Carbon nanotubes-cylinders so tiny that it takes 50,000 lying side by side to equal the width of a human hair-are packed with the potential to be highly accurate vehicles for administering medicines and other therapeutic agents to patients. But a dearth of data about what happens to the tubes after they discharge their medical payloads has been a major stumbling block to progress.

The Fertile Crescent of the Middle East has long been identified as a “cradle of civilization” for humans. In a new genetic study, researchers at the University of California, Davis, have concluded that all ancestral roads for the modern day domestic cat also lead back to the same locale.

A team of Penn State University researchers is the first to conduct a genome-wide study to compare the relative importance of factors that contribute to DNA mutations, which are implicated in cancer and over 40 neurological disorders. Led by assistant professor of biology Kateryna Makova, the group investigated the simultaneous effects of numerous factors that are thought to increase the susceptibility to mutations of microsatellites -- variable-length sequences of recurring DNA subunits. Microsatellites are common throughout the genomes of plants and animals. The work is described in the January 2008 issue of the journal Genome Research.

It is like the premise of a popular home improvement show: in the before photos, the surroundings are undesirable and in the after shot there’s lots of attractive spaces to grab a meal, start a family and relax in seclusion from life’s stresses. The difference here is that the potential new homeowner is a lizard and the renovations come -- not from a sophisticated Manhattan designer -- but instead from a herd of elephants. An examination of the connections between elephants and lizards appears this month in the journal Ecology, where a researcher reports that the elephants’ eating habits have a strong influence on the lizards’ habitat choices. The results demonstrate an important and little understood aspect of ecosystem engineering, and may help land managers working on wildlife refuges in Africa.

Heart surgeons at Johns Hopkins have evidence to support further tightening rather than easing of standards used to designate hospitals that are best at performing heart transplants.

The combined supercomputing power of the UK and US ‘national grids’ has enabled UCL (University College London) scientists to simulate the efficacy of an HIV drug in blocking a key protein used by the lethal virus. The method – an early example of the Virtual Physiological Human in action – could one day be used to tailor personal drug treatments, for example for HIV patients developing resistance to their drugs.

In October 2001, letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to several news media offices and two U.S. senators, killing five people and infecting 17 others. Clearing the Senate office building of the spores with chlorine dioxide gas cost $27 million, according to the Government Accountability Office. Cleaning the Brentwood postal facility outside Washington cost $130 million and took 26 months.

We might think we control the climate but unless we harness the powers of our microbial co-habitants on this planet we might be fighting a losing battle, according to an article in the February 2008 issue of Microbiology Today.

Sequences of DNA in the human genome that originated from ancient viral infections have some surprising effects on our bodies and are even essential for a healthy pregnancy, according to an article in the February issue of Microbiology Today.