Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have provided, for the first time, a detailed look at the molecular pathways underlying sleep apnea, which affects more than twelve million Americans, according to the National Institutes of Health. Sleep apnea is a condition characterized by temporary breathing interruptions during sleep, in which disruptions can occur dozens or even hundreds of times a night.

To develop new strategies to control tuberculosis (TB), a contagious disease that infects one-third of the world’s population and kills almost two million people every year, the University of Pittsburgh Center for Vaccine Research has received an $11.4 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The grant will enable Pitt researchers to use new imaging technologies to study TB to shorten and simplify its course of treatment, potentially improving survival and curtailing the global TB epidemic.

While rabbits continue to ravage Australia’s native landscapes, rabbit fish may help save large areas of the Great Barrier Reef from destruction.

Transport processes in the cells of our body resemble the transport of goods on the roads. Molecular motors, which are special protein molecules, act as trucks. They carry the cellular cargo on piggy-back and transport it along microtubules, which are the roads of the cell. However, the molecular transporters are a billion times smaller than trucks and can only move as far as the beginning or end of the microtubule, depending on their type. They have to fight their way through a crowd that is more like a busy pedestrian area than a motorway, and also have to compete with motors that want to move in the opposite direction, as scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam have now discovered in a computer simulation.

Using the Canadian Light Source synchrotron, an international team led by University of Calgary researcher Ken Ng has determined the detailed structure of the enzyme the Norwalk virus uses to make copies of its genetic code in order to replicate itself. The information is crucial to developing drugs that could be used to treat outbreaks of Norwalk and other related viruses.

The vision system used to process color is separate from that used to detect motion, according to a new study by researchers at New York University’s Center for Developmental Genetics and in the Department of Genetics and Neurobiology at Germany’s University of Würzburg. The findings, which appear in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, run counter to previous scholarship that suggested motion detection and color contrast may work in tandem.

Emotions play an important role in the lives of humans, and influence our behavior, thoughts, decisions, and interactions. The ability to regulate emotions is essential to both mental and physical well-being. “Conversely, difficulties with emotion regulation have been postulated as a core mechanism underlying mood and anxiety disorders,” according to the authors of a new study published in Biological Psychiatry on March 15th. Thus, these researchers set out to further expand our understanding of the differential effects of emotion regulation strategies on the human brain.

The journal Medical Hypotheses (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/mehy), an Elsevier publication, has announced the winner of the 2007 David Horrobin Prize for medical theory. Written by Erle CH Lim and Raymond CS Seet of the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, the article, “Botulinum toxin, Quo Vadis?” was judged to best embody the spirit of the journal.

Brown bears from the Iberian Peninsula are not as genetically different from other brown bears in Europe as was previously thought. An international study being published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS, shows that, on the contrary, the Spanish bear was only recently isolated from other European strains. These findings shed new light on the discussion of how to save the population of Spanish bears.

A group of some 15 chimpanzees isolated in a pocket of Rwandan rain forest will have a greater range – and, thus, greater chances for survival – thanks to one of Africa’s most ambitious forest restoration and ecological research efforts ever. Organizers of the project, named the Rwandan National Conservation Park, said today that a 30-mile (50km) tree corridor will be planted to connect the Gishwati Forest Reserve, the chimpanzees’ home range, to Nyungwe National Park.

Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have estimated that one in six women are at risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in their lifetime, while the risk for men is one in ten. These findings were released today by the Alzheimer’s Association in their publication 2008 Alzheimer’s Disease: Facts and Figures.

Scientists at MIT have come up with a mathematical approach for analyzing a protein simultaneously in a set of ecologically distinct species to identify occurrences of natural selection in an organism’s evolution.