The thought of coral reefs tends to conjure up images of tropical vacations, complete with snorkeling among tropical fish in crystal clear waters.

People smell them, thump them and eyeball their shape. But ultimately, it's sweetness and a sense of healthy eating that lands a melon in a shopper's cart.

Research from Canada's own Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) featured in this week's edition of the Lancet shows that worldwide, 1 in 25 deaths are directly attributable to alcohol consumption. This rise since 2000 is mainly due to increases in the number of women drinking.

Two new construction manuals are now available for the world's smallest lamps. Based on these protocols, scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces have tailor-made nanoparticles that can be used as position lights on cell proteins and, possibly in the future as well, as light sources for display screens or for optical information technology. The researchers produced cadmium sulphide particles in microscopically small membrane bubbles. Depending on which of the construction manuals they follow, the particles can be 4 or 50 nanometres in size. Because the membrane bubbles have the same size as living cells, the scientists' work also provides an indication as to how nanostructures could arise in nature. (Small, published online: June 8, 2009/DOI: 10.1002/smll.200900560)

Researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, came a step closer to understanding how cells close gaps not only during embryonic development but also duringwound healing. Their study, published this week in the journal Cell, uncovers a fundamental misconception in the previous explanation for a developmental process called dorsal closure.

Researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center have identified a protein that marks the tumor suppressor p53 for destruction, providing a potential new avenue for restoring p53 in cancer cells.