A team, led by researchers at the Carnegie Institution,* has found a key biochemical cycle that suppresses the immune response, thereby allowing cancer cells to multiply unabated. The research shows how the biomolecules responsible for healthy T-cells, the body’s first defenders against hostile invaders, are quashed, permitting the invading cancer to spread. The same cycle could also be involved in autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis. The work is published in the September 25, 2007, issue of PLoS Biology.

Lymph nodes can be crucial for spreading low doses of infective prion agents -the pathogens responsible for conditions such as scrapie and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease - into the nervous system, according to new research published in the online open access journal BMC Veterinary Research. While we can show that the regional lymph node plays no pivotal role in the neuroinvasion of prions for high doses of infection, we cannot rule out the possibility that lymph nodes are still involved in the distribution of prions throughout the body to other non-neural tissues.

Baseball had its steroids and Black Sox. Politics lived through Watergate. Wall Street has been riddled with insider trading scandals. And before we cast the first stone, who among us has never tried to get through an intersection on a yellow light?

Researchers at Texas A&M University are participating in developing a medicine that is worth sneezing about: a treatment for influenza that forms a jelly when sprayed into the nose.

By placing quantum dots on a specially designed photonic crystal, researchers at the University of Illinois have demonstrated enhanced fluorescence intensity by a factor of up to 108. Potential applications include high-brightness light-emitting diodes, optical switches and personalized, high-sensitivity biosensors.

A new review of inpatient data from US hospitals shows that the number of infections caused by a common bacterium increased by over 7 percent each year from 1998 to 2003. The attendant economic burden to hospitals increased by nearly 12 percent annually. The research is published in the November 1 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, now available online.

Researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet (KI) and the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control (SMI) have identified the biochemical mechanism behind the adhesive protein that give rise to particularly serious malaria in children. The knowledge of how the malaria parasite makes blood vessels become sticky paves the way for a future vaccine for the disease, which currently kills some 2 million people every year.

Many herbal plants such as strawberry, clover, reed and ground elder naturally form networks. Individual plants remain connected with each other for a certain period of time by means of runners. These connections enable the plants to share information with each other via internal channels. They are therefore very similar to computer networks. But what do plants want to chat to each other about?

Scientists have discovered how the zebrafish (Danio rerio) develops one of its four stripes.

The high biodiversity in tropical forests has both fascinated and puzzled ecologists for more than half a century. In the hopes of finding an answer to this puzzle, ecologists have turned their attention to the spatial patterns of such communities and mapped the location of each tree with a stem larger than a pencil in plots covering 25 to 52ha of tropical forest around the world. In a study published in The American Naturalist a German - Sri Lankan research team has now undertaken thousands of spatial pattern analyses to paint an overall picture of the association between tree species in one of these plots in Sri Lanka.

Researchers at UC San Diego and UC Irvine have found evidence that supports the theory that reproductive competition during the evolution of primate species has occurred at the level of sperm cell motility. In a paper published online by the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, a team led by Michael Berns, an adjunct professor of bioengineering at UCSD and a professor of biomedical engineering at the Beckman Laser Institute at UC Irvine, and UCSD Ph.D. candidate Jaclyn Nascimento reported that sperm cells from the more promiscuous chimpanzee and rhesus macaque species swim much faster and with much greater force than those of humans and gorillas, species where individual females mate primarily with only one male during a reproductive cycle.

Researchers at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN), Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) and Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) have successfully developed a miniaturized device that can be used to detect the highly pathogenic avian flu (H5N1) virus.