New drug research suggests that teens may get addicted and relapse more easily than adults because developing brains are more powerfully motivated by drug-related cues. This conclusion has been reached by researchers who found that adolescent rats given cocaine – a powerfully addicting stimulant – were more likely than adults to prefer the place where they got it. That learned association endured: Even after experimenters extinguished the drug-linked preference, a small reinstating dose of cocaine appeared to rekindle that preference – but only in the adolescent rats.

Improved management of crops and perennials could go a long way toward alleviating the problem of hypoxia, which claims thousands of fish, shrimp and shellfish in the Gulf of Mexico each spring.

New research suggests that not everyone who is bitten by a malaria-infected mosquito develops life threatening health problems according to scientists at the University of Toronto.

Blacksburg, Va. – Researchers from the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI) at Virginia Tech and their colleagues have identified a key function of a large family of virulence proteins that play an important role in the production of infectious disease by the plant pathogen Phytophthora sojae.

A new fundamental mechanism of how tumour cells communicate has just been discovered by the team of Dr. Janusz Rak at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) in collaboration with Dr Guha from the University of Toronto. The cancer cells are able to communicate with their more healthy counter-parts by releasing vesicles. These bubble-like structures contain cancer-causing (oncogenic) proteins that can trigger specific mechanisms when they merge into non or less-malignant cells. These findings could change our view on how cancerous tissues work and lead to major clinical innovations. They were published on April 20 in the on-line edition of Nature Cell Biology.

The results of a University of Illinois study have demonstrated an effective way to lower cholesterol levels – by eating chocolate bars.

About 40 percent of African-Americans have a genetic variant that can protect them after heart failure and prolong their lives, according to research conducted at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and collaborating institutions.

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have found that female mice avoid mating with inbred males by ‘sensing’ the diversity of a protein type in their urine.