An effective way to fight leukemia might be to knock out a specific protein that protects cancer cells from dying, a new study shows.

Yale School of Medicine and University of Crete School of Medicine researchers report in Cell April 20 the first evidence of a molecular mechanism that dynamically alters the strength of higher brain network connections.

The most recent census of mountain gorillas in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park—one of only two places in the world where the rare gorillas exist—has found that the population has increased by 6 percent since the last census in 2002, according to the Uganda Wildlife Authority, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Max Planck Institute of Anthropology and other groups that participated in the effort.

This rare wattled crane chick hatched at the Smithsonian's National Zoo on March 30. The chick is the National Zoo's first in its 118-year history. Visitors can see the wattled crane chick and its parents at the Zoo's Bird House outdoor exhibit. There are 63 wattled cranes in the North America zoo population and an estimated 8,000 in the wild. Adult wattled cranes stand 6 feet tall and weigh approximately 14 pounds. Credit: Jessie Cohen/Smithsonian's National Zoo Smithsonian's National Zoo has announced a first in its 118-year history -- the hatching of a rare wattled crane chick.

Crohn’s disease is a chronic relapsing inflammatory disorder of the intestinal tract that affects an estimated 0.15% of people in the developed world. Common symptoms include abdominal pain and diarrhea, but the disorder is often associated with debilitating clinical complications. Researchers from the University of Liège, Belgium, have now uncovered an important clue to the susceptibility of individuals to this disease.

The largest study to date of genetic variation among chimpanzees has found that the traditional, geography-based sorting of chimps into three populations—western, central and eastern—is underpinned by significant genetic differences, two to three times greater than the variation between the most different human populations.

The rise of the central nervous system (CNS) in animal evolution has puzzled scientists for centuries. Vertebrates, insects and worms evolved from the same ancestor, but their CNSs are different and were thought to have evolved only after their lineages had split during evolution. Researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg now reveal that the vertebrate nervous system is probably much older than expected. The study, which is published in the current issue of Cell, suggests that the last common ancestor of vertebrates, insects and worms already had a centralised nervous system resembling that of vertebrates today.