Marbled Antartic cod (Notothenia rossii) Five tons of marbled Antarctic cod (Notothenia rossii), now that was surely a big surprise to scientists and crew on board of Polarstern, alike considering that previous and subsequent hauls barely ever reaped such plentiful harvests.

Photoreceptor cells (red) in the developing eye of a fruit fly initiate an unfolded protein response (yellow) to help them cope with a stressful environment. Misfolded proteins are implicated in many diseases, including neurodegenerative diseases, diabetes and types of blindness.

Credit: Rockefeller University When cells get stressed, their proteins go unfolded. It's a reaction with a straightforward name: the unfolded protein response. Now, new research from Rockefeller University shows that this phenomenon actually serves a protective role; rather than a sign that the cell has given up, it may be a mechanism by which the cells cope with adversity. The findings were reported as an advance online publication in the EMBO Journal on the Dec. 14.

Kids and adults will stay glued to video games this holiday season because the fun of playing actually is rooted in fulfilling their basic psychological needs.

People estimate that, on average, they make about 15 food- and beverage-related decisions each day. But the truth is, they make more than 15 times that -- more than 200 such decisions.

Despite the explosive growth in size and complexity of the human brain, the pace of evolutionary change among the thousands of genes expressed in brain tissue has actually slowed since the split, millions of years ago, between human and chimpanzee, an international research team reports in the December 26, 2006, issue of the journal, PLOS Biology.

Upon entering a cell, a virus often becomes dormant, turning off its genes and laying low until awakened by som e trigger from its environment. When that trigger is pulled, the virus quickly ramps up production of proteins through built-in positive-feedback loops that turn up gene transcription. (In positive feedback, production of something stimulates more production of that thing, resulting in exponential, or faster, growth.) If the viral environment were perfectly regulated and viral gene expression perfectly silenced during latency, this system would be foolproof. But this is almost never the case--there is always noise and always the potential for some low level of erroneous transcription. This poses a problem for the virus--how does it prevent stray transcription from erupting into full-blown activation?

Much like flipping a light switch, the hepatitis C virus turns on human immune defenses upon entering the body but also turns off those defenses by manipulating interaction of key cellular proteins, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have found.

Scientists can predict how the distance marine larvae travel varies with ocean temperature – a key component in conservation and management of fish, shellfish and other marine species – according to a new study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.