Stem cells and how to boost them is hot on the research agenda. But stopping them could be critical too, as evidence implicating stem cells in cancer is mounting.

Scientists funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), have engineered a powerful inhibitor of anthrax toxin that worked well in small-scale animal tests.

Nanotechnology may one day help physicians detect the very earliest stages of serious diseases like cancer, a new study suggests.

"Frankly, some researchers didn't think what we were attempting was possible," says Dr Keith Firman, at Portsmouth University and Mol-Switch project coordinator, funded under the European Commission's Future and Emerging Technologies initiative. "However, we got our molecular switch to work."

Men may cringe at the idea, but sperm-producing stem cells found in testicles could be extracted, grown in the lab, and frozen for future use. A team in the Netherlands has successfully harvested spermatogonial stem cells from cows and cultured them inside mouse testes. The hope is that the same thing could be done for men. "This is a very promising route to help young cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy," Dirk de Rooij of Utrecht University, Netherlands, told participants gathered at the first EuroSTELLS conference in Venice last month.

While most nations excavate their skeletons using a toothbrush, the Norwegians found one using a drill. The somewhat rough uncovering of Norway's first dinosaur happened in the North Sea, at an entire 2256 metres below the seabed. It had been there for nearly 200 million years, ever since the time the North Sea wasn't a sea at all, but an enormous alluvial plane.

As global change accelerates, quantifying the role of forests in the carbon cycle becomes ever more urgent. Modelers seek simple predictors of forest biomass and carbon flux. Over the last decade, the theory of metabolic ecology generated testable explanations, derived from physical and biochemical principles, for a wide range of ecological patterns. However, in two Ecology Letters articles, Helene Muller-Landau and colleagues show that tree growth, mortality and abundance in fourteen tropical forests deviate substantially from metabolic ecology predictions, especially for large trees. Instead, observed variation within and among forests supports alternative models presented by the CTFS team.

Cancer researchers at Sydney's Garvan Institute, in collaboration with Spanish scientists, have formulated a new concept for how cancer cells can escape normal growth controls, which may have far-reaching implications for the new generation of cancer therapies.

A scientific paradox linking artificial sweeteners such as saccharin with a sensory experience in which plain water takes on a sweet taste has guided researchers to an increased understanding of how humans detect sweet taste.

University of Utah researchers will receive up to $10.3 million to help develop a new prosthetic arm that would work, feel and look like a real arm. The Utah work is a key part of a U.S. Department of Defense contract worth up to $55 million to develop the new device for soldiers and potentially others whose arms were amputated.

Alcoholism is commonly associated with chronic smoking, and both alcohol and nicotine are believed to act on the same brain region. A study in the May issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research builds upon previous research that identified four potential alcohol-sensitive genes in the prefrontal cortex, finding that smoking also influences the expression of these genes.

Researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Toronto have designed a nanoscale assembly of molecules that successfully counteracts and inhibits anthrax toxin in animal and laboratory experiments. The novel approach used to neutralize anthrax toxin could be applied in designing potent therapeutics for a variety of pathogens and toxins, according to the researchers.