The National Institutes of Health has awarded Montana State University's Center for Biofilm Engineering a $2.9 million grant to find new ways to heal chronic wounds.

Stimulation of a receptor in the brain that controls insulin responses has been shown to halt or diminish the neurodegeneration of Alzheimer's disease, providing evidence that the disease can be treated in its early stages, according to a study by researchers at Rhode Island Hospital and Brown Medical School.

Biologists at the EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne) have unveiled a new twist in a metabolic pathway that cells use to defend themselves against toxins made by disease-causing bacteria.

As the annual dolphin drive hunts begin in the Japanese villages of Taiji and Futo, a consortium of scientists and zoo and aquarium professionals has launched a campaign to end the practices through public awareness and by appealing to the government of Japan to put an end to the hunts. The "Act for Dolphins" campaign--which includes members from The New York Aquarium, Emory University, and the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA) --maintains that the hunts, which result in the deaths of thousands of dolphins every year, are inhumane by any ethical standard and should be discontinued immediately.

A new target for cancer therapy has been identified by Monash University scientists investigating the cell signalling pathways that turn on a gene involved in cancer development.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine have discovered a unique evolutionary link between the immune systems of fish and mammals in the form of a primitive version of B cells, white blood cells of the immune system. Their studies link the evolution of the adaptive immune system in mammals, where B cells produce antibodies to fight infection, to the more primitive innate immunity in fish, where they found that B cells take part in phagocytosis (literally: cell eating), the process by which cells of the immune system ingest foreign particles and microbes.

An innovative new NASA-funded study based on a combination of satellite data, computer models and weather balloon readings finds that smoke from Alaskan and Canadian forest fires as much as doubled ground-level ozone thousands of miles away in Houston during a two-day period in July 2004. The study, which will appear online Sept. 26 in the Journal of Geophysical Research, offers scientists a rare glimpse at the precise air-quality effects from pollutants generated thousands of miles away.

The skull of the Australopithecus afarensis child. 3.3 million years ago, a three year old girl died in present day Ethiopia, in an area called Dikika. Though a baby, she is providing us with unique accounts of our past as a grand mother would! Her completeness, antiquity, and age at death combined make this find unprecedented in the history of paleoanthropology and open many new research avenues to investigate into the infancy of early human ancestors. The extraordinary discovery reported this week in the scientific journal Nature, was found in north-eastern Ethiopia, by a paleoanthropological research team led by Zeresenay Alemseged of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany.