HIV plagues more than 25 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the World Health Organization, and efforts to develop a vaccine against the virus have achieved limited success. But what if a vaccine against another sexually transmitted infection found widely in that region of Africa – chancroid – was relatively easy to develop and could reduce transmission of HIV as much as 10-fold?

A Northern Arizona University doctoral candidate and a National Park Service researcher have discovered a new genus of cave cricket.

Scientists at the University of Michigan Kellogg Eye Center have gained new insight into the way an embryonic retina cell develops and then commits itself to a specific role. They have observed a small window of opportunity during which a cell has been designated to play a particular role, but has not yet begun to function as such.

Whether it's rice farming or rice research, very few of Asia's best and brightest young people are interested in a career in an industry that has been a foundation of the Asian way of life for generations. Few rice farmers want their children to be rice farmers, and even fewer young Asians are choosing careers in rice science, despite its vital importance to the region.

A team of researchers, including biologists at Washington University in St. Louis, has discovered the key role one protein plays in a major turn-off –in this case, the turning off of thousands of nearly identical genes in a hybrid plant.

Researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have engineered nanoscale materials that are blood compatible using heparin, an anticoagulant. The heparin biomaterials have potential for use as medical devices and in medical treatments such as kidney dialysis.

For anyone tethered to a lawnmower, the Holy Grail of horticultural accomplishment would be grass that never grows but is always green.

When it comes to fire ants, most people prefer to wipe the venomous little varmints off the face of the Earth – or at least out of their own back yards. The reviled South American native that invaded the U.S. Sun Belt via 1940s Mobile, Ala., is known in biology circles as Solenopsis invicta and everywhere else as a painful pest in the grass, so to speak.