With childhood obesity increasing, school administrators and public health officials are reducing availability of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSB) in schools. In a study published in the November/December 2008 issue of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, researchers found that reduction or elimination of SSB from school menus has little effect on total consumption by adolescents.

Coral reef scientists and policy makers from the world's most prominent coral reef nations are meeting in Australia this week to develop urgent action plans to rescue the world's richest centre of marine biodiversity from gradual decline.

Inside every axon is a dendrite waiting to get out. Hedstrom et al. converted mature axons into dendrites by banishing a protein crucial for neuron development. The results suggest that this transformation could occur after nerve cell damage.

Like other kinds of cells, immune cells lose the ability to divide as they age because a part of their chromosomes known as a telomere becomes progressively shorter with cell division. As a result, the cell changes in many ways, and its disease fighting ability is compromised.

Researchers at the University of Toronto and the University of California, San Francisco, have revealed new hope for HIV treatment with the discovery of a way to 'rescue' immune cells that are exhausted from fighting off HIV infection.

Scientists from Maastricht University have developed a method to look into the brain of a person and read out who has spoken to him or her and what was said. With the help of neuroimaging and data mining techniques the researchers mapped the brain activity associated with the recognition of speech sounds and voices. In their Science article "Who" is Saying "What"? Brain-Based Decoding of Human Voice and Speech the four authors demonstrate that speech sounds and voices can be identified by means of a unique 'neural fingerprint' in the listener's brain. In the future this new knowledge could be used to improve computer systems for automatic speech and speaker recognition.

In HIV-infected patients the body's immune system is unable to fight off the virus. A new study to be published online on November 10th in the Journal of Experimental Medicine shows that T cells in HIV-infected individuals express a protein called TIM-3, which inactivates their virus killing capacity. Blocking this protein, the study suggests, might one day help patients to eliminate HIV as well as other chronic infections.

Colugos (aka flying lemurs)—the closest living relatives of primates most notable for their ability to glide from tree to tree over considerable distances—are more diverse than had previously been believed, according to a new report published in the November 11th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

Researchers have generated the first comprehensive genetic blueprint of a forming mammalian organ, shedding light on the genetic and molecular dynamics of kidney development.

A University of Colorado at Boulder K-12 educational payload toting butterflies and spiders is slated to launch to the International Space Station aboard NASA's space shuttle Endeavour on Nov. 14.... A NASA space shuttle mission carrying a University of Colorado at Boulder payload of web-spinning spiders and wannabe butterflies will be closely monitored by hundreds of K-12 students from Colorado's Front Range after Endeavour launches from Florida for the International Space Station Nov. 14.

It sounds like a science fiction movie: A killer contagion threatens the Earth, but scientists save the day with a designer drug that forces the virus to mutate itself out of existence. The killer disease? Still a fiction. The drug? It could become a reality thanks to a new study by Rice University bioengineers.

Headphones for MP3 players placed within an inch of pacemakers and implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) may interfere with these devices, according to research presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2008.

Bottom left: Megeleledone setebos, endemic to the Southern Ocean, surrounded by related octopus species that evolved in the deep-sea. In a report on progress towards the first Census of Marine Life, more than 2,000 scientists from 82 nations announce astonishing examples of recent new finds from the world's ocean depths.

Yale researchers have taken the first critical steps in unraveling the mysteries of brain aneurysms, the often fatal rupturing of blood vessels that afflicts 500,000 people worldwide each year and nearly killed Vice President-elect Joseph Biden two decades ago.

The question of whether or not to continue to pursue the development of T-cell-based HIV-1 vaccines has been a source of controversy following last year's widely publicized failure of the field's most promising candidate, a vaccine developed by Merck known as V520.