Category Archives: News & Archives

The multitude of microbes scientists have found populating the human body have good, bad and mostly mysterious implications for our health. But when something goes wrong, we defend ourselves with the undiscriminating brute force of traditional antibiotics, which wipe out everything at once, regardless of the consequences. Researchers at Rockefeller University and their collaborators are…

The HIV pandemic with us today is almost certain to have begun its global spread from Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), according to a new study. An international team, led by Oxford University and University of Leuven scientists, has reconstructed the genetic history of the HIV-1 group M pandemic,…

Scientists have found the beginnings of life-bearing chemistry at the centre of the galaxy. Iso-propyl cyanide has been detected in a star-forming cloud 27,000 light-years from Earth. Its branched carbon structure is closer to the complex organic molecules of life than any previous finding from interstellar space. The discovery suggests the building blocks of life…

A team of Stanford University researchers has developed a protein therapy that in mice was able to disrupt the process that causes cancer cells to break away from original tumor sites, travel through the bloodstream and start aggressive, new growths elsewhere in the body. This process, known as metastasis, can cause cancer to spread with…

When it comes to DNA, France has always been behind the times. Never mind the hefty fines and prison sentence a man apparently can get for trying to order a paternity test, it seems that just knowing your own genetic sequence is offensive enough. Now that the much anticipated MinION USB stick genome sequencer has finally…

Its victims include the actor Christopher Reeve, Pope John Paul II, and the British poet Rupert Brooke, who died after a mosquito bite on his lip became infected. Sepsis remains one of the leading killers in the United States and the world. Now, researchers describe a novel way to treat the lethal condition by filtering…

Although there have been more than two thousand studies documenting that GMOs do not pose an unusual threat to human health, questions about the safety of genetically modified foods remain in the minds of many consumers. Gilles-Eric Séralini, in his retracted GMO corn study (laterrepublished in a pay for play journal without peer review), claimed rats fed…

With the completion of the sequencing and analysis of the gibbon genome, scientists now know more about why this small ape has a rapid rate of chromosomal rearrangements, providing information that broadens understanding of chromosomal biology. Chromosomes, essentially the packaging that encases the genetic information stored in the DNA sequence, are fundamental to cellular function and…

A new type of cancer drug that harnesses the body’s immune system to fight tumors has won approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Keytruda (pembrolizumab), which blocks a protein called PD-1 that tumors use to evade immune cells, is approved for patients with advanced melanoma who fail other treatments. Cancer researchers “have been almost…

If Professor Hubert Farnsworth's "Smell-O-Scope" actually existed, astrobiologists would have pointed it at dozens of alien planets by now. The Professor's odor-detecting invention, which was featured in several episodes of the animated sci-fi series "Futurama," would be a good life-hunting tool, researchers say, because alien organisms may betray their presence by pumping stinky chemicals into their home…