Laboratory discoveries by scientists at two universities may lead to new directions in cancer therapy drugs. The researchers have discovered that a genetic switch involved in growth and development of an animal is the same one used to prevent normal cells from becoming cancerous.

The cell is understood to be highly organized, with specialized areas for different functions and molecular motors shuttling components around. Researchers from the University of Illinois' Chicago and Urbana-Champaign campuses now offer the first imaging evidence from live cells of ongoing organization and transport within the cell nucleus.

Australia's policy of restricting antibiotic use in food-producing animals may be linked with lower levels of drug-resistant bacteria found in its citizens, according to an article in the May 15 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, now available online.

As juveniles, individuals of many fish species face a developmental choice that will profoundly affect their future: whether to adopt a sedentary or migratory lifestyle.

The octopus arm is extremely flexible. Thanks to this flexibility--the arm is said to possess a virtually infinite number of "degrees of freedom"--the octopus is able to generate a vast repertoire of movements that is unmatched by the human arm. Nonetheless, despite the huge evolutionary gap and morphological differences between the octopus and vertebrates, the octopus arm acts much like a three-jointed vertebrate limb when the octopus performs precise point-to-point movements. Researchers have now illuminated how octopus arms are able to form joint-like structures, and how the movements of these joints are controlled.

Scientists have long known that the social insects in the order Hymenoptera--which includes ants, bees, and wasps--have an unusual mechanism for sex determination: Unfertilized eggs develop into males, while fertilized eggs become females. But the development of an unfertilized egg into an adult (called parthenogenesis) remains a mysterious process.

Being able to witness the precise events that form the heart's orchestral rhythm or the rat-a-tat-tat of irregular heartbeats could enable researchers to better understand the underlying causes of arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death. Indeed, a team from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Carnegie Mellon University report they have developed unique chemical dyes that have made it possible to see what the naked eye has never seen before: action potentials, or voltage changes, of cardiac cells – including those deep inside the heart, which trigger and determine the pace of heartbeats.

A study forthcoming in the June 2006 issue of Current Anthropology sheds new light a contentious issue: How accurate are men's suspicions of whether or not they are a child's biological father? Some studies have suggested that up to 10 percent of fathers are not the biological parents of their alleged child, but little is known about how this differs across cultures and to what extent men's paternity assessments reflect actual biological paternity.