Even a quiet stroll in the park can dramatically change natural ecosystems, according to a new study by conservation biologists from the University of California, Berkeley. These findings could have important implications for land management policies.

A study performed by researchers at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), in collaboration with researchers at the Instituto de Biología Molecular of the CSIC, reveal a mechanism that controls the movement of cells in a tissue by regulating cell adhesion. This same mechanism may be defective in diseases such as cancer and its metastasis, when tumour cells lose their adhesion to neighbouring cells and migrate through the organism. The results of this research have been published in this week's Nature Cell Biology.

The white horse is an icon for dignity which has had a huge impact on human culture across the world. An international team led by researchers at Uppsala University has now identified the mutation causing this spectacular trait and show that white horses carry an identical mutation that can be traced back to a common ancestor that lived thousands of years ago. The study is interesting for medical research since this mutation also enhance the risk for melanoma. The paper is published on July 20 on the website of Nature Genetics.

A way to turn off one gene at a time has earned acceptance in biology laboratories over the last decade. Doctors envision the technique, called RNA interference, as a tool to treat a variety of diseases if it can be adapted to humans.

New research into the treatment of Alzheimer's disease reports improvement in language abilities using a novel immune-based approach. A video accompanying the research, published today in the open access journal BMC Neurology, documents rapid language improvement within minutes of using this new treatment.

Biogeoscientists show evidence of 90 billion tons of microbial organisms—expressed in terms of carbon mass—living in the deep biosphere, in a research article published online by Nature, July 20, 2008. This tonnage corresponds to about one-tenth of the amount of carbon stored globally in tropical rainforests. The authors: Kai-Uwe Hinrichs and Julius Lipp of the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM) at University of Bremen, Germany; and Fumio Inagaki and Yuki Morono of the Kochi Institute for Core Sample Research at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) concluded that about 87 percent of the deep biosphere consists of Archaea. This finding is in stark contrast to previous reports, which suggest that Bacteria dominate the subseafloor ecosystem. To reach this conclusion, the researchers investigated sediment cores collected from several hundred meters beneath the seafloor of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the Black Sea. The cored sediments included samples that were the result of research expeditions conducted by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP).