A new national health study funded by the NH&MRC, industry and state governments released today by the International Diabetes Institute in Melbourne shows diabetes is hitting up to 275 new victims each day throughout Australia.

The U.S. Agriculture Department's mad cow disease-testing program is wholly inadequate and the agency's refusal to let processors do their own testing further undercuts the safety of American beef, a University of Illinois scholar writes.

Global warming has had a more devastating effect on some of the world's finest coral reefs than previously assumed, suggests the first report to show the long-term impact of sea temperature rise on reef coral and fish communities.

Dr. Shirley Tilghman and colleagues (Princeton University) lend new insight into the mechanism of genomic imprinting, demonstrating a necessary role for a non-coding RNA transcript in the silencing of an imprinted gene cluster in mice.

It sounds like one of those curiosities which pops up in wildlife documentaries, but the African clawed frog could prove a powerful ally for scientists working in the key area of stem cell research. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have discovered that the distinctive species – which has become popular in recent years as a domestic pet – shares with humans the same genetic mechanism that enables embryonic stem cells to divide without limit. This process, which gives embryonic stem cells the capacity to become any of the 200 cell types in the body, is fundamental to all research in the discipline.

The new interdisciplinary technology approach, developed and tested by researchers in Spain, France and Italy with funding from the European Commission's FET (Future and Emerging Technologies) initiative of the IST programme, will ultimately lead to electronic noses based on natural olfactory receptors that could be used not only in healthcare but also in agriculture, industry, environmental protection or security.

Researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island have identified which among several different kinds of cells in the brain is the chief target of the widely prescribed antidepressant Prozac. This discovery might enable a new generation of more specific treatments for depression, with fewer side effects, to be developed.