Biologists at Washington University in St. Louis have made an important breakthrough in understanding a pathway plant cells take to silence unwanted or extra genes using short bits of RNA. Basically, they have made it possible to see where, and how, the events in the pathway unfold within the cell, and seeing is believing, as the old saying goes.

University of Cambridge scientists have discovered that older meerkats teach pups how to obtain food by incrementally introducing dead, injured and then live prey. Although learning per se wouldn't be surprising, whether wild mammals teach their young was still debated. The findings were published in this week's edition of the journal Science.

The regions in robins' brains responsible for singing and mating are shrinking when exposed to high levels of DDT, says new University of Alberta research--the first proof that natural exposure to a contaminant damages the brain of a wild animal.

A massive dinosaur death bed in Alberta has helped map out the animal's life span and thrown doubt on long-held theories about how one species lived, says new research conducted in part at the University of Alberta.

A fluorescence microscopy image of a piece of fruit fly tracheal tube shows the colocalization of transmembrane protein Ninjurin A at the cell surfaces (green), enzyme Mmp1 at the cell surfaces (red), and the cell nuclei (blue).Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have discovered a communication signal between cells that plays an important role in cell adhesion and detachment. The finding provides new information about how cells and tissues determine when to let go from surfaces during new growth, according to the researchers.

Stanford University researchers demonstrated for the first time the ability to create 3-D positron emission tomography (PET)/computed tomography (CT) images for "fly-through" and "fly-around viewing" of cancer in the lungs and colon, according to a study in the July issue of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine.

UCSD bioengineers have found a link between parallel alignment of 'stress fibers' in blood vessel cells and healthy levels in those cells of a protein called JNK.Atherosclerotic narrowing and hardening of coronary arteries typically appear first at vessel branches, and a study in the October issue of Cellular Signalling reports that the type of mechanical stretching found at those branches activates a cellular protein known to damage cells. The report is the first to link mechanical forces with structural and biochemical changes in blood vessel cells that could explain why atherosclerotic lesions form preferentially at branches of coronary arteries.

Research by Warwick Medical School at the University of Warwick has found that sleep deprivation is associated with an almost a two-fold increased risk of being obese for both children and adults.

Researchers, working with colleagues at St George's, University of London, are developing drugs designed to stop allergens from entering the body, so rendering them harmless.

In a pair of groundbreaking studies, brain scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh have discovered that the anatomical differences that characterize the brains of people with autism are related to the way those brains process information.