LA JOLLA, CA—November 24, 2008—Researchers at The Scripps Research Institute have figured out how a macromolecular machine is able to unwind the long and twisted tangles of DNA within a cell's nucleus so that genetic information can be "read" and used to direct the synthesis of proteins, which have many specific functions in the body.

Bacterial decay was once viewed as fossilization's mortal enemy, but new research suggests bacterial biofilms may have actually helped preserve the fossil record's most vulnerable stuff -- animal embryos and soft tissues.

Scientists have identified a gene critical to lung maturation in newborns and the production of surfactant, which lines lung tissues and prevents the lungs from collapsing.

Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) have reported for the first time that mammals can be stimulated to regrow inner nerve cells in their damaged retinas. Located in the back of the eye, the retina's role in vision is to convert light into nerve impulses to the brain.

A single hit on the head by the termite Termes panamensis (Snyder), which possesses the fastest mandible strike ever recorded, is sufficient to kill a would-be nest invader, report Marc Seid and Jeremy Niven, post-doctoral fellows at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Rudolf Scheffrahn from the University of Florida.

Overturning a century of prevailing thought, scientists are finding that neurons in the adult brain can remodel their connections. In work reported in the Nov. 24 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Elly Nedivi, associate professor of neurobiology at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, and colleagues found that a type of neuron implicated in autism spectrum disorders remodels itself in a strip of brain tissue only as thick as four sheets of tissue paper at the upper border of cortical layer 2.

MIT researchers have shown how a cell motor protein exerts the force to move, enabling functions such as cell division.