For many single-celled organisms living in water, the force is always against them. The classic example is the slipper-shaped paramecium, which consistently swims harder going up than going down, just to keep from sinking. Now physicists Karine Guevorkian and James Valles of Brown University have worked out a way to turn gravity on its head and see how the creatures respond.

Scientists at the Monell Chemical Senses Center report that bitter taste perception of vegetables is influenced by an interaction between variants of taste genes and the presence of naturally-occurring toxins in a given vegetable. The study appears in the September 19 issue of Current Biology.

In their hunt for genes and proteins that explain how animals discern bitter from sweet, a team of Johns Hopkins researchers began by testing whether mutant fruit flies prefer eating sugar over sugar laced with caffeine. Using a simple behavioral test, the researchers discovered that a single protein missing from the fly-equivalent of our taste buds caused them to ignore caffeine's taste and consume the caffeine as if it were not there.

In three new independent studies, researchers have deepened our understanding of the remarkable ability of some specialized areas of the brain to activate both in response to one's own actions and in response to sensory cues (such as sight) of the same actions perpetrated by another individual. This ability is thought to be based in the activity of so-called mirror neurons, which have been hypothesized to contribute to skills such as empathy, socialized behavior, and language acquisition.

A protein known to be a key component of the glue that holds cells together also is involved in breaking them apart and promoting their movement when tumors begin to spread to other parts of the body, researchers at Mayo Clinic have found.

A defective link in the intracellular protein "transit system" may lie at the heart of some craniofacial defects, new research in zebrafish suggests.

Like tiny nano-soldiers on parade, the cyclic tungsten trioxide clusters line up molecule-by-molecule on the titanium dioxide platform. One tungsten atom from each cluster is raised slightly, holding forth the potential to execute catalytic reactions.

A new web site at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine – www.statineffects.com – will enable people from around the world to self-report adverse effects of statin drug use, or use of other cholesterol drugs.

Calling it an important technical advance in the study of the complex receptors and pathways of the body's cellular system, researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine have reconstructed the signaling pathways that impact activation of a receptor that is critical to the control of bleeding and to the thrombosis that occurs in heart attacks and strokes.