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Sustainable seafood initiatives, including certification and ecolabeling and awareness schemes, could be extended to more effectively cover inland, freshwater fisheries, according to researchers writing in the November issue of BioScience.

STANFORD, Calif. — Light-skinned people who avoid the sun are twice as likely to suffer from vitamin D deficiency as those who do not, according to a study of nearly 6,000 people by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Surprisingly, the use of sunscreen did not significantly affect blood levels of vitamin D, perhaps because users were applying too little or too infrequently, the researchers speculate.

WALNUT CREEK, Calif. -- According to roadside signs, the number of burgers served has eclipsed the billion mark, while the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI) will now serve up trillions of nucleotides of information from scores of newly-selected projects geared to feed the data-hungry worldwide research community.

North Carolina State University researchers have uncovered evidence that evolutionary "breakpoints" on canine chromosomes are also associated with canine cancer. Mapping these "fragile" regions in dogs may also have implications for the discovery and treatment of human cancers.

LAWRENCE, Kan. — University of Kansas anthropologist and Maya scholar John Hoopes and his students are watching predicted doomsday dates such as 11/11/11 and Dec. 21, 2012, with considerable skepticism.

Hoopes is regarded as one of the major go-to guys to separate fact from fiction about the Maya calendar and a prediction that the world would end Dec. 21, 2012.

We all know that human skin tans after days spent in the sun. That relatively slow process has known links to ultraviolet (and specifically UVB) exposure, which leads to tanning only after it damages the DNA of skin cells. Now, researchers reporting online on November 3 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, have uncovered a much speedier path to pigmentation.

The newly discovered response is likely to provide rapid protection against UV damage, the researchers say, and understanding how it works might impact the design of sunscreens in the future.

Pancreatic cancer is a particularly challenging one to beat; it has a tendency to spread and harbors cancer stem cells that stubbornly resist conventional approaches to therapy. Now, researchers reporting in the November issue of Cell Stem Cell, a Cell Press publication, have evidence to suggest there is a way to kill off those cancer stem cells. The target is a self-renewal pathway known for its role not in cancer but in embryonic stem cells.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — For most people, tanning seems a simple proposition. A naturally light-skinned person lies in the sun for hours and ends up as bronzed as a Jersey Shore star. To scientists, the reaction of skin to ultraviolet light is more mysterious. A new study demonstrates that skin detects UVA radiation using a light-sensitive receptor previously found only in the eye and that this starts melanin production within a couple of hours. Until now, scientists only knew that melanin production occurred days after UVB radiation had already begun damaging DNA.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA—November 3, 2011—Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes have identified a protein that kick–starts the response to low levels of oxygen, suggesting new lines of research relevant to a variety of potentially fatal disorders associated with diminished oxygen supply, including cancer, heart disease, stroke and other neurological conditions that affect millions of people worldwide.

Medical scientists have for the first time identified a gene responsible for a fatal abdominal condition that afflicts tens of thousands of people across the world.

An international team led by Matt Bown, a vascular surgeon from the University of Leicester, identified a single gene that is linked to the development of abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs).

What is more, the team discovered that the gene, LRP1, was not linked to other cardiovascular diseases, suggesting that it is specific to AAA.

Scientists of the German Cancer Research Center have discovered an alternative mechanism for the extension of the telomere repeat sequence by DNA repair enzymes.

For decades, scientists and farmers have attempted to understand how a bacterial pathogen continues to damage tomatoes despite numerous agricultural attempts to control its spread.

Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato is the causative agent of bacterial speck disease of tomato (Solanum lycopersicum), a disease that occurs worldwide and causes severe reduction in fruit yield and quality, particularly during cold and wet springs.

In the spring of 2010, for example, an outbreak in Florida and California devastated the harvest in those areas.

Duck nest boxes used to aid cavity-nesting ducks can prove to be turtle death traps.

That was the discovery made by University of Cincinnati Educator Associate Professor Denis Conover, of the Department of Biological Sciences in UC's McMicken College of Arts and Sciences, when he came upon a duck nest box in the wetlands of southern Ohio's Miami Whitewater Forest. The box had tipped over. Turtle corpses were strewn about the mud and mire surrounding the fallen nesting box. Several species of turtles had been trapped by the box, and not all of them made it out alive.

Inserm's AVENIR "Genomic plasticity and aging" team, directed by Jean-Marc Lemaitre, Inserm researcher at the Functional Genomics Institute (Inserm/CNRS/Université de Montpellier 1 and 2), has recently succeeded in rejuvenating cells from elderly donors (aged over 100). These old cells were reprogrammed in vitro to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) and to rejuvenated and human embryonic stem cells (hESC): cells of all types can again be differentiated after this genuine "rejuvenation" therapy.

TAMPA, Fla. (Nov. 3, 2011) – Because the incidence of malignant melanoma is rising faster than any other cancer in the U.S., researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla., and colleagues at Tampa-based Intezyne Technologies, Inc., Western Carolina University and the University of Arizona are working overtime to develop new technologies to aid in both malignant melanoma diagnosis and therapy. A tool of great promise comes from the world of nanomedicine – where tiny drug delivery systems are measured in the billionths of meters and are being designed to deliver targeted therapies.