New data published in the Nov. 24 issue of Science provide further support for a protocol to reverse type 1 diabetes in mice and new evidence that adult precursor cells from the spleen can contribute to the regeneration of beta cells.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis; the U.S. Department of Agriculture; and the University of Haifa in Israel have cloned a gene from wild wheat that increases the protein, zinc and iron content in the grain, potentially offering a solution to nutritional deficiencies affecting hundreds of millions of children around the world.

A technique used since the 1930s to estimate the abundance of fish has shown for the first time that enforcement patrols are effective at reducing poaching of elephants, African buffaloes and black rhinos in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania.

To the multitude of substances that regulate neuronal signaling in the brain and spinal cord add a new key player: zinc. By engineering a mouse with a mutation affecting a neuronal zinc target, researchers have demonstrated a central role for zinc in modulating signaling among the neurons. Significantly, they found the mutant mouse shows the same exaggerated response to noise as children with the genetic disorder called "startle disease," or hyperekplexia.

Helping to change scientists' thinking about how the heart is formed, researchers at Children's Hospital Boston have identified a type of stem cell that is the precursor to at least two main cell types that form the heart. This single cardiac progenitor cell gives rise to both myocardial cells, which form the beating muscle and electrically conductive tissue of the heart, and to the vascular smooth muscle cells that line the heart's blood vessels. This cell is responsible for the formation of the left-sided chambers of the heart, the first chambers to form in the embryo.

Pinpointing reasons behind the dramatic increase in testicular cancer, now the most common malignant cancer among 15-to-35-year-old Caucasian men, is the focus of a five-year, $5.5 million National Cancer Institute (NCI) grant to Yale Public Health researcher Tongzhang Zheng.