Many people with HIV/AIDS in Serbia and Montenegro experience stigma, loneliness and ostracism, and can find it difficult to secure work and support themselves, according to new research findings.

Huntington’s disease is a genetic time bomb: Programmed in the genes, it appears at a predictable age in adulthood, causing a progressive decline in mental and neurological function and finally death. There is, to date, no cure. Huntington’s, and a number of diseases like it, collectively known as trinucleotide repeat diseases, are caused by an unusual genetic mutation: A three-letter piece of gene code is repeated over and over in one gene. Scientists at the Weizmann Institute have now proposed a mechanism that provides an explanation for the remarkable precision of the time bomb in these diseases. This explanation may, in the future, point researchers in the direction of a possible prevention or cure.

Researchers from the University of Delaware and the University of California at Riverside have thawed ice estimated to be at least a million years old from above Lake Vostok, an ancient lake that lies hidden more than two miles beneath the frozen surface of Antarctica.

It was not the isolation of the Ice Age that determined the genetic distribution of bears, as has long been thought. This is shown by an international research team led from Uppsala University in Sweden in the latest issue of Molecular Ecology. One possible interpretation is that the hunting of bears by humans and human land use have been crucial factors.

STORING carbon dioxide deep below the earth’s surface could be a safe, long-term solution to one of the planet’s major contributors to climate change.

Bioengineers at Yale and Cornell have created a modified chemotherapy that more effectively reaches and remains at the site of brain tumors — by adding a water-soluble polymer to the anti-cancer drug, according to a report in the November-December issue of Bioconjugate Chemistry.

For the first time, researchers have identified structural damage to the lungs caused by secondhand cigarette smoke.

__IMAGE_2 One gene for pea pod color generates green pods while a variant of that gene gives rise to the yellow-pod phenotype, a feature that helped Gregor Mendel, the 19th century Austrian priest and scientist, first describe genetic inheritance. However, many modern-day geneticists are focused on the strange ability of some genes to be expressed spontaneously in either of two possible ways.

Moths and butterflies, particularly silkworms, are well known producers of silk. And we all know spiders use it for their webs. But they are not the only invertebrates who make use of the strength and versatility of silk.