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Controlling the properties and behavior of matter at the smallest scale—in effect, "domesticating atoms"—can help to overcome some of the world’s biggest challenges, concludes a new report on how diverse experts view the future of nanotechnology. Released today, NanoFrontiers: Visions for the Future of Nanotechnology, summarizes discussions among over 50 scientists, engineers, ethicists, policymakers, and other experts, as well as information gathered in follow-up interviews and from specially prepared background papers, about the long-term potential of nanotechnology.

Medical professionals conducting clinical trials should provide more information about financial conflicts of interest before they talk to patients about participating in the trials.

That is one of the main conclusions of a new survey by researchers from Duke University Medical Center and Johns Hopkins University. Their study found that 41 percent of the clinical trial coordinators surveyed had experience disclosing financial aspects of the trial to potential participants, and 28 percent of the coordinators had been asked by participants about potential financial conflicts.

Crohn’s disease is a chronic relapsing inflammatory disorder of the intestinal tract that affects an estimated 0.15% of people in the developed world. Common symptoms include abdominal pain and diarrhea, but the disorder is often associated with debilitating clinical complications. Researchers from the University of Liège, Belgium, have now uncovered an important clue to the susceptibility of individuals to this disease.

Mayo Clinic researchers, along with collaborators from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and University of Oslo, Norway, have discovered that a miscue of the body’s genetic repair system may cause Huntington’s disease, a fatal condition that affects 30,000 Americans annually by destroying their nervous system. Until now, no one knew how Huntington’s begins, only that it is incurable. The findings appear in the online issue of the journal Nature.

An effective way to fight leukemia might be to knock out a specific protein that protects cancer cells from dying, a new study shows.

The findings suggest that a drug that can block this "survival protein" might on its own be an effective therapy.

But such a drug used in combination with several existing drugs might also offer an effective one-two punch against drug-resistant forms of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). The two forms of cancer kill about 20,500 Americans yearly.

The rise of the central nervous system (CNS) in animal evolution has puzzled scientists for centuries. Vertebrates, insects and worms evolved from the same ancestor, but their CNSs are different and were thought to have evolved only after their lineages had split during evolution. Researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg now reveal that the vertebrate nervous system is probably much older than expected.

The largest study to date of genetic variation among chimpanzees has found that the traditional, geography-based sorting of chimps into three populations—western, central and eastern—is underpinned by significant genetic differences, two to three times greater than the variation between the most different human populations.