What sound does a prawn make when it eats? How much food can one prawn devour in a day?

Scientists have discovered the first gene involved in regulating the optimal length of human sleep, offering a window into a key aspect of slumber, an enigmatic phenomenon that is critical to human physical and mental health.

The cancer stem cells that drive tumor growth and resist chemotherapies and radiation treatments that kill other cancer cells aren't invincible after all. Researchers reporting online on August 13th in the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication, have discovered the first compound that targets those cancer stem cells directly.

Life in the fruit bowl is no longer the pits, thanks to a University of Alberta researcher.

Honeybees in colonies affected by colony collapse disorder (CCD) have higher levels of pathogens and are co-infected with a greater number of pathogens than their non-CCD counterparts, but no individual pathogen can be singled out as the cause of CCD, according to a study by an international team of researchers.

In a paper to appear in the journal "Naturwissenschaften," Stevens Institute of Technology Professor Athula Attygalle and his research student, Xiaogang Wu, report for the first time that some ground beetles produce the natural repellent limonene as their major defensive chemical. The paper is the result of a collaborative research project with Professor Kipling Will (University of California, Berkeley), and Professor David R. Maddison (University of Arizona, Tucson).

Our genome is constantly under attack from things like UV light and toxins, which can damage or even break DNA strands and ultimately lead to cancer and other diseases. Scientists have known for a long time that when DNA is damaged, a key enzyme sets off a cellular 'alarm bell' to alert the cell to start the repair process, but until recently little was known about how the cell detects and responds to this alarm. In a study published today in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, have identified a whole family of proteins capable of a direct response to the alarm signal.

Imagine that you're working on your back porch, hammering in a nail. Suddenly you slip and hit your thumb instead — hard. The pain is incredibly intense, but it only lasts a moment. After a few seconds (and a few unprintable words) you're ready to start hammering again.