learn to time one or two short intervals (on the order of seconds to 1½ hours). However, almost nothing had been known about whether animals in the wild can do this in the course of their normal behavior.

It has been well documented that, across human cultures and in most mammals, males are usually more aggressive and less nurturing than females. It's simple to blame male hormones, like testosterone, for male behavior such as aggression. But maybe it's in our genes, too.