Refrigeration units began pumping chilly air deep into an Arctic mountain cavern today, launching the innovative and critical “cooling down” phase of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in advance of its official opening early next year as a fail-safe repository of the world’s vital food crops. Svalbard is now three days into the three-month “Polar Night” period when there is 24 hours of complete darkness.

In a study with zebrafish (Danio rerio), Gregg W. Roman, assistant professor in the Department of Biology and Biochemistry at the University of Houston, has found that melatonin directly inhibits memory formation at night. He describes his team's findings in a paper titled "Melatonin Suppresses Nighttime Memory Formation in Zebrafish," appearing in Science, the world's leading journal of original scientific research. Credit: Thomas Shea What do you do when a naturally occurring hormone in your body turns against you? What do you do when that same hormone – melatonin – is a popular supplement you take to help you sleep? A University of Houston professor and his team of researchers may have some answers.

Scientists at The University of Arizona have added another piece of the puzzle of how the brain processes memory.

There’s one more reason to try to avoid being bitten by mosquitoes, scientists have discovered: bites from mosquitoes that aren’t infected by the West Nile virus may make the disease worse in people who acquire it later from West Nile-infected mosquitoes.

The cowpox virus, a much milder cousin of the deadly smallpox virus, can keep infected host cells from warning the immune system that they have been compromised, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found. The scientists also showed that more virulent poxviruses, such as the strains of monkeypox prevalent in Central Africa, likely have the same ability.