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For a variety of reasons it is important to be able to identify farm animals, horses and small companion animals. Farm animals have generally been marked by branding with hot irons or by ear-tagging, while more recently dogs and cats are being uniquely identified by the implant of a microchip transponder.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Purdue University scientists believe they have found an effective target for killing late-stage, metastatic prostate cancer cells.

Xiaoqi Liu, an assistant professor of biochemistry and member of Purdue's Center for Cancer Research, and graduate student Shawn Liu are focusing on the function of a gene called Polo-like kinase (Plk1), a critical regulator of the cell cycle. Plk1 is also an oncogene, which tends to mutate and can cause cancer.

Oxaliplatin, a platinum-based anticancer drug that's made enormous headway in recent years against colorectal cancer, appears to cause nerve damage that may be permanent and worsens even months after treatment ends. The chemotherapy side effect, described by Johns Hopkins researchers in the September issue of Neurology, was discovered in what is believed to be the first effort to track oxaliplatin-based nerve damage through relatively cheap and easy punch skin biopsies.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have modified HIV in a way that makes it no longer able to suppress the immune system. Their work, they say in a report published online September 19 in the journal Blood, could remove a major hurdle in HIV vaccine development and lead to new treatments.

Global crises and the slow burn of climate change are having a profound impact on the lives and livelihoods of poor people around the world, and bringing into question core ideas about what development is and how it happens, according to a new report.

'Time to Reimagine Development?' is the latest issue of the IDS Bulletin, the flagship journal from the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), published by Wiley-Blackwell.

The search for a rapid, non-invasive way to determine whether people have been exposed to potentially toxic substances in their workplaces, homes and elsewhere in the environment has led scientists to a technology that literally takes a person's breath away. Their report identifying exhaled breath as an ideal indicator of such exposure appears in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Breast cancer cells that mutate to resist drug treatment survive by establishing tiny pumps on their surface that reject the drugs as they penetrate the cell membrane – making the cancer insensitive to chemotherapy drugs even after repeated use.

Researchers have found a new way to break that resistance and shut off the pumps by genetically altering those breast cancer cells to forcibly activate a heat-shock protein called Hsp27. This protein regulates several others, including the protein that sets up the pumps that turn away the chemotherapeutics.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – The creation of compounds that disrupt a worldwide pest's winter sleep hints at the potential to develop natural and targeted controls against crop-eating insects, new research suggests.

Scientists have designed agents that interfere with the protective dormancy period of the corn earworm, a species that infests more than 100 types of plants and costs American farmers an estimated $2 billion a year in losses and control costs.

Scientists at the University of Granada have confirmed that a low plasma level of copper and zinc in pregnant women may be a factor associated with spontaneous abortion, a hypothesis that had not been confirmed to date, and which had never been proven in humans before.

UC Davis scientists have developed a self-cleaning cotton fabric that can kill bacteria and break down toxic chemicals such as pesticide residues when exposed to light.

"The new fabric has potential applications in biological and chemical protective clothing for health care, food processing and farmworkers, as well as military personnel," said Ning Liu, who conducted the work as a doctoral student in Professor Gang Sun's group in the UC Davis Division of Textiles of Clothing.

Scientists are reporting discovery of a potential new drug for epidemic keratoconjunctivitis (EKC) — sometimes called "pink eye" — a highly infectious eye disease that may occur in 15 million to 20 million people annually in the United States alone. Their report describing an innovative new "molecular wipe" that sweeps up viruses responsible for EKC appears in ACS's Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.

Parents of babies born without clearly defined male or female genitals experience a roller-coaster of emotions, including shock, anxiety and the need to protect their child, according to a study in the October issue of the Journal of Advanced Nursing.

UK researchers who spoke to 15 parents found that they were keen to find a sense of harmony between their child's genital ambiguity and the sex they raised them as.

Researchers from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute have for the first time identified a 'programmed cell death' pathway in parasitic worms that could one day lead to new treatments for one of the world's most serious and prevalent diseases.

Dr Erinna Lee and Dr Doug Fairlie from the institute's Structural Biology division study programmed cell death (also called apoptosis) in human cells. They have recently started studying the process in schistosomes, parasitic fluke worms responsible for the deadly disease schistosomiasis.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Anyone who has hiked down a mountain knows the soreness that comes a day or two after means the leg muscles have endured a serious workout. While the pain is real, it's not well understood how leg muscles cope with the force from such movement.

Researchers have found the first, firm evidence that fibroids are associated with recurrent miscarriages. They have also discovered that if they removed the fibroids that distorted the inside of the womb, the risk of miscarriage in the second trimester of pregnancy was reduced dramatically – to zero.