They're not afraid of heights, they're voracious, and Dr. Spencer Behmer wants to know if you've seen them hanging out in oak trees or on your house.

A surprising technique to concentrate, manipulate, and separate a wide class of swimming bacteria has been identified through a collaboration between researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois Institute of technology, University of Arizona at Tucson, and Cambridge University, UK. This device could have enormous applications in biotechnology and biomedical engineering including use in miniaturized medical diagnostic kits and bioanalysis.

The research group "Estudio de sustancias antagonistas producidas por microorganismos" (Antagonistic substances produced by microorganisms), part of the Microbiology Department of the University of Granada (Universidad de Granada [http://www.ugr.es]), has succeeded in isolating enterocin AS-48, which could have a medium-term use as food biopreservative. This represents a significant advance, given that biopreservation is an innovative method in food-preservation systems based on the use of microorganisms or their metabolic products to inhibit or destroy undesirable microorganisms.

CNRS scientists in collaboration have developed a new technique for the in vivo imaging of neuronal function using bioluminescence, based on a GFP-aequorin fusion protein. This imaging technique enables the monitoring of neuronal activity (and more specifically, calcium activity), real-time and in-vivo, in either a small group of neurons or in the brain as a whole.

A new study in PLoS Medicine has shown that children who have rotavirus, a very common cause of diarrhea in children, and who have antigens (protein fragments from the surface of the virus) in their blood, also have infectious virus in their blood. Margaret Conner and colleagues from Baylor College of Medicine, Houston Texas, tested samples obtained from hospitalized children with gastroenteritis and compared them with samples taken from children admitted with bronchiolitis or noninfectious, nonchronic conditions and healthy adults.

As the first FDA-approved cancer vaccine, designed to protect against human papillomavirus, has moved from scientific discussion to social debate, other vaccine studies are continuing to make progress. While HPV vaccine efforts had the "benefit" of a viral source for the disease, other researchers are developing vaccines for cancers that are not virally based, in an effort to coax the immune system into attacking cancerous cells. Today at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, presentations on ongoing HPV trials and other new approaches to stimulating the immune system are injecting momentum into cancer vaccine research.

A new study from the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute's Center for Environmental Oncology suggests that fish caught in Pittsburgh rivers contain substances that mimic the actions of estrogen, the female hormone. Since fish are sentinels of the environment, and can concentrate chemicals from their habitat within their bodies, these results suggest that feminizing chemicals may be making their way into the region's waterways.

A vaccine for treating a recurrent cancer of the central nervous system that occurs primarily in the brain has shown promise in preliminary data from a clinical trial at the University of California, San Francisco.

Four-year-old girls are six times more likely to have a Body Mass Index (BMI) of more than 30 than they were 20 years ago and ten-year-olds are five times more likely, according to research published in the April issue of Acta Paediactrica.

Researchers from the Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center today presented preclinical research at the American Association of Cancer Research's annual meeting suggesting the potential of a new combination treatment for chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL).