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A study released this month confirms and quantifies what many medical school deans and financial administrators have long understood: Basic science research can be an expensive luxury. The study, which was conducted by the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, found that the school had to add 40 cents to every dollar of external grant support received by newly recruited scientists in order to achieve financial equilibrium. This is in contrast to support required for established scientists, which is considerably less.

In the 13th January print edition of the journal Current Biology, Instituto Gubenkian de Ciencia researchers provide insight into an old mystery in cell biology, and offer up new clues to understanding cancer. Inês Cunha Ferreira and Mónica Bettencourt Dias, working with researchers at the universities of Cambridge, UK, and Siena, Italy, unravelled the mystery of how cells count the number of centrosomes, the structure that regulates the cell's skeleton, controls the multiplication of cells, and is often transformed in cancer.

Imagine new treatments for heart disease or muscle loss that direct the body to repair damaged tissue rather than helping it cope with a weakened condition. That's not hard to do thanks to Canadian researchers, who for the first time, have developed an organic substance that attracts and supports cells necessary for tissue repair and can be directly injected into problem areas.

(Toronto, Ontario, Canada) January 12, 2009 -- Researchers have discovered a potentially important new resistance factor in the battle against HIV: blood types. An international team of researchers from Canadian Blood Services, The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and Lund University in Sweden have discovered that certain blood types are more predisposed to contracting HIV, while others are more effective at fending it off.

An 'honest indicator' has been discovered by a scientific team at Arizona State University that reveals reproductive cheating. But before you run out to buy an infidelity identification kit, know that it only works for ants.

While it's well-known that workers in ant colonies typically support one reproductive female – a queen, it turns out that cheating can be a problem, and not just for humans. Cheating is found in all sorts of animal and insect groups, including other highly organized social organisms, such as ants.

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There should be no barriers to providing high-quality speech pathology services, according to University of Queensland PhD graduate Dr Anne Hill.

Completed through UQ's School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Dr Hill's research found speech and language disorders could be validly and reliably assessed over the internet using a telerehabilitation application.

A treasure trove of information about pre-human New Zealand has been found in faeces from giant extinct birds, buried beneath the floor of caves and rock shelters for thousands of years.

A team of ancient DNA and palaeontology researchers from the University of Adelaide, University of Otago and the NZ Department of Conservation have published their analyses of plant seeds, leaf fragments and DNA from the dried faeces (coprolites) to start building the first detailed picture of an ecosystem dominated by giant extinct species.

A large fraction of the transcription factor Oct-1 is associated with the inner nuclear envelope, but how and why it is retained there was unknown.

As for how, Malhas et al. show—in the January 12, 2009 issue of the Journal of Cell Biology (www.jcb.org)—that Oct-1 binds to lamin B1, a prominent intermediate filament that lines the nuclear envelope, and in cells expressing a drastically truncated mutant of lamin B1, Oct-1 was disassociated from the nuclear envelope.

In his book, Wonderful World, Stephen Jay Gould writes about an experiment of 'replaying life's tape', wherein one could go back in time, let the tape of life play again and see if 'the repetition looks at all like the original'. Evolutionary biology tells us that it wouldn't look the same – the outcome of evolution is contingent on everything that came before. Now, scientists at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC) in Portugal, New York University and the University of California Irvine, provide the first quantitative genetic evidence of why this is so.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Using new technologies that make it easier to sequence the human genome, researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center have identified a series of genes that become fused when their chromosomes trade places with each other. These recurrent gene fusions are thought to be the driving mechanism that causes certain cancers to develop.

The gene fusions discovered could potentially serve as a marker one day for diagnosing cancer or as a target for future drug development.

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. – Researchers have long known that some repetitive DNA sequences can make human chromosomes "fragile," i.e. appearing constricted or even broken during cell divisions. Scientists at Tufts University have found that one such DNA repeat not only stalls the cell's replication process but also thwarts the cell's capacity to repair and restart it. The researchers focused on this CGG repeat because it is associated with hereditary neurological disorders such as fragile X syndrome and FRAXE mental impairment.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Researchers at Mayo Clinic have discovered the first gender-linked susceptibility gene for late-onset Alzheimer's disease.

Berkeley -- Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have identified a new enzyme that plays a far more important role than expected in controlling the breakdown of fat. In a new study to be published Jan. 11 in the journal Nature Medicine, researchers report that mice that have had this enzyme disabled remained lean despite eating a high-fat diet and losing a hormone that suppresses appetite.

UPTON, NY – Using two simultaneous light-based probing techniques at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, a team of researchers has illuminated important details about a class of enzymes involved in everything from photosynthesis to the regulation of biological clocks.

Now, a pair of Scripps Research Institute scientists has taken a significant step toward answering that question. The scientists have synthesized for the first time RNA enzymes that can replicate themselves without the help of any proteins or other cellular components, and the process proceeds indefinitely.

The work was published on Thursday, January 8, 2008, in Science Express, the advanced, online edition of the journal Science.