A study in Switzerland uses the tools of physics to show how our circadian clocks manage to keep accurate time in the noisy cellular environment.

Two Iowa State University botanists and their colleague at the University of North Carolina have discovered a new species of North American bamboo in the hills of Appalachia. It is the third known native species of the hardy grass. The other two were discovered more than 200 years ago.

A new study reported that zolpidem, a drug normally used to treat insomnia, temporarily improved brain function in a patient suffering from akinetic mutism, a condition in which the person is alert but cannot speak or move. The patient was able to communicate, walk, and eat without assistance after receiving the drug for a bout of insomnia. The study was published in the March 2007 issue of Annals of Neurology (http://www.interscience.wiley.com/ana), the official journal of the American Neurological Association.

Scientists have reported development of a large dataset of gene sequences in rice. The information will lead to an increased understanding of how genes work in rice, an essential food for much of the world's population.

Yale School of Medicine autism experts Fred Volkmar, M.D. and Ami Klin are part of a global research consortium from 19 countries to identify a gene and a region of a chromosome that may lead to autism in children.

Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Massey Cancer Center studying the interaction between the immune system and cancer cells have identified interferon gamma as one of the signaling proteins involved with tumor relapse.

Medical Hypotheses, an Elsevier publication, has announced the winner of the 2006 David Horrobin Prize for medical theory. Written by Judith Rich-Harris, author of The Nurture Assumption and No Two Alike, the article, "Parental selection: a third selection process in the evolution of human hairlessness and skin color" was judged to best embody the spirit of the journal. The £1,000 prize, launched in 2004, is awarded annually and named in honour of Dr. David Horrobin, the renowned researcher, biotechnology expert and founder of Medical Hypotheses (http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/623059/description#description), who died in 2003.

Unlike most of our sensory systems that detect only one type of stimuli, our sense of smell works double duty, detecting both chemical and mechanical stimuli to improve how we smell, according to University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine researchers in the March issue of Nature Neuroscience.

A popular game fish mistaken by scientists for a dog snapper is actually a new species discovered among the reefs of the Abrolhos region of the South Atlantic Ocean.

The cell-signaling molecule Akt is a primary trigger that leads malignant melanomas on the skin's surface to begin growing vertically beneath the skin and turn into deadly invasive cancers, scientists have found. Understanding this key molecular difference between radial melanomas that spread on the surface of the skin and melanomas that grow vertically and invasively could provide new targets for the development of drugs to treat individuals with advanced stage melanomas.

Whip spiders, considered by many to be creepy-crawly, are giving new meaning to the term touchy-feely.