A masked marauder has emerged unexpectedly from the ocean to rescue a dying coral reef from destruction in the nick of time.

Surveys conducted in southern Sudan, after conflict there ended in 2004, found much higher levels of blindness than anticipated. The results, published in PLoS Medicine, have major implications for the provision of health services in the region.

The Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor (EGFR), a so-called kinase protein, is often abnormally active in cancer. A new class of anticancer drugs inhibiting the activated EGFR kinase have shown to be effective against such cancers, especially lung cancer. In a new study in PLoS Medicine, researchers have catalogued and characterized the mutations in the EGFR gene that occur in glioblastoma, a deadly type of brain tumor. The researchers sequenced the whole coding sequence of the EGFR gene in more than 100 glioblastomas. Nearly 15% of the tumors contained missense mutations—changes that altered the amino acid sequence of EGFR.

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have developed an experimental vaccine that could, theoretically, eliminate malaria from entire geographic regions, by eradicating the malaria parasite from an area's mosquitoes.

Forthcoming in the January/February 2007 issue of Physiological and Biochemical Zoology, a groundbreaking study reveals an unanticipated way freshwater fish may respond to water diversion and climate change. Endangered naked carp migrate annually between freshwater rivers, where they spawn, and a lake in Western China, where they feed and grow. However, Lake Qinghai is drying up and becoming increasingly more saline--leading to surprising adjustments to the carps' metabolic rate.

Right now there's no rapid way to diagnose sepsis, a fast-moving blood infection that is a leading cause of death in hospital intensive care units. The illness unleashes a powerful inflammatory response that can quickly overwhelm the body, causing organ failure and death, often within days.

As the world's first explorers branched away from humanity's birthplace in east Africa some 65,000 years ago, distinct mutations accumulated in the DNA of each population, essentially providing a genetic trail for modern researchers to follow.

Want biodiversity? Look no further than the air around you. It could be teeming with more than 1,800 types of bacteria, according to a first-of-its-kind census of airborne microbes recently conducted by scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

Fluorescent image of an aurora-A-mutant Drosophila brain, showing excessive numbers of neural stem cells (DNA in red; neuroblasts outlined in green). Credit: Courtesy of Chris Doe An enzyme found at elevated levels in several human cancers has been linked to abnormal tumor growth in fruit flies, a discovery that provides a new model for understanding the link between stem cell biology and cancer, according to researchers at the University of Oregon.