How do adult stem cells protect themselves from accumulating genetic mutations that can lead to cancer?

Biologists at Harvard University have identified the ancient fossilized remains of a pollen-bearing bee as the first hint of orchids in the fossil record, a find they say suggests orchids are old enough to have co-existed with dinosaurs.

A review of measures taken to address a 2004 outbreak of the highly infectious Norwalk virus at The Johns Hopkins Hospital has provided the first solid documentation of expenses and efforts in the United States to stop the infection from spreading among patients, staff and visitors. Total hospital costs for the three-month outbreak - including extra cleaning supplies, staff sick leave, diagnostic tests, replacement staff, and salaries and lost revenue from closed beds - were estimated at more than $650,000.

University of Pennsylvania researchers and their colleagues at the Wistar Institute and University of Oxford have discovered the molecular process by which the PAX5 protein, necessary for lymphocyte development, promotes the growth of common lymphomas, thereby unveiling a potential new target in the fight against cancer.

It appears that chemical warfare has been around a lot longer than poison arrows, mustard gas or nerve weapons – about 100 million years, give or take a little.

Gene networks are some of the most basic features of a living organism. An external or internal stimulus activates some genes, which in turn control others genes whose activity turns on or off various biological processes (such as the cell cycle, energy production, DNA repair, cellular suicide etc). Many of the regulatory functions are controlled by attachment of special proteins (transcription factors) to 6 - 10 nucleotide long binding sequences located on the DNA, activating or suppressing expression of the regulated gene. Our ability to identify these binding sites is essential to understand the way biological networks operate.

Touching stories of living donor transplantation are continuously happening in hospitals. One of these stories is reported recently in the August 14 issue of the World Journal of Gastroenterology because of its shining significance in hepatology. This article is going to bring comfort to many families.

Neighborhood property values predict local obesity rates better than education or incomes, according to a study from the University of Washington being published online this week by the journal Social Science and Medicine. For each additional $100,000 in the median price of homes, UW researchers found, obesity rates in a given ZIP code dropped by 2 percent.

Comparison of body and muscle size between normal (left) and double mutant mice lacking myostatin and overproducing follistatin (right). The Johns Hopkins scientist who first showed that the absence of the protein myostatin leads to oversized muscles in mice and men has now found a second protein, follistatin, whose overproduction in mice lacking myostatin doubles the muscle-building effect.