In discovering the genes responsible for storing fat in cells, scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have answered one of biology’s most fundamental questions. Their findings, which appear in the December 17 to 21 “Early Edition” online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could lead to new strategies for treating obesity and the diseases associated with it.

Researchers with the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine have demonstrated the process by which the cancer-causing chemical dioxin attacks the cellular machinery, disrupts normal cellular function and ultimately promotes tumor progression.

Neurotransmitters have consequences. They initiate events that are critical to a healthy life, giving us the ability to move, to talk, to breathe, to think. But that’s if the neurotransmitters are getting it right and sending proper signals downstream to muscle cells, neurons or other cells.

MIT scientists have found a way to induce cells to form parallel tube-like structures that could one day serve as tiny engineered blood vessels.

Human liver cells are dotted across the new DataChip to quickly determine if various chemicals, drugs, and drug candidates are toxic. When coupled with the MetaChip, the two biochips could provide a highly predictive alternative to animal testing. Credit: Moo-Yeal Lee/Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute A new biochip technology could eliminate animal testing in the chemicals and cosmetics industries, and drastically curtail its use in the development of new pharmaceuticals, according to new findings from a team of researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of California at Berkeley, and Solidus Biosciences Inc.

A novel surgical technique allowing doctors to operate on patients by making a Z-shaped incision inside the stomach could potentially replace certain types of conventional surgery in humans, according to Penn State medical researchers who have successfully demonstrated the procedure in pigs.

A tiny possum and a giant rat were recorded by scientists as probable new species on a recent expedition to Indonesia’s remote and virtually unknown “Lost World” in the pristine wilderness of western New Guinea’s Foja Mountains.

A new American Cancer Society report estimates that there will be over 12 million new cancer cases and 7.6 million cancer deaths (about 20,000 cancer deaths a day) worldwide in 2007. The estimate comes from the first-ever Global Cancer Facts & Figures, the latest addition to the American Cancer Society’s family of Facts & Figures publications. The report estimates that 5.4 million of those cancers and 2.9 million deaths will occur in economically developed countries, while 6.7 million cases and 4.7 million deaths will occur in economically developing countries. These projections were based on incidence and mortality data from the Globocan 2002 database compiled by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).

Researchers from the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), a joint project of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, have for the first time described a mechanism called “dynamic connectivity,” in which neuronal circuits are rewired “on the fly” allowing stimuli to be more keenly sensed. The process is described in a paper in the January 2008 issue of Nature Neuroscience, and available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nn2030.