Johns Hopkins researchers from the Whiting School of Engineering and the School of Medicine have devised a micro-scale tool - a lab on a chip - designed to mimic the chemical complexities of the brain. The system should help scientists better understand how nerve cells in the brain work together to form the nervous system.

Fatal shark attacks worldwide dipped to their lowest levels in two decades in 2007 with the sole casualty involving a swimmer vacationing in the South Pacific, according to the latest statistics from the University of Florida.

This is what the brain says when people use tobacco, as well as ‘hard drugs’ such as heroin. New research published in the February 13 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience indicates that the effects of nicotine and opiates on the brain's reward system are equally strong in a key pleasure-sensing areas of the brain – the nucleus accumbens.

aken by researchers for the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, this image is one of a series showing western gorillas mating 'face-to-face' in Mbeli Bai in the Republic of Congo. These images are the first capturing such behavior in wild gorillas. Credit: © Thomas Breuer – WCS/MPI-EVA Scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have released the first known photographs of gorillas performing face-to-face copulation in the wild. This is the first time that western gorillas have been observed and photographed mating in such a manner.

Reconstructed skull of Velafrons coahuilensis, a 72-million-year-old duck-billedspecimen discovered in Coahuila, Mexico. A new species of dinosaur unearthed in Mexico is giving scientists fresh insights into the ancient history of western North America, according to an international research team led by scientists from the Utah Museum of Natural History at the University of Utah.

A leaf mine on an unidentified leaf from the PETM. Insects will feast and leafy plants will suffer if temperatures warm and atmospheric carbon dioxide increases, according to a team of researchers who studied evidence of insect feeding on fossil leaves from before, during and after the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.

UCLA stem cell scientists have reprogrammed human skin cells into cells with the same unlimited properties as embryonic stem cells without using embryos or eggs.

The study, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, claims to have solved this scientific riddle by analysing the genomics of primitive living fishes such as sharks and lampreys and their spineless relatives, such as the sea squirts.