In order for meat producers and retailers to satisfy anticipated consumer desires to avoid meat and milk from cloned animals, access to DNA from every unique clone should be made public so that DNA traceability technology can be used, according to Patrick Cunningham of Dublin's Trinity College and Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government of Ireland, who will speak at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference in Boston tomorrow.

The small Pacific Island nation of Kiribati has become a global conservation leader by establishing the world’s largest marine protected area – a California-sized ocean wilderness of pristine coral reefs and rich fish populations threatened by over-fishing and climate change.

Jack rabbits like these have mysteriously vainished from Yellowstone, a Wildlife Conservation Society study says. A new study by the Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society found that jack rabbits living in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem have apparently hopped into oblivion. The study, which appears in the latest issue of the journal Oryx, also speculates that the disappearance of jack rabbits may be having region-wide impacts on a variety of other prey species and their predators.

__IMAGE_2 Researchers have discovered a peptide in scorpion venom that may hold the key to understanding and controlling cystic fibrosis and other secretory diseases.

All the crucial proteins in our bodies must fold into complex shapes to do their jobs. These snarled molecules grip other molecules to move them around, to speed up important chemical reactions or to grab onto our genes, turning them "on" and "off" to affect which proteins our cells make.

This figure shows the structure of a beta-sheet protein, Z1-Z2 telethonin complex, in the giant muscle protein titin. The inset shows the orientation of the protein backbone of three beta strands (in purple) with hydrogen bonds (yellow) holding the assembly together. Using simulation and theory, Buehler and Keten found that hydrogen bonds in beta-sheet structures break in clusters of three or four, even in the presence of many more bonds. Credit: Sinan Keten and Markus Buehler Researchers in Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT reveal that the strength of a biological material like spider silk lies in the specific geometric configuration of structural proteins, which have small clusters of weak hydrogen bonds that work cooperatively to resist force and dissipate energy.

The immune system's powerful cellular mutation and repair processes appear to offer important clues as to how lymphatic cancer develops, Yale School of Medicine researchers report this week in Nature.