University of Utah biologists discovered that young "right whales" learn from their mothers where to eat, raising concern about their ability to find new places to feed if Earth's changing climate disrupts their traditional dining areas.

A new way to direct chemical modifications to specific sites on recombinant proteins – including the monoclonal antibodies so important in the pharmaceutical industry – has been developed by Carolyn Bertozzi and her colleagues at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley.

An investigational vaginal gel intended to prevent HIV infection in women has demonstrated encouraging signs of success in a clinical trial conducted in Africa and the United States. Findings of the recently concluded study, funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the NIH, were presented today at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Montreal.

The decline of amphibian populations worldwide has been documented primarily in frogs, but salamander populations also appear to have plummeted, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, biologists.

Solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance, or SSNMR, is a valuable tool to image and analyze the chemical makeup of proteins and other biomolecules. But the imaging process is time-consuming and requires large amounts of costly isotope-labeled sample for study.

An estimated 15% of cancer cases can be linked to a viral infection, however the biological changes that cause some asymptomatic carriers of a virus to develop full-blown tumors are not well understood. In a study published online in Genome Research (www.genome.org), scientists have mapped a chemical modification of DNA in three oncogenic viruses (Epstein-Barr, human papilloma virus, and hepatitis B virus) and found that the viral genome undergoes critical changes during the progression of disease, with implications for the development of new methods of prevention, diagnosis, and treatment.

Genetics may play a surprisingly small role in determining the precise wiring of the mammalian nervous system, according to painstaking mapping of every neuron projecting to a small muscle mice use to move their ears. These first-ever mammalian "connectomes," or complete neural circuit diagrams, reveal that neural wiring can vary widely even in paired tissues on the left and right sides of the same animal.