Transgenic corn's suppression of the European corn borer has saved Midwest farmers billions of dollars in the past decade, reports a new study in Science.

There is still time to save the world's ailing coral reefs, if prompt and decisive action can be taken to improve their overall health, leading marine researchers say.

Many a holiday is ruined by food poisoning, frequently caused by the bacterium Campylobacter jejuni. Although Campylobacter infections are rarely life-threatening they are extremely debilitating and have been linked with the development of Guillain-Barré syndrome, one of the leading causes of non-trauma-induced paralysis worldwide.

A team of Yale University scientists has engineered the cell wall of the Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, tricking it into incorporating foreign small molecules and embedding them within the cell wall.

Advocates for seeding regions of the ocean with iron to combat global warming should be interested in a new study published today in Geophysical Research Letters. A Canada-US team led by University of Victoria oceanographer Dr. Roberta Hamme describes how the 2008 eruption of the Kasatochi volcano in the Aleutian Islands spewed iron-laden ash over a large swath of the North Pacific. The result, says Hamme, was an "ocean productivity event of unprecedented magnitude"—the largest phytoplankton bloom detected in the region since ocean surface measurements by satellite began in 1997.

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have found that a species of lizard in the Mojave Desert lives in family groups and shows patterns of social behavior more commonly associated with mammals and birds. Their investigation of the formation and stability of family groups in desert night lizards (Xantusia vigilis) provides new insights into the evolution of cooperative behavior.

An immune reaction to dystrophin, the muscle protein that is defective in patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, may pose a new challenge to strengthening muscles of patients with this disease, suggests a new study appearing in the October 7, 2010, issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

The United States continues to lag behind other nations when it comes to gains in life expectancy, and commonly cited causes for our poor performance—obesity, smoking, traffic fatalities, and homicide—are not to blame, according to a Commonwealth Fund-supported study published today as a Health Affairs Web First. The study, by Peter Muennig and Sherry Glied at Columbia University, looked at health spending; behavioral risk factors like obesity and smoking; and 15-year survival rates for men and women ages 45 and 65 in the U.S. and 12 other nations (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom).