With summer in full swing, many plants are at their peak bloom and climbing plants, like clematis, morning glories, and sweet peas, are especially remarkable. Not only are these plants beautiful, but their ability to climb walls and trellises is an impressive feat of biological engineering that has taken millions of years to accomplish.

Orchids are famous for their deceptions. Most of those with nothing of value to offer their pollinators lure them instead with the scents of more rewarding flowers or potential mates. Now, a report published online on August 6th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, reveals for the first time that a species of orchid, which lives on the Chinese island of Hainan, fools its hornet pollinator by issuing a chemical that honeybees use to send an alarm.

Rice University physicists have written the next chapter in an innovative approach for studying the forces that shape proteins -- the biochemical workhorses of all living things.

Global calamities like the one that doomed most dinosaurs forever alter the varieties of life found on Earth, but new research shows that it doesn't take a catastrophe to end entire lineages. An analysis of 200 million years of history for marine clams found that vulnerability to extinction runs in evolutionary families, even when the losses result form ongoing, background rates of extinction.

Building upon a series of successful preclinical studies, researchers at MassBiologics of the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS) today announced the beginning of a Phase 1 clinical trial, testing the safety and activity of a human monoclonal antibody they developed that can neutralize the Hepatitis C virus (HCV).

Scientists at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) and Harvard University have thrown the lid off a new toolbox for building nanoscale structures out of DNA, with complex twisting and curving shapes. In the August 7 issue of the journal Science, they report a series of experiments in which they folded DNA, origami-like, into three dimensional objects including a beachball-shaped wireframe capsule just 50 nanometers in diameter.

A UC Irvine study has found that a gene called TOMM40 appears twice as often in people with Alzheimer's disease than in those without it. Alzheimer's, for which there is no cure, is the leading cause of elderly dementia.

A group of genes whose expression is significantly altered following exposure to drug paraphernalia after an enforced 'cold-turkey' period have been identified. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Neuroscience studied gene expression in the brains of heroin-addicted rats, identifying those genes that may be involved in precipitating a relapse.