Therapeutic antibodies can be an efficient alternative when common drugs do not work anymore. However, antibodies obtained from blood of animals such as mice could not be used: The human immune system recognizes them as foreign and rejects them. In an international cooperation, scientists from the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig, Germany have now succeeded in developing a promising approach to solve this problem; with the help of human stem cells they generated mice with a human immune system, which were then vaccinated to produce human monoclonal antibodies. These fully human antibodies could help in the research and therapy of human diseases. Their results have now been published in the current online issue of the scientific journal "PLoS One".

A new species of dinosaur discovered in Arizona suggests dinosaurs did not spread throughout the world by overpowering other species, but by taking advantage of a natural catastrophe that wiped out their competitors.

Protein molecules inside cells are constantly reorganizing themselves, driven by very tiny forces exerted by all the other molecules in their crowded environment. Most experimental techniques and theoretical/computational models are necessarily built around much greater driving forces. A new theoretical model reported in the Journal of Chemical Physics investigates the unfolding of fibronectin under gentler conditions.

The oldest evidence of the dinosaur lineage—fossilized tracks—is described this week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Just one or two million years after the massive Permian-Triassic extinction, an animal smaller than a house cat walked across fine mud in what is now Poland. This fossilized trackway places the very closest relatives of dinosaurs on Earth about 250 million years ago—5 to 9 million years earlier than previously described fossilized skeletal material has indicated. The paper also described the 246-million-year-old Sphingopus footprints, the oldest evidence of a bipedal and large-bodied dinosaur.