Using new techniques for resurrecting ancient genes, scientists have for the first time reconstructed the Darwinian evolution of an apparently "irreducibly complex" molecular system.

A mutation in blood stem cells occurs in patients with a blood disorder called polycythemia vera (PV), scientists at the Moores Cancer Center at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine and Comprehensive Cancer Center at Stanford University School of Medicine have confirmed.

A team led by physicists at the University of California, San Diego has shown the feasibility of a fast, inexpensive technique to sequence DNA as it passes through tiny pores. The advance brings personalized, genome-based medicine closer to reality.

MIT scientists have harnessed the construction talents of tiny viruses to build ultra-small "nanowire" structures for use in very thin lithium-ion batteries.

In an experiment that could offer a new pathway to restoring vision in people with inherited retinal degeneration, researchers have engineered cells in the eye to be light sensitive that were not before. Using a harmless virus, they introduced a gene for a light-sensitive protein into "inner retinal neurons" in a strain of mice with photoreceptor deficiency that resembles the defect in such inherited human disorders as retinitis pigmentosa. Unlike the retinal rods and cones that normally function as light-sensing cells in the eye, these retinal neurons are normally not photosensitive. The light-sensitive protein they used, called channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2), is found in green algae.

Last fall Dr. Peter Sarnow and a team of Stanford University scientists reported that the hepatitis C virus needs a specific microRNA, named miR-122, in order to replicate in cultured liver cells.

An antibiotic commonly used to treat a variety of serious infections may also help prevent dementia in HIV patients, according to a test-tube study of human brain cells by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine neurologist Jeffrey Rumbaugh, M.D., Ph.D.

A 37-year-old-mother, who gave birth to a low-weight preemie at 24 weeks, exhibited the first-found link in a human between bacteria found in the mouth and the amniotic fluid of a woman in preterm labor.

Exposure to nicotine the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarets a day produced complicated, abnormal breathing development during the first 18 days of newborn rats, University of Arizona researchers report.

Cancer researchers are working toward a future in which each patient's tumor will act like a crystal ball, revealing how oncologists should treat the cancer to obtain the best outcome.

Cognitive impairment in people with AIDS exists in two forms -- one mild, another severe -- each affecting different areas of the brain, according to the results of a University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine study being presented today at the American Academy of Neurology 58th Annual Meeting in San Diego, Calif. The researchers say their findings indicate there probably are two separate mechanisms that can cause cognitive impairment in people with AIDS.